Personal Narrative: My State Tournament

I always dreamed of celebrating a state tournament berth with my teammates, and the summer of 2013 I got to do that. But I had no clue what was about to happen that summer. The state tournament consisted of mostly metro teams whose population ranged from 20,000 to 200,000. We were the town of 3,000 heading into the state tournament just hoping we wouldn’t take last. I’ll never forget the time my baseball team won state because it made me realize that even though we are a very trivial town, we can still do very immense things. When the pools were released for the tournament we saw that we were the smallest team in our pool by far. It consisted of Apple Valley, Owatonna, and Prior Lake. We had to win two of those games to make it to bracket play. My team and I arrived on a Friday evening on which was a beautiful evening to play baseball. The auburn colored sunset was shining bright in center field. Our first game we got throttled by Apple Valley and were on the verge of elimination.

It was a showdown, us against Minnetonka. Our team scarlet colored jerseys, and they wore their royal colored jerseys. I was pitching the championship game and I got plenty of run support early as we took a six to nothing lead. I pitched five shutout innings and gave the ball to Brandon Gill to get the last six outs. We lost our mojo a little bit when they scored four runs heading into the last inning. I was playing shortstop; Brandon struck the first and second kids out. He was throwing gas as he just blew his fastball by the first two hitters. The ball hitting the glove sounded like a shotgun. We only needed one more out to win a state title. Brandon rared back and fired the ball towards home. The ball hit the bat and made a loud “ding” as the ball rolled right back to Brandon who picked it up and fired it to first. I could hear the crowd roar as we all dog piled in front of the mound. I had never been so exultant in my