Helping the Under-Privileged Community

For my fifteen sophomore service hours required for graduation of my sophomore year, my family and I decided that I should volunteer at Spring Baseball. Spring Baseball is an organization that organizes a baseball league for under-privileged kids in a bad part of town. This organization was created with hopes that it would help these young kids as well as their entire family to get involved in their community through baseball and to stay out of trouble. I feel like my choice of volunteering at this organization was a good one because I used to play baseball and I enjoyed it very much throughout my middle school years. My duties and responsibilities during the hours that I volunteered were to assist the younger kids with the fundamentals of baseball, to assist the coaches in keeping the young athletes under control, and sometimes even to setup a volleyball game so that the families of the young baseball players could get involved in the fun as well.

            I think that this service project relates to my life at Strake Jesuit because one of the six grad at grad statements is physically fit. This means that although Strake Jesuit and its students take much pride in their academic success, they also take pride in their physical abilities and their performance in sports. I think this project is especially important because, as I said before, one of the main purposes of this organization is to get kids that live in a bad part of town to participate in their community in order to keep them off the streets and causing mischief. I am proud to have worked at this organization because keeping young kids involved in their community and out of trouble can affect them greatly as they mature and get older. They will most likely become more responsible and willing to help others because of the kindness that people had shown to them in their early childhood.

One main thing that I want to reflect on in this reflection paper is something that I didn’t really realize and it kind of bugged me at the time, but after thinking and reflecting about the experience I realized why this certain thing kept on happening. This “thing” is that many of the families that came to Spring Baseball late or sometimes didn’t even show up at all. The experience was very inconsistent because of this. Sometimes when I volunteered there, there would be tons of people and they would all show up on time, but other times there were very few people and the people that did show up were very late. This meant that I had a little down time in between setting up and the arrival of the players. The absence of punctuality of the players and their families annoyed me at first, but then I realized that they are doing their best to get there on time. I noticed that many of the families walked to the Spring Baseball fields, so I began to understand their inconsistency. Many times some of the families that showed up were very large, maybe about seven or eight people. This means that it would have been hard for them to get organized and walk to the field in order to get there on time without fail. I discovered that in the over-indulged world that I live in, being punctual and on time is a very important thing, but in the world of the under-privileged families, they are trying their hardest to get there on time. After discovering the reality of the situation, I became a lot more patient with the families and I now just happy when they showed up and were ready to play some baseball!