Inside Pitch: Grace White On Growing Up

Grace White is a college senior who plays first base for Union University, a DII school in Jackson, Tennessee, and is majoring in Journalism. She is the Sports Editor for the Cardinal & Cream, the school’s student publication, and has a younger sister who plays in the Virginia Unity club organization.

In today’s Inside Pitch, Grace shares her poignant feels about growing up and how her perspective toward baseball and softball changed as she got older… as did her appreciation and relationship with her father.

*****

On a warm spring day in Orlando, Florida, I watch excitedly as the Atlanta Braves warm up at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex, the place that they call their Spring Training home.

The breeze is blowing.  Gloves are cracking.  Players are carrying on.  This is the life.  This is what dreams are made of for a 12-year-old girl that loves Major League Baseball and can tell you anything you want to know about her Braves.  I eagerly wait for the players to finish so that I can call out to them to ask politely for their autographs.

“Mr. Heyward!  Mr. Heyward!  Could you please sign my card?”

Jason Heyward, one of my favorite Braves when he was on the team from 2010 to 2014, ambles over to where me and a bunch of other autograph-hungry kids and adults are gathered along the right field line.

“How you doin’?” he asks as he takes the baseball from a little boy near me.

I am so used to seeing Heyward on the TV screen that he seems larger than life in person.  My heart beats faster, and my palms start to sweat when I see that I’m next in line.  This is all that matters to me in the world right now.

This is to me what meeting Nick Jonas or Justin Bieber would be to my friends.  MLB stars are who I look up to and want to be like.  My 12-year-old dream is to be a player alongside them one day.

At home, I put on my Braves jersey and hat and pitch to my dad on our concrete driveway.  I try to throw different pitches, and even though he knows they aren’t moving the way I think they are, he plays along and keeps on giving me signals so that I can live my dream for just a while longer.

Heyward is standing in front of me now.  He has his glove tucked underneath his arm and his sunglasses fixed on the back of his hat.  I notice that he writes left-handed just like he throws.

“Thank you, sir,” I say politely, trying to contain my excitement.

“No problem,” Heyward replies casually.  He’s signed hundreds of autographs before so this is nothing new for him.

But for me, I am almost speechless looking down at the signature on the 2013 Topps card.  It hardly looks like he was trying to write his name on the card.  Instead, it looks more like a bunch of squiggles, but to me, those squiggles are everything.

I turn to look farther up in the stands where my dad sits just watching.  I hold the card up for him to see, and instantly, he grins so big.  It’s obvious this means the world to him just like it does to me.

My dad loved baseball growing up too so getting to be out there and see the players interact with each other and go through workouts was something he was glad to experience, but he admits that he probably wouldn’t have gone if it weren’t for me and my two sisters.

“It was probably a bigger deal to get to see y’all learning and seeing things and just having fun for the game,” my dad said.  “And meeting the players or getting autographs because y’all were in it for what the game is all about because it’s still a game to y’all.  Y’all were able to have fun with everything that was going on. You weren’t worried about anything but just trying to get to meet them and talk to them and then you’d get to see the game, maybe catch a ball.”

He had a love for the game just like us. But our relationships with the experience were very different at the time. I was just focused on what I was getting to do and the autographs that I was able to get. But I don’t think I was doing it in a selfish way. I was just so young that all of it was so new and exciting that I wanted to do everything I could to get the most out of such a special trip for myself.

On the other hand, my dad was able to take things from the experience to “Ooo and ahh” at, but he was also able to step back and realize that the autographs and the foul balls weren’t the most important thing.

He was a parent who was able to see his kids in awe and that was much more important to him than his own feelings. I’m really glad that he did enjoy watching our innocent joy and wonder because if he didn’t, I don’t think the trip would have had as much meaning as it did.

If I’m being honest, at that time in my life, I didn’t have all that much in common with my dad. 

Only a couple of years prior, my mom had died, leaving me and my sisters and my dad.  While she was here, I was definitely a mama’s girl.  I still loved my dad immensely, but my relationship with my mom was just different.  I guess one reason being that she was a girl and another being that she was at home with me all the time, whereas my dad had to work.

When she died, it was like my dad and I had to rediscover our whole relationship.  We had to lean on each other in new ways and learn to trust each other on an entirely different level.  One thing that has brought us together has been baseball and softball.

My dad took us to our first Braves game at Turner Field in 2009.  From then on, I was a diehard Braves fan.  There was no looking back.  I have him to thank for that and for lighting a fire under me when it came to softball.  MLB and softball are part of the ties that bind us.

*****

It’s March 16.

Those carefree Spring Training days are in the past. I’m in the heart of my junior season of softball at Union University, and I just went 0-5 and got taken out in the middle of the second game of our double header.  I’m questioning my desire to play this game and wondering if I truly want to continue.

On the bus ride home, I call my dad to talk to him about the situation.

“Promise me one thing,” he says. “Don’t make a rushed decision.”

I promise.

This isn’t a decision I should make lightly at all. If I end my career, I will be ending something that I’ve been doing since I was five years old.

I don’t think I’d change the last 15 years of my life. I do love the game, and I for sure love the people that have become life-long friends of mine as a result of it.

But as I’ve gotten older, it has become more like work and less like the game I knew it to be growing up. The excitement and the pure joy that I had when I was six or seven years old has turned to weariness and frustration.

And I honestly don’t know if I will ever be able to find that true happiness again.

I think that many athletes go through what I have gone through, whether it be in high school or college; and I believe that instead of realizing that it is probably not realistic to ever experience the magic of sport again in the same way that you did when you were young, many continue to seek it. They might play in rec leagues or pick-up games. They might get into coaching, and a lot of times, they might try to find it in their own kids.

It’s strange to me that parents try to live their athletic dreams through their kids. I guess they see their children as miniature versions of themselves. However, they can’t go out there and swing the bat or throw the ball for their kids. I think this might be one reason why parents end up being so hard on their kids when it comes to sports.

Parents want their kids to be as good as they had hoped they could be; and when the kids don’t live up to expectations or seem to enjoy it as much as the parents think they should, then frustration creeps in and arguments happen. In the parents search for happiness in sport, they ultimately end up becoming dissatisfied not only with athletics but also with their kids.

I talked to Ted Kluck, a football player, coach, and father of two boys, about this very thing. He treated the game like a job and always worked as hard as he could to be the best he could be.  However, his sons didn’t have the same desire to work hard at sports as he did. This was something that Kluck had to work through and become okay with. Eventually, he was able to come to terms with it.

“Having a rich relationship with my boys where I love them unconditionally and they love me was more important than seeing them reach their potential,” Kluck said. “Neither of them have reached their potential as athletes and that’s fine. That’s so fine because they’re reaching their potential in other areas of their lives, including their spiritual lives and that’s way more important.”

I really do want my kids to have every opportunity to try things to see what they like, and I want to make sure they always try their best. But I don’t want to force them to play at a level that they don’t want to play at. If they decide that playing in college isn’t for them, I want to be okay with that.

I wouldn’t be wearing “Union” across my chest today if it weren’t for my dad pushing me along the way, but I don’t think I would change a thing.

I think deciding how hard to push your kids can be a very difficult decision because on the one hand you don’t want them to do things with zero effort and hustle but on the other hand you don’t want to try to live your dreams through them.

I’m not a parent yet, but if I am one day, God-willing, I want to enjoy seeing them experience sports for the first time and find their own love through practicing and competing.

I don’t want to inject my love of the sport into them.  And if they never find the same love I had, I hope I have the patience and love to be all right with that.

I want to be able to be like my dad at Spring Training, understanding that the best part is getting to see the wonder in his children’s faces… wonder that has not been tainted by the brokenness of the world.

— Grace White, Extra Inning Softball corresondant