Billy Center is 5’9” and has been playing baseball since he was four playing tea-ball. He and his best friend Dave have been on the same team for all 11 years of their baseball lives, now they’re freshman wanting to try out for their high school, the Samafarue Tigers. Billy is quite a bit better than Dave but Dave is much taller than him standing about five inches above him. Billy was never a player that would hit homeruns he was always the one that would get on base almost every time he went up to plate, and almost never struck out. He was feeling really good when he step on the field for the first day of the week long tryouts. Day after day he did the same exact stuff, not doing anything for the coach to think he is not a team player or not going to be a good contributor to the team. He would do what was asked of him and do it at 110%.

That Friday night at the end of tryout Coach Cole gathered us all remaining player around and gave us a nice speech that he has said for the past four years he has been there.
Starting with him taking his hat off and scratching what’s left of his hair. Looking at his feet he say, “This is the day that I hate, I have been watching you guys play for months now,” they had preseason workouts.
“In my four years I have been the head coach here I haven’t seen this much talent in those years.” They were all looking up at him with scared eyes not knowing if they were going to make it or not. After he got done with his ten minute speech he says okay now I will let you guys go and I will send out an email with the final team. Billy was scared there were eleven more cuts that the coach had to make and Billy didn’t know if he did good enough to make the team.

At 9:08pm Billy’s phone buzzed he knew what it was and was scared to read it, but with one eye barely open he looks trying to find his name and fourth from the bottom he sees it. Then he yells “YEAH BUDDY,” his mom and dad come into his room and congratulated him. Billy calls his best friend Dave and congratulated him as well because he made it too.

The next day, Saturday, was the first day of the actual practice. It went well Billy thought he did the best he could have and it looked like he made the coach happy. The team didn’t have that long to I guess you can say play as a team or be like a family because they only had a week and a day until their first game. The players did not know where they were playing or where they were going to bat until the day of the game/games. There were two games that day one for sophomores and then right after one for freshman. They barely had any sophomores so they played their best freshman in those games. Billy wasn’t did not play that sophomore game but did play the freshman game because the freshman that played in the first game couldn’t play in the other game unless there was no one else to take that place. In the next ten games this is what happened to Billy he was always the back up to someone and always batted low in the line-up. In practices the 9/10 team never really got to practice because the varsity and JV team was more important. So Billy never got his opportunity to show coaches that he was better than he thought.
When they finally get time to practice they just hit the outfielder’s pop ups and infielder’s grounders. So to the players it gets boring so they do not try as hard as they can so you start to see more and more mistakes. Like one practice they had over 20 errors, coach was not to happy so he made them run a pole, going to the foul pole and back, for every error they made. The next practice was exactly the same pop ups and grounders, this time there weren’t as many errors but there still was some, mostly in the infield. When the infielder’s made mistakes the coach did not care but the one time Billy make a mistake in the outfield his coach says “Billy what are you doing it’s like you have never played baseball before, we are not playing tea-ball here.” Then what made it worst when he was hitting Billy missed a few balls and coach told him he sucked and didn’t know why he picked him to be on his team. This made Billy get really sad, he almost quit the team but then that voice inside his head told him if you give up then your lifelong dream will be crushed. But Billy didn’t realize this until his junior when he realized that if he didn’t step up his game then he wouldn’t have any collage or even pro scouts to come and look at him. During his junior year first game he showed coach what he could actually do. Hitting two homeruns and in the outfield made two ESPN quality driving catches. He and his friend Dave were the only ones on the JV team as juniors. After Billy already had four homeruns in the first three games he got moved up to varsity to start in center field.

At the end of Billy’s High School career he had 37 homeruns, 189 RBI and 13 stolen bases. And most important he was going to continue his lifelong dream of becoming a pro-baseball player, he got a full-ride scholarship to the best college baseball program, the University of South Carolina. That place is so good that every game almost every professional baseball teams scouts come in to watch every game.

Billy did very well in college, in his sophomore year he signed for the St. Louis Cardinals, with a 243 million dollar contract for 8 years. He didn’t go straight into the pros his sophomore year he told the Cardinals that he wanted to finish college so he could have something to fall back on when he retired from baseball. He ended his college career with 67 homeruns, 298 RBI and 42 stolen bases.

Billy got his life time goal by not listening to what someone else said instead he used that as motivation in becoming better to prove that person wrong and do right in his mind.