Observations from a High School Benchwarmer
Standing in right field must seem pretty boring to skilled baseball players, but as someone who rarely got put onto the field, the thought excited me. I played baseball my junior and senior years of high school, and played in only two varsity games. While this seems surprising to most, it is easy to understand if one knows just how closed-off a community can be to newcomers.
You move to a new town far from your home, and start school at a place where no one knows your name. Sports seems to be a surefire way to make friends and get to know people. You make friends on the baseball team, but you didn’t grow up with any of your teammates, and for that reason, you will always be an outsider. You are dedicated to the sport, even though you are not the best. The coach recognizes this dedication and says that hard work beats talent any day. This encourages you to keep at it even though you haven’t gotten the playing time you think you should have. The playing time doesn’t come. The coach keeps telling you that if you prove yourself in practice, he will let you have all the game time you want, so you work your butt off. The next year, senior year, it’s the same story. You have one season left to go out there and win one for the school, that is, if coach will let you play at all. Going to a small school is not in itself a bad thing. Playing baseball at a small school where the town’s favorite sport is football might give you some trouble if you want to earn anything more than a school photo of you in your jersey.
One of the biggest downfalls in high school sports today, especially in small schools, is favoritism. While it should be understood that a coach wanting only the most experienced players to play is perfectly logical, when a coach never lets the inexperienced players onto the field, they will not get better. This situation may arise for a number of reasons, but the most common is that the team is struggling to win, and has a history of losing. During my time on the team in high school, this was the case. The team was not very good, and winning was a rare occurrence. Only the best players played because the coach didn’t see the point in letting newcomers onto the field who might be unreliable in a tight situation. The coach did not know me to well, nor did he know two players that had moved to the town the same time that I had, and as a result, we didn’t play too often.
Both of these players had a passion for the sport, and had since they were very young. I can remember having many conversations with them, during games we wouldn’t play in, about our time in little league baseball and how much we loved the sport then, when it was all fun and games. As the season progressed all three of us became more and more disenfranchised with the sport, and we slowly cared less and less as to whether or not we won. By the end of the season we couldn’t wait for it to end, and it didn’t matter what coach had planned for the off-season, we weren’t coming back. Wanting to win is natural, and should be a major part of why people play sports, but the will to win should never be more important than the players themselves.
