Final Writing Assignment

Personal narrative


I am now 20 years old, and I have spent more than half of my life with baseball. The beginning of my baseball life was when I was 7 years old. Every Sunday, my father took me to a nearby park in the early morning and played catch with me. At that time, it was one of the biggest pleasures for me. In fact, I have a great amount of memory with my father due to this baseball communication. When I was 9 years old, I joined in a local baseball club and began to practice baseball harder. Of course I continued to playing baseball after the graduation of elementary school, and also junior high school. All of the experience concerning to baseball is precious to me because it told me many things; the ability of sports, the importance of teamwork, the difficulty of human relationship, time management, and of course leadership.

Since I loved baseball, I continued to play baseball at high school. My high school is famous for baseball so the practice was really hard and, there were many strict and somewhat unreasonable rules, and I sometimes had to feel quite uncomfortable. In addition, the academic level of my high school was very high so there were quite a lot of assignments every day. At the beginning, I tried to on one hand, play baseball and on the other hand, study hard. That is, my goal was playing baseball with studying hard and getting high grades. However, even though I could get quite a good grade, to do so while practicing hard was not easy and I often cut my sleeping time. After the hellish winter practice of my first year, I began to think that this hectic life was not good for me and I couldn’t enjoy my high school life. Then I thought seriously about my life and finally made a decision to quit the high school baseball club. At that time, I felt comfortable because I had a lot of free time and spent them for studying. But after a few months, I felt lonely because I lost my good baseball friends and baseball community at high school, and above all, because I broke up with baseball which I had spent much time with. I thought many times whether I could go back to the team, but I did not have the courage to tell the teammates about it. Although I enjoyed my high school days and of course I have a lot of good memory, I regret quitting the baseball club even now. When I graduated from high school, the manager of my high school baseball team told me that he planed to appoint me as a captain. As I heard his words, I burst into tears because I felt that I failed to meet his expectation as well as betrayed my mind.

From this experience, I learned the importance of not giving up whatever I decide to do. In addition, I realize that what is important is doing things not perfectly, but as hard as possible. Somebody says that this is very natural, but since I had no experience of failure of the compatibility of baseball and studying, I believed that I could and must do both of them perfectly at that time. However, this was not true. I had to realize that the result of doing my best was the best consequence for me, and pursuing the perfect results was not the end. Therefore, now I try to do whatever I want to do as hard as possible, and I believe that the result of doing so will be good, or at least acceptable. By quitting baseball, I learned how it is painful to giving up what I want to do. In order not to regret again, I want to challenge many things with my best without concerning the result.

Baseball raised not only my body but also my mind. Now I am playing baseball to recover my high school days and to thank to baseball.


Yasuhito