My dad in many ways reflects Edward and his legacy. He was an avid athlete who grew up playing soccer, baseball, and even wrestling through high school. He ended up playing both soccer and baseball at Duke University, and continued to inspire myself and my friends to pursue our athletic abilities and dreams through coaching local rec. programs since I was only two years old. He especially always pushed me to be my best through my softball career, driving hundreds of thousands of miles to make sure I could get the right college exposure I needed. After just the two of us spent hundreds of hours together in a car, it is safe to say that we were very close to one another. This only amplified my shock when he very unexpectedly passed away in January of 2022 due to Covid. I soon learned how dependent I was on him, not just for softball coaching or homework help, but for simple communication skills. Being more introverted, I found it hard to go out of my way to talk to people. My dad, being very outgoing, would often do most of the talking. I had to quickly learn to become more independent with my social skills following his passing, be it through scheduling my own appointments over the phone, or working on talking to one new person everywhere I go. If anything, I have only become more extroverted due to this, as I never really wanted to be considered shy, yet I never had a true need to be outspoken for myself. Secondly, my father taught me to fall in love with softball, of which I owe my second life lesson. Since it is considered to be a game of failures, one needs to have a short memory to succeed. Beating myself up from striking out on a curve ball is not going to help me field the next ground ball. Humans are in no way perfect, and we are prone to errors. While it is important to learn from them, constantly dwelling on the past will only take time away from working to be your best in the present. I was lucky enough that my dad was able to attend my college visit to the University of Dayton not even a month before he passed. On the drive home, all he could think about was how great of an opportunity it would be for me. I, too, fell in love with the institution and have since earned an offer to continue my athletic and career there at the Division 1 level—a dream that I have had since I was 10 years old. I would not only be able to honor one of my dad’s final wishes to play softball in college, but also be able to study at a great university in hopes of soon helping other people as a doctor. Scholarships like these specifically would help as I will not be receiving any athletic money, so it would provide relief on the financial side so I can better pursue my dreams of playing in college.

I have always been told that one day I am going to have to stop depending on my parents so much. Sure, I may have been more of a clingy kid than the rest, but there was no way that I would have to change my habits any time soon. Turns out, the time to change was coming far sooner than I, and even many of those critics thought. The year of my sweet sixteenth was supposed to be, well, sweet. The ending soon turned sour, though, as my dad passed away in January of 2022 from complications due to Covid. I could have never predicted such an event, especially since many of his relatives lived well into their 90s. In just one week, my mom and I had gone from believing he would be released from the hospital in time for Christmas, to having to finally make the decision to pull him off of life support. My dad was not just my dad, but my coach, my tutor, my road trip buddy—or taxi driver as he would have put it. Since I was 10, he was always trying to be involved in my softball career, be it coaching my teams or helping me out with recruiting. He would spend countless hours on the road driving literally hundreds of thousands of miles to better expose me to colleges to pursue my dream of competing at the Division 1 level. While I would be in the back seat asleep, he would be awake, sports radio blasting, diet coke in hand, ready to take on the 8 plus hour drive home up the east coast. I think it is safe to say that after spending hundreds of hours in the same car with one person you become extremely close to one another. Not only did I depend on him for such road trips but also advice, practice, and thousands of everyday tasks that I soon had to do on my own. While drafting emails, scheduling doctors appointments, and even ordering pizza over the phone seem like simple tasks, I had to become comfortable doing them myself without him there to do it for me. Independence is what I had been missing up to this point. Turns out, my dad did a lot more stuff than I realized, and most of it was things I should be learning my own. There has only been one thing we have ever truly fought about leading up to his passing, and that was my communication skills. Be it with him or to other people, I sometimes found myself struggling to continue to give updates on grades or schedules, and sometimes even just carry on a simple conversation. It was the one thing I most regretted when he died, as only months before he confronted me about not telling him anything about what was going on in my life. While I don‘t, technically speaking, have “social anxiety”, I do find myself getting nervous when in new environments or with people I don‘t know. I want to make connections, yet my body refuses to open my mouth and talk. Since his passing, I have been fighting within myself to overcome this specific fear of mine. Simple goals such as talking to at least one new person everywhere I go have allowed me to slowly but surely become more comfortable in unfamiliar situations. Such skills are also better to be learned now than later, as it will be essential for interviews, jobs, and even just finding new friends down the road. I‘d like to think that I am becoming more successful in communicating to more people, yet I often still get that same pit in my stomach after uttering even a single word. If I am being fully honest, I don‘t think that I would have developed as far as I had if he was still standing by my side today. And I can guarantee that he would still be fighting with me to learn to better communicate with him and other people.

“Softball is a game of failure.” Such a quote is often heard from many coaches through the game, and it is—in fact—exactly what it sounds like. An All-American batting average is considered to be around .300, in other words, hitting the ball 3 out of 10 times. Such a score on a test would be considered an absolute failure, yet in this game it is an exceptional feat. With this in mind, it is very important to quickly move on from an error and get ready for the next pitch. More times than not, being hung up on a previous play or at-bat only takes focus away from the next inning. One thing leads to another and suddenly I may be 0 for 3 at the plate or miss 2 consecutive balls in the field. Ultimately, this sport has taught me, if anything, to have a short memory. When one first hears a short memory, Dory from Finding Nemo may come to mind. While I don’t mean short term memory loss, I mean working to live in the present moment. Making mistakes is important to grow both as a player and as a person. With this, such errors should not be completely forgotten about, but should be used as a learning experience for the future. If I swing and miss on a strike three curveball, there is nothing else I can possibly do at that point to fix my at-bat except to expect a curveball next time around. Further, it is also important to recognize that I am, in fact, a human being. Humans are never perfect and often prone to errors. It is impossible to retain a 1.000 average through ten, twenty, thirty at bats, so I should never beat myself up for failing to achieve such a standard. Translating these experiences into school, I realize I will never get a perfect score on every exam, or know the answer to every question on a test. Obsessing over past test scores can take away from studying for the next test, so learning from my wrong answers and moving on has been a key to achieving my straight A streak through high school. While I have applied these tactics in my academic life, I still struggle with this in my social life. Looking back, I often cringe at my past actions. School talent show performances or class presentations make me want to never show my face in public again, yet it is I who only can remember in extreme detail the exact events of what I did. Following a game, I would often ask my coach what my stats were, though I already knew. He would then have to dig to the bottom of the equipment bag to reference the chicken scratch of scores and stats. If not even he can remember my exact mistakes, then how should I possibly be allowed to strangle myself for them. I am my biggest critic in my life, yet the reasons of which are events that no one else could possibly remember to the details that I can. Through softball, I have learned that inorder to prevent the endless cycle of anxiety and regret, I need to simply learn and forget.