My dad missed a lot of my games. His career demanded it; long hours, business trips that stretched days into weeks, and a schedule that didn't pause for Tuesday night baseball. As a kid who measured everything by what happened on the field, I noticed every empty seat. I kept a mental count. I'm not proud of that, but I did. For a while, I let that shape how I saw him. Junior year, I lost my starting shortstop position to a first-year player. I had worked toward that spot my entire high school career; early morning work-outs, late practices, more hours in the batting cages than I can count, and in one conversation with my coach, it was gone. Driving home that day, I kept asking myself a question I had never had to face before: without baseball, who am I? My dad called that night from wherever he was traveling. I don't remember the city. What I remember is that I wanted to talk to him more than anyone else, and that he didn't try to fix it. He listened. He asked questions. He had spent his entire career navigating setbacks in business, dealing with hard quarters, difficult decisions, the grind of building something through disappointment, and he brought all of that quietly to a seventeen-year-old who felt like his world had caved in. He didn't give me a speech. He just stayed on the phone until I felt like myself again. That was the night I stopped counting the missed games. What I came to understand is that my father was never really absent, he was stretched. There's a difference. He was doing something hard every single day for our family, without asking for recognition or sympathy. And even from a hotel room in some city I couldn't name, he was paying attention. He always was. He never made my ambitions feel small. When I started organizing neighborhood cleanups and founded the Blue Bell Hill Beautification Project, he took it seriously. When I told him I wanted to study Management and Organizations to use business not just to make money but to actually fix things in communities like the one I grew up in; he understood immediately. Coming from someone who had spent his career in those rooms, that meant everything. I am heading to college this fall shaped by both sides of who my father is: the cost of real ambition, and the steady, unconditional belief that made me confident enough to chase my own. He never sat me down to teach me any of this. He just lived it, and I watched.