Posted: Friday, May 20, 2011 4:08:51 AM
Nobody enjoys losing. Nobody expects to lose twenty-eight games in a row. This school year I was forced to deal with the pain of losing every single baseball game this season. I managed to overcome the terrible feeling of defeat and I learned to grow from the experience.
At the start of this season, my team was to move into a new league, a league that was well known for being a very competitive group of teams. Unfortunately, my team consisted of a group of four returning Varsity players, the J.V team from last year, and one freshman. We had next to no experience at the varsity level and we were joining a league of some of the best teams in the county. Before the season began, we were projected to go defeated and lose every game. Of course, we would not let that bother us as we practiced for the upcoming season.
Once the season started we lost our first game, but we were not too worried because we thought we would learn to improve. Then, we kept playing and we kept losing. As the season developed, we played twenty-eight games and lost every single game. I could not believe it was possible to lose every single game we played. I thought we would at least win one, or get lucky somewhere in those twenty-eight games, but I ended up being wrong. We came close to winning several times, yet at the final pitch we always ended up on the wrong side of the final score every time. Going back to school after a game was never fun either since everybody seemed to be aware of how horrible our team's record was. Walking into class, one of my friends would always ask, with a fake sympathetic smile on his or her face, whether we had finally won a game. Of course, they knew the same response to the question after every game was a sigh followed by "no..." It definitely began to annoy me when I overheard some of the freshman baseball players snickering when they discussed the varsity team that I was on and how terrible we were doing.
Through it all, I learned many lessons about myself and about life in general. I learned that sometimes life just blows the wind against you and the only thing you can do is brace yourself. The recent baseball season was extremely difficult to survive, but that is the way things go. I learned one of the difficult lessons life teaches you, you will fall sometimes. The key part about that lesson is learning to jump back up after falling. I managed to survive the rigor of my junior year and played for a team with a zero and twenty-eight record without going crazy. I think I will be ready for anything that life throws at me next year after my experience this year.