Learning From Failure: A Team Sports Essay

There are a lot of benefits to being part of an athletic team. You learn how to win...and how to lose, you learn how to succeed...and how to fail. You find out quickly that your individual actions have an impact on the team as a whole, and that selfishness has no place in a thriving team environment. Toughness, self-control, humility, pride, courage, respect, work-ethic, encouragement; these are all character building attributes that can be learned through participation in team sports.

I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in team sports from the time I could walk until I graduated from college. The youth athletic association in the city that I grew up in provided great opportunities for kids to be a part of these teams. In baseball I progressed from T-ball, to coach pitch, to playing with the same rules the pros do. In football, I went from pulling flags, to a split league based on weight, to playing under the lights on Friday nights. While I played baseball, football, and basketball growing up, baseball was by far my favorite, and I continued my baseball career for another 4 years at Bethel University.

Baseball has taught me a lot of things about myself, but the most important thing I’ve learned after 17 years of playing the game is how to deal with adversity. Things don’t always go your way in baseball, in fact you can make it to the hall of fame if you succeed only 4 out of 10 times. It is a failure sport, and if you can’t deal with failure then you won’t succeed. When things aren’t going your way, when hits are hard to come by and the umpire’s seems to be squeezing you a bit, you find out what you’re made of. These lessons are learned through experience, and if you’ve ever been a part of team, then you’ve hopefully experienced the encouragement from teammates that carry you through those failures.

The memories I have from being part of the traveling baseball team as a kid will stick with me forever. I may not remember what I learned in some of my college courses, or what I had for dinner the other night, but I will not forgot the shared experiences I had with my teammates on and off the field. I’ll always remember the out of town tournaments where we would run around the hotels making up games, the endless hot dog and Gatorade combo meals eaten at the ballpark, and my rather loud dad offering some suggestions to the umpires on how they could be improving.

In an effort to provide other kids with these same unforgettable experiences, Proozy is proud to partner with the Eagan Baseball Association. This program provides youth in their community the opportunity to play baseball from Pre-K to 12th grade.  We support their vision of developing an engaged and competitive program built on dedication, respect, and personal development. As a brand, we promote living an active, healthy life, and that starts with developing those habits as a kid. So whether it’s baseball, football, softball, soccer, or just running around playing tag, get out and play! Here at Proozy, we like to think of ourselves as a sports team, with different individuals playing different roles to help out the company as a whole. Just like the Eagan Baseball Association, we want to develop our team for success by instilling in them our core values of excellence, integrity, and passion.