This week is a different outlook on my journey through high school and college. I have been a small fish in a big pond and I have been a big fish in a small pond. There are benefits and disadvantages to both, but I believe that being a big fish in a small pond helps you the most in the long run. If it were as simple as stating you should do this, I wouldn’t be writing this blog. The ebb and flow of life will give you lessons if you’re listening.  Over the rest of this blog, I’ll be explaining why I believe this through my personal experience and experience of my friends that I’ve watched benefit from the process first hand. 

I was in the public school system up until high school and without even knowing it, I was getting swallowed up. I was fat and shy with no personality other than the kid who can swing the bat hard. It wasn’t until my parents and I decided going to Bishop McLaughlin Catholic High School was the best choice for me going forward. Nick Rodriguez (my high school baseball coach) convinced my dad this was the best route for my baseball career, and I am so thankful he did. I went into my first summer baseball game at Land O Lakes High School with no expectations. All of my friends were going to try out for their JV teams- and I was happy enough to be on the varsity team as an incoming high school freshman. To my surprise, I look at the lineup card and I’m hitting 4-hole and catching in my first game. Catching!? I had never played this position in my life. I told my coach, Nick, my concerns and he was like, “I know, but you’ll be catching for us.” I was scared out of mind and you know something wild had to happen. There was a foul ball and it shattered the umpire’s forearm. To this day I’ve never seen that happen again. From this wild start,I had success that I would have never imagined my freshman year. This gave me the fuel I needed to transform my body into being a college baseball recruit. I knew I was good and that I might have a chance to play baseball at the next level. I start out by going to the Carolinas for prospect camps and ended up performing pretty well. We stopped by UNCG to just check it out and ran into Dustin Ijames, little did I know this would change my life forever. 

Dustin handed me a pamphlet to their prospect camp and after walking around campus I knew I wanted to go there. I showed up to the camp and performed better than I could have ever wished for. I had the best BP I’ve ever had in my life, hit a homerun foul on the first pitch of the scrimmage, and threw a kid out from right field. Yes, I was in the outfield. It was an outlier of how good of a baseball player I was but the coaches at UNCG didn’t know this. They offered me a scholarship and the rest is history, I was going to UNCG. I had a great Junior year and knew I was ready for UNCG. Then, hurt my elbow. This is where the doubt started getting into my head. I had a down year from junior year and was going into UNCG not fully healthy. 

Here starts the transition of turning into the small fish in a big pond. I loved my time in high school but I hadn’t looked inward and realized why. I loved high school because of how close of a community we were and PLAYING baseball. I was about to have both of these things taken away from without knowing it. I was too caught up in the clubhouse, the gear, and the lifestyle of a division 1 athlete. This is the case for many high school athletes today, and I believe it’s getting worse because of technology. I list some blogs that detail the next portion of this time in my life better but just know that it didn’t work out well for me. I was cut from UNCG and had to find a new place to play. 

Fast forward to spring of 2014 and I’m playing my junior year at Catawba. I’m back to being a big fish in a small pond. My confidence has been low ever since the day I got cut at UNCG. This showed at Catawba when I started the year going 0-21. Now if I’m seen as a small fish, then I don’t even get to 21 at bats before I’m yanked out of the lineup. This wasn’t the case. I was a big fish and I was valued by Coach Gantt. The next game changed the course of my life. It sounds silly to say but I do look back at this game shifting my mindset to being forever positive. We are on the road at Pfiefer and I went 3-5 with 2 HR’s and 8 RBI. I thought to myself, “If i can overcome what i just went through to do this, what can’t I do?” I go on to have a great Junior year campaign getting labeled as 1st team all-DH in the SAC. You can read this blog to see what happened next and I honestly don’t know where my life would be if I didn’t turn around my playing career the way that I did. I thought that I had a good experience of going down to the division 2 level, little did I know that we were getting a transfer that would set the world a blaze. 

In steps Will Alberston. Will transferred to Catawba for the 2015 campaign and no one knew what he was about to do that season. He transferred here with the help of Dylan Richardson. Dylan and I became pretty good friends the year before and he was best friends with Will. He convinced Will that coming to play with him at Catawba was the right thing to do. This was a big deal because Will was a starter for Campbell, a D1 in North Carolina. He was a solid outfielder but was a singles hitter in his time at Campbell. I remember to this day, hitting in the cage with these two. I told Will he was going to lead the conference in singles! I was just giving him crap, because of his previous stats and the way he swings. Boy, that was probably the coldest take this century. Most of you know, but Will went on to lead us to the D2 championship game by having this stat line.

.467 BA, 26 HR, 17 2B, 114 hits, 91 RB, 32 BB, 19 K and 1.396 SLG

Just absolutely insane numbers. I hit behind Will that season and it was crazy to watch it first hand. I’ll let Will tell more of his story in the video below. I’ll ask him two main questions. How did your life change when you went from a small fish in a big pond to a big fish in a small pond? How did you develop your approach during batting practice? This question hit on last week’s blog because he had the best approach in batting practice that I’ve ever seen. 

This is my experience with this analogy. If you want to dive deeper into this subject, I highly recommend reading David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell. He approaches and implies that you are better off by taking the top of a below average school as opposed to the bottom of a prestigious school. He explains it much better than I can, so please read. To wrap this all up, my life has been better by being the best in a smaller pond, rather than caught in the middle at a bigger school.