At that point, being cut from the first travel team I had tried out for was the worst heartbreak I had ever experienced.
When I was eleven, I had been playing with the same coach and group of players in Little League for the last couple of years, and the core group was ridiculously talented. They all played for the same team—the Ada Dawgs—, and I was focused on getting there myself. While my latest year in Little League wasn’t exactly my best (It took me half the season to figure out my swing), I knew I had the hitting ability to earn myself a spot. While I still had offensive tools, I struggled to run and field well enough to hang with all of the kids, since they were all a year older than me (I played up a year until 8th grade because of my birthday). In the end, despite how I felt about how I stacked up, I didn’t make it. Despite how much it hurt, instead of being sad all summer, I got to work with my dad to build a new team, one made up of all of the players that didn’t make the Dawgs or the other talented team nearby, the Ada A’s. We were the Thornapple River Raiders, what you could call a B-Team, and it went about as well as expected.
We were terrible.
In 3 years, doing 4 or 5 tournaments per summer, we won a grand total of five games. We got embarrassed in pretty much every game. Despite my personal success, I just couldn’t look at the results every summer and think, “I really enjoyed doing this”. I got the complete opposite experience the year after leaving the Raiders, with a team of kids in my grade known as the Ada Boomers. We were a group of mostly FHC kids, and I had latched on with them after the Little League season, playing for one of the coaches on a team called the Ada Boomers. Without ever really knowing the cause, I struggled for a good portion of the year, hitting well below the standard I had set for myself. The difference was that the team was legitimately good. For the first time ever, a team I played on won a tournament. It was fun, but I didn’t feel comfortable in the box or with the team. I was unsure at best.
The season between my freshman and sophomore years was the best travel season of my life. With a couple of buddies and others with a team called the Ada Lions, I put everything together. We played a lot of games at Cornerstone University’s baseball field, and I quickly reaffirmed my love for turf fields, hitting line drives into gaps and just watching them roll all the way to the fence as I legged out doubles and triples. I felt calm and comfortable as I sprayed liners all over the field and found myself enjoying the game just as much as I ever had. I carried that momentum into the next high school season as I continued to perform.
Then everything screeched to a halt.
Playing with all of my high school teammates with a team run by Elite Baseball, I was incredibly hopeful to continue to prove myself and maybe earn some college looks. In the first game, with two outs in the last inning, we were ready to lock down win number one. With two men on base, I had a ball hit to me in right field. I charged for the ball, came up with it, and hopped to throw, but I couldn’t see my cutoff man. I landed without making the throw, just ready for a light toss in, but as soon as my right leg hit the ground, I heard a pop and felt what I thought was the bones in my knee shifting together. I threw the ball in, then hit the ground, fearful that I had just cost myself big-time. I had.
My ACL was torn, instantly ending my season. I had surgery in August and began the nine-month journey to clearance to play. I sat on crutches for a month and went to physical therapy twice a week until late April, when I was good to go again. I only got four at-bats in the school season, meaning I would have a lot to figure out with my new team, Lightning Baseball, in the summer. While working to fix my swing, I began to do some things incorrectly, and that led to some bad habits during travel ball. While the statistics looked good, I felt uncomfortable, and the quality of my contact was never up to my standards.
Despite all that, I refused to let it bother me. Being hurt had made me come to terms with the fact that college baseball wasn’t happening. All I wanted was to have one more fun summer, and in that I succeeded. Summer ball was always about traveling around and just having fun with your teammates, and the fact that I was able to fulfill that one last time seemed to make everything right.
