Appreciating the Now

Hello again, friends. I promised to share some mental struggles with you and I am fulfilling that promise much sooner than I anticipated. The Augie tea for the week dives into my confrontation with this simple fact: people love asking me questions on how I feel about my softball career coming to an end. Rather than complain that people care enough to ask how I am feeling (because it’s awesome to have people that love and care about me, and I know their hearts are in a good place) I am going to share how I am approaching my senior campaign and my perspective as to why.

February 7, 10 a.m. marks the moment I’ve been working towards since the flight home from Seattle last May. February 7th marks the start of softball season. Sporadically throughout our preseason training, my teammates would blindside me with the cannon ball of a question, “how do you think you’re going to handle this (my softball career) being over?” The sweetest woman on Earth, my Grandee, calls me randomly to see if my spirits are high because it is all coming to a close. In trying to give them decent responses to questions I hadn’t spent much time thinking about, I realized how damaging it could be to the mental side of my game to put an emphasis on the end. What happens when we harp on losing something we hold so close to our hearts? Inevitably, nostalgia hits and our minds fill with devastating clouds of sadness. We get stuck thinking about the unavoidable facts of the future rather than being in the moment and appreciating the now.

My coaches brought in a guest speaker, Tony Abbatine, several weeks back to help us with the “visual” side of hitting. This guy’s claim to fame is putting an emphasis on staying in “open space” during an at-bat. Open space is most easily explained by this quote from MLB legend, Manny Ramirez, “when I see nothing, I see everything”. At first that seems to be an abstract, philosophical thought far beyond the simple idea of sports. But, as you sit and ponder, it makes perfect sense. I play my best softball when my mind is equally focused on the positioning of the defense, the subtle cheats of a pitchers windup, and the balanced swaying of my bat loosely gripped between my fingers all at once. I am completely aware of the game.

I bring the concept of open space up now because I find it to be equivalent to fully embracing the moment in front of you. Thoughts of the past and ideas of the future are no where in sight. Your mind is fully appreciating the now. Appreciating the now is my mantra for my senior campaign. I am one of the few women who have been given the opportunity to live my dream and compete at the highest level. There are thousands of young girls who would kill for this experience that, whether it be talent level, health issues, or some other reason, will never be able to walk in my foot steps. And as we get older and other important things come into our lives, we lose sight of softball being our escape from reality. So often we find ourselves dreading that conditioning session after a heavy squat day or counting down the seconds until practice is over. In fact, this was my biggest hurdle to jump over my freshman year of college. I lost the genuine appreciation for being able to do what I loved day in and day out. It wasn’t until halfway through spring semester my freshman year that I realized how stupid I was to have wasted so much time being ungrateful to be able to do what I loved every day. We had just beat Dayton in a walk-off win and my teammate, Madi Shaw, gave a dope speech at the end of the game that brought me back to life. She played the game with a level of passion I had never seen. She had the heart and she had the talent, oh my gosh was she a beast with the bat. Thanks to her no more time was wasted. She showed me the key to greatness was finding that love again. Because when you are fully invested and passionate in what you do nothing can stop you. Going to practice everyday happy and ready to get after it makes life as an athlete-student, it is advertised as student-athlete but don’t get it twisted (not a complaint, I wouldn’t have it any other way), so much better. And as you get older you realize how quickly this all goes. I vividly remember my first college start like it was yesterday. No one prepares you for how fast it goes. So the sooner you learn to appreciate the now, the less you will regret.

I will leave you with you the “why” to my mantra of appreciating the now. Plainly put, college athletes are taught to focus on controlling what we can control. Can I control that my time as a competitive athlete is going to come to an end? No. My teammate blew out her knee during conference play last year and her season got cut short. I bring this up because the blunt reality is, more times than not, we don’t get a say. The saying is “God laughs when we plan”, right? Each day I get to pick up a softball and wear the number 7 on my back is a blessing. It’s a waste of my time and energy to get stuck thinking about the end when 1) I can’t control it and 2) I have so much softball still left to play. One day at a time and one pitch at a time is where I am at right now. Tomorrow I’ll be headed to Houston. And that, my friends, is all the Augie tea we have for today. Until next time.