Effects of a High School Experience

485 Words2 Pages
The game of softball has always been an extremely large part of my life. I played softball for ten years, having been part of both winning and losing teams. I have come to know the joy of winning, and the ugliest side of defeat. I have learned that though a team may lose, it doesn’t mean they aren’t putting in all of the same effort of a winning team. As a freshman at an inner-city school whose students had little involvement in many of their sports, I was on both JV and varsity. I pitched every JV game without fail for three years in a row, with teammates that had very little, or no previous knowledge of softball. All four of my high school years, I found myself teaching these girls everything from a softball being yellow to how to steal a base. Though this was often a tedious process, I never got frustrated or angry with my teammates. They were so willing to learn, and they always seemed to stay positive. Through this process, I learned so much about myself. Not only about a few fundamentals I had forgotten, but that softball is, and will always be, just a sport. At the end of the day, you can walk off the field and leave the game behind. This applies to life, too; at the end of the day, no matter what happens, tomorrow will always be a new day-it’s a guarantee. These girls reiterated that to me. Though I was only team captain my senior year, I was a role model for many girls the previous three years, too. Those three years I spent pitching JV games that could be rather treacherous, with our team being on the field upwards of 45 minutes an inning, just trying to get that third out. This is when I learned patience, something I had never known before. In the most bittersweet way, there was a beauty to this situation-no matter what happened, those girls pressed on. The score could be 0-20 (as it often was), but never once did this seem to phase them. Never once
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