Winning a conference title is no easy feat, and clinching the title before the final weekend arrives does not happen often! We truly pulled everything together and beat a good team in 3 straight games. I could not be more proud of this team and what we have accomplished up to this point.
In all of my blogs so far I have highlighted players who stood out in my mind as “unsung heroes.” For this one I am going to go in a different direction.
This group of guys is truly a team, more so than any other I have ever been a part of. With that being said, there are several things that come to mind about why this is more of a team than any other.
First of all, we just get along incredibly well. This is a very good and balanced group of personalities who mesh well and go together like a band of brothers. With that feeling of brothers, there are disagreements that come with, but it’s all handled with a level of love and respect that can’t be matched.
It’s hard for me to even describe how amazingly we get along and how close we have become. What class you are in has become completely irrelevant and we have all grown together like we are truly family.
Another reason we are such a great team is our approach to the game. It is very easy to get caught up in the mindset of trying to build your statistics or just do what is best for you personality.
This is especially true in the game of baseball. We play a game which is all about individual players making individual plays. That makes it seem like the better our stats are as individuals the more games we are going to win. What we have learned throughout the year is that we are individual players making individual plays for the benefit of the team.
That simple change of mind, or addition onto the mindset has made a huge difference in not only our ability to execute, but the effort in which we give. That is why effort is the third and final thing which comes to mind about why this team is so successful.
Our level of effort is unimaginable for most people. The reason we give effort is because of the first two things I pointed out: we are a family and we want what is best for the team. We work our hardest on a daily basis, not for ourselves, but because we don’t want to let the guy next to us down.
The recipe for winning is when one of us walks up to the plate with a runner on base and thinks, “I am going to get a hit right here because the person in front of me got on base, and I refuse to leave them out there.”
This post is a little bit all over the place, mainly because it’s so difficult to truly capture what the word "team" means to us and how much we have embraced our philosophy. There is not a better feeling than knowing you are on the field with a group of guys who care about and are going to do whatever they can to help you, not for their own benefit, but for the team.
We can only hope that this closeness will carry us into the playoffs and keep us winning; but even without the wins, we are creating bonds that will not be broken when the season ends.
Congrats!! I liked all the great things you said about your team in this post! It shows to me how close you are and how important your team is to you!
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