College Admissions Essay: How Baseball Changed My Life

Sports have always been something I loved as a kid. I grew up playing baseball at my local YMCA and aspired to play professionally when I got older. My time playing baseball changed me into the person I am today. It showed me how to work together with other people and allowed me to make lifelong friendships. My coach from my YMCA days taught me the joy in playing baseball, and the opportunities that could come from playing baseball in the long run. As I got older and made into highschool my love for baseball was still apparent. I worked hard to improve and hone my skills. My highschool coach was also my middle school assistant coach and our relationship was rocky. His approach to coaching didn't mesh well with my response to it and we butted

Throughout my life academics had always been something I was good at. My family's expectations for me were very high. I decided on taking Ib level classes which amplified the stress I was experiencing. Managing the gpa I wanted while also playing baseball grew to be too much of a challenge. Along with my Ib courses I was also taking dual enrollment which added onto the pressure of school. This led to me questioning my goals in life and if I really wanted to continue playing baseball at all. Up until this point baseball was a fun extracurricular activity that I enjoyed. It soon became a more job-like experience and felt like a burden rather than a relief. The pressure to uphold my academics and the straining relationship between me and my coach were two of the main reasons I decided to quit baseball. Furthermore, there is an additional reason that contributed to my decision to quit my highschool baseball

I consider myself an independent person and wanted a job as soon as I was of age. I ended up getting a job at my local movie theatre which was the final straw that led to my decision to leave the team. My usual schedule at work was right after school around 3 days a week and more on the weekends. This interfered with practice for the team and sometimes even my baseball games. In hindsight, my job at the movie theatre could have compromised more with my schedule knowing my situation before I got hired. Nonetheless, with everything going on in my life at the time, I felt baseball would be the lesser thing to lose. The job allowed me to have access to everything I wanted. I gained useful experience with it being my first job. I also gained many friendships and even some enemies from my experience working there. All these different experiences compiled into one altercation with my baseball coach. We were practising and one of my younger teammates was teasing me which was normal for him. I ignored him and he decided to lie to the coach and say I was the one doing the teasing. This resulted in the coach confronting me. My coach is a very unreasonable person and does not compromise. He already had in his mind that this older player was picking on a younger player. So he immediately blamed me and decided to punish me. Even Though me and some of my other teammates pleaded my case, his mind didn't change.