My Greatest Failure

November 16th, 2008

So failcamp happened like a million years ago, and I could not attend, and I promised a post about my greatest failure, well here you go, this is it, my heart is on the page:

I started playing sports when I was about four years old, and since then I have not stopped. I’ve played softball, soccer, field hockey, and basketball. I’ve always had a knack for sports, I can pick them up almost instantly. Softball had always been my sport of choice, after my first year I started playing up an age level. When I was about eight years old my dad took me to watch a softball tryout for the Gamblers which was a local travel team; after about five minutes of watching them I turned to my dad and told him that this is what I wanted to do, I wanted to play travel softball. When I was eleven I made my first travel team, the Doylestown Fury. From then on my goal was to play collegiate softball. I won’t bore you with the scouting process, but basically you have to market yourself well enough and be good enough to get college coaches to notice you. It takes hard work, determination and copious amounts of persistence, thank you dad.

In my junior year of high school I contracted Mononucleosis, and relapsed the same year. I missed 65 days of that school year. It’s still astonishing that I passed. It took me more than a year to recover from it. I graduated ready to finish the summer and start art school, I was going to play softball for Temple University. (Tyler School of Art is part of Temple University).

I was a walk on, and made the team. I was ecstatic. Words cannot describe how happy I was, especially because the first practice that we had was a scrimmage. I was the last batter, I cannot remember if it was the first or the second pitch, but I hit an out of the park home run, right over center field, with two RBIs. That is the only thing I will really brag about when it comes to softball. Well there are a select few other things but that’s not the point.

The training schedule was incredibly rigorous the team was up at 5:30am every day in the gym, the team would lift together, and then we would run. Morning practice would end right before 8am so we could get to class, My classes ended at 1:30 and I had to catch a 2 o’clock bus to the Ambler campus for practice. We would get back around 7 or 7:30pm I would put my equipment away and be back for study hall by the latest 8:30 and would be in study hall until it ended, which I think was 11pm. I would go back to my dorm relax, finish work that I did not get done in study hall or the bus, take a shower and go to bed. The team and I would do the same thing everyday. I should have known better than to let myself do that much physical activity. The third time I relapsed was in the fall of my freshman year of college. I had to quit softball for the first time in my life. My doctor told me that if I kept playing that I would end up in the hospital and do some long term damage to myself, he recommended that I never play again, at least at that level.

I was devasteted, to say the least, and to this day I cannot put to words how much it hurt to see the only true goal I ever had for myself wither and die.

To this day the greatest failure of my life is contracting Mononucleosis. I got it from a girl on a soccer team I was on, I gave her my water bottle to use because she forgot hers. She put her mouth on the spout, I didn’t care at the time, I did not think anything of it. A few weeks later she had to stop playing because she had gotten mono, and a week after that I came down with it. To this day I battle with the fatigue, getting sick easily etc., and I always will. This virus has stopped me from doing the one thing that was literally my life from the age of eleven on. It is still strange not to be playing, I miss it. I wish I could play for my college. I can however play with summr leagues as long as it isn’t too intense, but even then I tier easily.

I guess the only thing I can say that I really learned from this is that life happens. There are tons of things that are out of your control and you can’t be angry at them, you have to adapt. Come on people survivial of the fittest! :)

Entry Filed under: Events, Happenings, Thoughts