Essay A: Sorry, it's a bit long. I'm open to any kind of suggestion or criticism. You can even tear it apart if you feel you have to.
After a few short years of prosperity, my family was hit pretty hard by the recent economic downturn. At first, it was difficult to make the adjustment from having a lot to scrimping and saving so the bills would be paid. However, we eventually got used to the scarcity and none of us were wallowing in self-pity; there were much more important things to do.
It was during this time that I began to develop athletically. My baseball skills were really starting to improve, and I wanted to do more than just play against the local competition. That's when we found out about the Columbia Angels, a baseball club based just outside of Houston that had an excellent record of getting players recruited to colleges, were holding tryouts for their pre-Freshman team. They had the cheapest fees, but even that would be a major strain on the already miniscule family resources. Still, my dad decided to go through with it and making good on his faith in me, I made the team.
Before all this happened, I gained a healthy disrespect for rich kids. The ones I knew at school were nothing more than immature goof-offs who somehow found great enjoyment in wasting their time on unimportant things. That really annoyed me, and I had to show them that I was far superior to them. I outdid them in the classroom and outdid them athletically, but that did very little to improve my social standing. They must have found it distasteful that an outsider could do better than the ones they deemed to be in good-standing.
My dad's work schedule was in conflict with the team's schedule, so that left only a small window of opportunity for him to drop me off at a cheap hotel near the area of the tournament. We would leave Cedar Park (Suburb of Austin) late at night and get to the hotel around two or three o'clock in the morning. I'll have to admit that it was a pretty interesting experience riding in the passenger seat, while my dad was driving down a poorly lit county road in the dark of night and screaming at the top of his lungs to stay awake. Once we arrived I hopped out of the car, got my equipment, and went to the room. My dad could only stay long enough to check if I had everything because he had to get to work early in the morning.
Usually, the nights at those hotel rooms were spent without sleep, as I did not want to miss a game due to oversleeping. In the mornings, I took a shower to refresh myself before beginning my walk to the field. Depending on the distance, my walk took as little as thirty minutes or as much as two hours, but I wasn't going to let that stop me from playing.
During the first game, I didn't play much, but I learned something about my teammates. All of them came over comfortably in their air-conditioned vehicles and some came from very comfortable living arrangements. In other words, they were rich kids. "Oh great, here we go again," I thought to myself. Still, I wanted to know more about them.
I talked with a few of them about where they were from and what schools they were going to. The story I gave them included living just outside of Austin, playing baseball for many local teams, and even walking to the field. However, I did not tell them about the hardships my family faced or the sleepless nights. That would have given me a charity case image; something I absolutely hated.
As the summer season progressed, I found that these rich kids were not the same kind I was used to dealing with back home. Oh sure, they had it good and I had a pretty rough deal, but somehow that didn't matter anymore. They wanted to play baseball; I wanted to play baseball so it worked out pretty well. We ended up winning many games and finished in second place at the national tournament in Joplin, Missouri.
On top of that, I was pleasantly surprised by my teammates. They didn't exclude anyone or create an insiders' group, and they were quite friendly. Slowly, I removed the protective shell that I built to avoid making friendships and began to really be myself. This may sound a little funny, but I realized for the first time that making friends didn't hurt my ability to focus on the game. I also learned that a person's economic background did not determine the content of their character.
Looking back, this was one of the first times I had really decided to look past a person's economic background to find out who they really were. It took me a while to find out that what I was doing was almost as superficial as the people I had been dealing with at school. Sometime during that summer of baseball, the real me emerged and since then, I've never let what a person had cloud my judgment of who they were.
