Evan S

Baseball, Baseball and More Baseball!

It was the summer before my freshman year in high school. I knew that I would be trying out for the baseball team because I have played since I was five. The open gyms would start in October and I was nervous. I didn’t want to just assume that I’d make the team since I’d played both years at the middle school. A lot of thoughts were running through my head: Would I make the team? What would high school baseball be like? Would I like my coaches? Will I get playing time? Would the team be any good? As I continuously thought about these questions, I realized that I could figure this out with a simple solution: I was going to take lessons and practice hard to make sure that I would succeed.

The first skill I wanted to work on was pitching. So I decided to try and find a good pitching coach who could work with me, help me get better and not break my parent’s bank account. So, the first coach we found was a really nice man who coached at North Cross. He and I got a long great and after a few lessons, I was feeling good. One afternoon, we were nearing the end of the lesson and decided to work just a little on hitting. There were several balls lying on the ground by home plate and I was going to toss them to the coach (who was on the mound). Evidently my “toss” was much harder than I thought and, unfortunately, the coach was not paying attention. You guessed it. My “toss” hit him straight in the face, knocking his glasses off and cutting his nose. He dropped to his knees and I started to panic. Fortunately, I didn’t kill him or permanently disable him. However, I was too embarrassed and scared to ever go back to him again.

After the “almost killed the coach” incident, I knew I still had to have help with my pitching. So, we decided to go to another nice man at The Yard. He drove an awesome Mercedes, so I figured he must be good since he seemed so successful (and was able to buy such a nice car). Ryan was a great coach. He videotaped me and really helped me get my core pitching skills down pat. I went to him for several months and then realized that while I had come a long way, I wasn’t improving much anymore. So, we made the decision to leave “Coach Mercedes” and try to find yet another coach.

The third time was the charm! We hooked up with a coach at Rip City. Dave was really good at what he did. There were many times I was frustrated and he was great at calming me down and making me feel better about things. He took my core skills that I’d learned with “Coach Mercedes” and pushed me to the next level. When I started with Dave, I was pitching in the low 60’s. He worked with me (twice a week for months) to get me to where I could pitch consistently in the 70’s.  He’d videotape me and we go into a room to watch where he would go over all the things I was doing right and all the things I was doing wrong. He showed me how pitching is 80% legs, 20% arm and explained how I needed to push from my legs more. It helped me to watch myself on video. He also gave me exercises to practice at home. We also worked in my hitting a lot. We worked together for months (August through February) and I felt like I’d really improved and was ready for the tryouts.

Tryouts started on February 24^th. All of us were pretty nervous. At the same time, I was pretty calm too since I knew I had worked hard to get ready and thought I’d have a pretty good shot at making the team. We had three days of tryouts and I tried to do my best in everything. It paid off! On the last day of tryouts I was told I’d made the team! The coaches told me that they were really impressed with my bat and wanted me to keep working on my pitching. It was a very exciting night!

There had been many times when I felt like giving up or wanted to go do something with my friends instead of going to lessons. I know my parents had also spent a lot of money on me for these lessons. In the end I’m really glad I stuck with it because I made the team. I’m hoping to keep improving so I can contribute a lot to the team. I think we have a great team and are going to have a great season.