High School Football - Freshmen Season

My high school freshmen football season was a big adjustment for me. Going from 8^th to freshman year is a lot different. You go from practicing with people your age to practicing with guys who are 15, 16, 17, 18 years old. Two-a-Days are also a lot different instead of just practicing for 2 hours like before, for about 2 weeks in the beginning of August, you’re practicing for 6 hours a day, and honestly as a freshman you are not ready for that, you don’t really even adjust for it until your sophomore year. Our freshman season was average, we won a couple games, but lost a lot more. The football program where I went to school wasn’t very good. But, they let freshmen dress on Friday nights for games so it was awesome getting to run out of the tunnel and be on the sidelines for those games. Our varsity team went 1-9 that year. The big thing I remember from the freshman year is the injury I sustained on my left pinky finger. We were playing a freshmen away game and that year I was playing Quarterback and we were losing bad and one of our linebackers got hurt so our coach put me in. On the second to last play of the game, I was making a tackle and one of the defensive linemen came back to help out and put his face mask right on my finger and the tip of my left finger literally exploded. I ran over to the sideline and our coach sprayed water on it and I screamed from the pain and I could see my bone. My family and I left immediately and went to the hospital at the hospital, instead of doing surgery they just stitched me up, well, that didn’t sit well with my parents and the next day we went to my family doctor and he referred me to a surgeon. The next day I went to the surgeon, he took one look at it and said, “I’ll see you in OR, we need to perform surgery on this.” My being who I am, I said, “What’s OR?” I had no idea what it meant. That wasn’t how I wanted to end my freshmen football season but I still had a blast that year and I was ready to come back next year and make plays on Friday nights.

High School Baseball - Senior Season

My senior season was awesome, not because that we did that great. We went around .500 again, which makes me mad. We went around .500 every season of my high school career and that’s very disappointing because we have a lot of talent every year and should’ve done better. Just like last year, my roles were the same, lea as best as I can and play my position in the outfield. I had a pretty good season for myself, I started the year off batting over .600 and about halfway through the year, cooled off tremendously but started to heat back up toward the end of the year. The first game of the season was good and bad way to start the year. I was killing the ball at the plate so that was the good, but I had two errors on the first two fly balls hit my way, and we lost so that was not the way we wanted to start the year. I remember a lot of the good and the bad from my last baseball season. One good thing is we finally beat our crosstown rival twice, the last time we beat them was freshmen year. I was leading the team in batting average, runs scored, and RBIs, how fun senior night was, getting to play with my best friends in the rain, killing the team we played. Now, I remember the good, but like most people, I remember the bad more so. I had to run more than I wanted to senior year because I didn’t agree with some of the stuff going on and I am very competitive and want to win and as a team we weren’t winning.  We got run-ruled for the first time ever while I was in high school and in our last tournament which was the district semi-finals, we were winning 6-0 in the 6^th inning and then everything started to snowball, and we ended up losing 7-6 on a walk off. Even though there was some good and bad, I would trade that season or the seasons before for anything. My experience playing high school baseball with all of my friends was awesome because of the guys I got to play with. Our team dedicated this season to our assistant coach who was diagnosed with colon cancer the year before. We knew he didn’t have a lot of time and we wanted him to know this season was for him and we love him.

High School Baseball - Junior Season

My junior season of baseball was kind of a blur but still as enjoyable as my freshman and sophomore season, just with added responsibility of being a leader because now I am an upperclassman and have been playing for 2 years so I need to step up and lead. The only way I knew how to lead was just lead by example, because I wasn’t a very vocal person so just leading by example was what I was comfortable with because I was really sure how to be a vocal leader. My role playing wise was the same as sophomore year, initially playing outfield but if need be, play first base. About 2 weeks before the started, during a cold practice the day before a scrimmage I dove for a ball and broke my right hand and was initially out for about 5 weeks but came back in about 4 weeks because it was healed enough to play and I could tolerate the pain. I only missed 2 games because we had like 6 rain delays in those 2 weeks. Fortunately, I was able to come back and have a good season, I played right field most of the season, didn’t play much first base, and didn’t pitch because after the injury I just never really got back into it like before and I didn’t really want to get back into it. I batted 5^th throughout the year and played pretty well even coming off the injury, ended the year with a batting average around .330. As a team we didn’t do as well as last year even though last year wasn’t great, wasn’t even that good because I don’t consider going .500 that good. We had a talented team and could’ve and should’ve done better, we went below .500, which is very disappointing, we just never really got on a winning streak, we would win one, lose a couple, win another, lose a couple more. We could just never find it. Our last game of the year was our sectional championship game where you could tell some players on our team just didn’t want to play and a bunch of errors were made. They checked out and were ready for it to be done. The game was ours to lose and we did just that, lose. We almost made a late comeback in the 7^th despite the added stress but couldn’t do it. We lost 5-3.