Willie B.

Photography by Cassie Baker

If you’re reading this, rejection is redirection.

Baseball has always been a big part of what I do. From Little League to summer teams to high school to my American Legion team, many of my favorite memories to this point have happened on or around a ballfield. At the time, the only true certainty I had about my future was that I wanted to keep playing ball at the highest level I could reach for as long as possible. 

My first semester at Georgetown was filled with some of the most exciting and most anxious times of my life. Along with making new friends and starting my first semester at my dream school, I was starting to turn this baseball dream into a reality as well. Making the fall roster after my tryout was one of the greatest accomplishments of my career, and each day became a grind to prove to myself and to everyone who had helped me along the way that I could do it, that I was good enough.

I made some lifelong friends, shared special moments with my family when they visited for our fall games, and then one Monday afternoon in November I was informed I had been cut from the team. I was devastated, had no idea what to do next, and began to question everything. I was a failure, I was embarrassed to see my friends or tell my family what had happened. I felt like everyone was looking at me differently, that all my relationships would change now and that nothing would be the same. A huge part of who I am was just taken from me, and now I was living on my own for the first time trying to figure out who this familiar face in the mirror was.

Then a few days passed, and I noticed some things and had a few realizations. My friends never looked at me differently, including my friends on the team, who still made time to spend time with me. One of the biggest realizations I came to is that I am not a baseball player, I am a person who plays baseball. The most valuable parts of who I am, everything that makes me “me”, have nothing to do with any activity or job or thing that I do. Not my results on the baseball field, or my grades in the classroom, or anything else. I realized the people in my life are there not because I played baseball, but because of who I am as a person, because of the things that can never be taken away from me. 

As I was being cut, I was offered an opportunity to work with the team as a student manager, which I accepted. This has led me to places I never imagined I would go to and people I am eternally grateful to have met. This adversity presented me with an opportunity to give up or to grow, and my decision to keep going showed me that rejection is redirection. If you’re reading this, know that your path will rarely ever be in a straight line, and that you are more than your results. That when you fail you yourself are not a failure, and that persistence will lead you to the path you were supposed to find all along.

Willie B., Georgetown University Class of 2025

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