I have played baseball my entire life, but I never tried playing for a team that was considered competitive. The end of the 2016 summer, right before I turned 13, I had chosen to go for a much more expensive and competitive team with Prospect Training Academy. One of the first coaches I met was Cody Smith.

He was a coach that worked a lot with the older kids and taught pitching for a majority of his time. I always thought I threw hard, I could throw any pitch at any time and no one would be able to hit it. I learned through watching the older guys Cody was teaching that I was not as good as I thought I was. I wanted to be like those older guys throwing mid to high 80s. I would take lesson after lesson with a bigger group of my teammates, trying my absolute best to get better. I would always think to myself, what did these guys have to do to be able to throw this hard?

I began to do private lessons with Cody. He would watch me pitch and measure my velocity on my throws. I threw very slow. After a few lessons with Cody, I didn’t see much progress. I started to get down on myself and tell myself there was no future for me in pitching.

Cody taught me something very important about baseball and life through these lessons. I remember after a few weeks of working with Cody we started to do pull downs. I increased my velocity a significant amount. After each throw, Cody would smile and get excited as if he was the one making progress in his own work. Every improvement, big or small, Cody would display this excitement and joy with me that made me feel as if I accomplished something amazing. Cody’s fiery passion made me begin to fall in love with the process of improvement just as much as accomplishing my goal.

Shortly after my Seventh grade season I began to develop anxiety and depression. It gradually became worse and worse until it began to overtake my life. It became a long term issue that I even battle to this day, but Cody taught me something very important without knowing he would later become a huge part in how I deal with my mental health today. He taught me that I need to focus on something small first to accomplish a much larger goal.

To this day I can still hear his passion for coaching and that booming voice he had, that he displayed at each and every practice. During my darkest days in my life, I would always try to remind myself that I need to keep pushing and working everyday just like Cody had taught me with pitching. I needed to find a way to celebrate the little things in life and find joy in improving myself whether it is with mental health, school, or baseball. I just needed to keep practicing and find a passion, like Cody had, for accomplishing small feats.

Although what you did for me was indirect, it impacted me to this day as you were one of the first educators/coaches in my life that celebrated reaching achievements with me. You made me feel like I could achieve anything I wanted as long as I worked hard at the small things. Thank you for being the best coach I have ever had and changing my life through the game of baseball.