My passion for baseball has always been with me as long as I can remember. Though I played football and basketball growing up, those were just activities to be done while waiting for baseball season to start. In many of my childhood photos I am pictured carrying a bat and ball and my parents always said, even as a toddler, I would ask anyone who would listen to throw the ball to me. Growing up in central Pennsylvania, my dedication to baseball was somewhat abnormal. I grew up in the shadow of Penn State University where football was king and where high school football was a generational tradition. There were limited facilities in town to practice indoors in the offseason and I spent many winter nights driving with my dad and brother to our hitting and pitching lessons, held in a converted garage on the edge of town. Our high school baseball field didn’t have a fence and was used for football practice in the fall, making the playing surface quite unique come spring. The junior varsity field faced the varsity field in deep center and if you hit the ball far enough, you would disrupt the JV game as you tried to round the bases before the other team could get the ball in. Many of our early spring practices were on the gym floor and more often than not, we lost our first game or two to snow-outs. One year, tryouts were held amid piles of plowed snow in the high school parking lot. Despite all of this, I always loved baseball and I imagined I would love it even more if I could go play in a warm climate in college. When it came time to start looking at colleges, I only reached out to schools out west and down south politely declining offers from northern schools including Penn State. I was done with cold, windy, snowy, gray weather….or so I thought.

Coach Joe Walsh called me one October evening my senior year of high school. On my dining room table was my letter of intent to play baseball at Wake Forest and I was ready to be done with the commitment process. It had been a long summer and fall of sorting through colleges, contacting coaches, and going on visits, and I had found an ACC school making a very good offer. But it was Harvard and maybe because it was so unexpected, or because my Mom was excited about it, I agreed to take my final recruiting trip the following weekend. At the time, I did not anticipate changing my well laid plans and expected I would return home, sign my letter of intent, and head south. Crazy to think now how much that one phone call changed both my perspective on the path that lay ahead of me as well as the overall trajectory of my life.

As I flew into Boston/Logan, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect from the coaches, the players, or the school, but after 48 hours on campus, I realized that this was the kind of team I was looking for. It just so happened to come with an opportunity at a world class education too. There was only one other concern I had with choosing to play baseball at Harvard and that was whether or not I would have an opportunity to play professionally after my time there. Coach Walsh gave me the phone number of a few MLB scouts in New England and told me to call them to ask my questions. On the very first call, the scout told me, “If you can play, we’ll find you,” and that was all I needed to hear. Despite not being guaranteed acceptance, when I got home, I told Wake Forest that I was going to pursue Harvard full steam and began the process of interviews, essay writing and….waiting. After what seemed like an eternity, with my college future hanging in the balance, I received my “Likely letter” and later my official acceptance to Harvard University and set my sights on Cambridge.

The next four years would be very different from where and how I grew up. The baseball part was the same; work hard, play hard, compete, and enjoy being around your teammates. Sure, there were ups and downs over the years with injuries or slumps, but that was sports and that was baseball. I was fortunate to have a lot of successes along the way as well. At one point, the Bean Pot trophy sat proudly on the mantle in my freshman dorm and I still have my Ivy League Championship ring tucked safely away with so many of my playing memories. It was everything else that I needed to adjust to and it was everything else that made my experience at Harvard so influential. Classes were challenging, made more so by my laisez-faire attitude toward them at the beginning. I am happy to say, my attitude quickly improved after the first round of grades came back and I realized I wasn’t in high school anymore. I also met people from all over the world, with completely different experiences and backgrounds. My roommates freshman year came from Peru, Texas, and Massachusetts and as each of us found our new friend groups, I met more people from interesting and far off places. Most interesting of all I think was how we all came to be at Harvard and that no two paths leading there were the same. Somewhere between arriving that first day as a part of “Dorm Crew” and graduating with my degree in Government, I realized, that was the whole point. I also realized that I was able to have those experiences and meet those people because of baseball and man did I enjoy playing baseball at Harvard.