Imagine you are a 14-year-old boy and you eat, drink and sleep baseball. You play baseball every day weather permits and even on some days when it doesn’t. You attend baseball camp every summer from the age of nine to hone your skills so that you will be ready when the days to prove yourself.

Then in high school, the day arrives. Freshman high school baseball team tryouts. You workout with the team for a week and on the last day of tryouts the coach calls the team together and says, “boys, the final roster will be posted on my office door by 7am tomorrow morning, if you are on the list come to practice, if not, thank you for your efforts.”

That night you can’t eat or sleep. You go to bed and you toss and turn, praying your name will be on the list of players who have made the team.

The next morning you are up so early your mom asks, “are you feeling okay?” You grab a pop tart and run the mile-and-a-half to school. You run down the main hallway to the gym, you make a left turn down the hallway to the locker room and right down the corridor to the coaches offices. As you get closer you can see a sheet of paper taped to the window. You are the first one there to see if you’ve made it.

As you get closer you feel a nervous knot in the pit of your stomach as you begin to run your index finger down the list of names. “I’ve got to be on this list, where am I, I’ve got to be here?” But after four runs over the list of names, the nervous knot in the pit of your stomach is overtaken by a sense of disappointment as you realize your dream of becoming a Major League Baseball player is over.

And, at the age of 14 you are facing a defining moment in your life. What’s a young adolescence to do?

This 14-year-old made a life affirming decision. He decided to continue playing the game he loved and invest in other ways to stay involved in the game. After coming back as a sophomore, junior and senior to play high school baseball he attends Ohio University, obtains a degree in communication and is accepted into that school’s Sports Administration Master’s Degree Program, which leads to a 20-year career in Minor League Professional Baseball management.