Clank; Here Comes My Future: by Carla

Clank; Here Comes My Future: by Carla - February 2024 Scholarship Essay

Certain sounds in life make every hair on your skin stand up. My sound is clank. You know this sound well if you are a baseball or softball fan. It's when the ball and bat finally connect, creating an inevitable commotion in the crowd, even if it's a simple foul ball. My whole life has revolved around this sound. Clank, foul ball, clank, hit, clank, out, clank, and oh my God, that ball is crushed out of the park! I've heard all situations where clank is present, but there is one in particular that I close my eyes and...
Since eighth grade, I had been bugging my school's athletic director to make a softball team. As the daughter of a baseball fan who miraculously threw a no-hitter in a high school baseball game, anything that involved a glove, bat, and a ball, I was there for it. Last year, at the beginning of the eleventh grade, I once more dropped into the athletic director's office to convince him of what many said was my "impossible dream," only this time, he led the conversation. "Carla, I know what you're here for, and before you start, yes, we are gonna have a softball team for next semester." This took me entirely by surprise; it had been almost four years of the same repartee, me insisting on the team and him dismissing me with a "we'll see," but it was finally happening! It was my school's first softball team in over twenty years, thanks to my insistence, or rather persistence. I then had a mission: recruit girls willing to suit up and play an unknown sport for most of them. By the time the softball season was about to start, we had a team of sixteen girls, including myself, that had begun to practice two months before our first game.
As expected of any team of rookies, we lost almost every game except for two, ironically, our only away games. I don't count one of these as a victory since the other team forfeited because they only brought eight players when the minimum is nine, but the other, do I treasure it. It was the season's penultimate game, and we were up against last year's runner-ups for the championship and the team who beat us in our first-ever game. All of the girls were hungry for that win. It was the fourth inning and my turn to bat. We had runners in scoring position and were down by two runs. I position myself to bat, and as the first pitch gets closer to me, my body starts to shift in preparation for a full-force swing... CLANK! The ball connected perfectly with the bat and went over the shortstop's head. I had done it: an RBI double that put us on top! Two innings later, we beat them by knock-out. My eighth-grade self was flipping out! After the game, many of the girls wrote sweet texts, thanking me for helping create the team, and that's when it hit me: sports were fulfilling my life and others in a way I couldn't have imagined. This whole adventure of starting a team, recruiting players, and seeing them grow is what I want to do for the rest of my life, leading me into my future in sports management.