Related article: High school baseball: Snow Canyon Warriors overcome adversity to win it all in 3A
SALT LAKE CITY —
Imagine finding success doing something you love with people you care about.
Imagine how wonderful it feels to sit together after winning a game and talk about who did what to help the team win and how grateful you all are for each other.
Imagine how happy you are day after day to play ball with your friends, to laugh in the sunshine and joke in the dugout.
And then imagine how it feels to have what appears to be a dream season snatched from your grasp. Imagine being consumed with anger, devastation and frustration.
And just when it looks like you will be a victim of someone else's bad decision, you and those same friends decide that giving up would only make a painful situation even more excruciating.
That was what the Snow Canyon baseball team faced two weeks ago.
Their region title was gone before they ever felt the elation of winning it. Their hope for a state title reduced to a long shot. And their idyllic, young lives became saturated in what everyone refers to as "adversity."
I have always found the discussions of adversity interesting. That's because adversity isn't something you just get through. It isn't a moment to be hurdled, battled or pushed past.
It is, in fact, what life is. It is a headwind that makes a tough race more challenging. It is a flat tire when you're late for a job interview. It is an unexpected trip to the emergency room when you're barely able to pay your bills each month.
It is both a blessing and a curse.
It is both a setback and an opportunity.
It the gritty, raw part of life that shows you what you're made of or helps you become what you didn't know you were.
But whether adversity becomes the circumstance of your demise, the reason for your failure, the rationale used to justify your decision to quit, or it becomes the dark before the dawn is predicated on you.
While adversity isn't always born of your own decisions, the blessings of the challenge always are.
The toughest part of the adversity the Snow Canyon baseball team had to face was that those who suffered most didn't even possess the power to rectify the mistake.
They were collateral damage.
The team wasn't punished because the boys didn't work hard enough.
The team wasn't punished because the boys cheated.
They didn't lose those four critical region games because they couldn't score more points, field the ball any cleaner or run any faster than any opponent they faced.
They were punished because of a paperwork technicality. Someone in the school's administration thought they'd turned in the necessary paperwork related to a player who'd transferred to Utah for his senior year so he could have resident tuition when he attended college next year. The region's board of managers forced the team to forfeit every game in which this ineligible athlete played. The decision sent them from the top of the standings to the brink of playoff elimination.
As often happens in life, one person's mistake affects someone who had nothing to do with it.
It was an accident.
But that acknowledgement didn't make it any less painful.
Rather than worry about how unfair life can be, the boys decided to grab onto the shred of hope that remained for them. Win every game — including a play-in game — and make the playoffs.
Instead of seeing themselves as victims of unfortunate circumstances, the boys controlled what they could. They defeated last year's 3A state champion — twice — once in the first round and then in the second game on championship Saturday.
We all have difficult situations in which we find ourselves. Sometimes it's because we've made bad decisions. Sometimes it's because someone else did.
But always we have a choice about how to see our circumstances, how to see ourselves.
Will adversity become our best excuse?
Will adversity become the explanation we offer when asked why we didn't fulfill our promise?
Or will adversity become the mountain we climb, the storm we weather or the challenge we conquer?
We may not always choose our adversity, but fortunately, we always get to choose how to respond to it, how to see it and how we handle it.
And that decision changed the fate of the Snow Canyon baseball team. Instead of that poor team that had a region title taken from them, the Warriors will always be known as one of the most resilient and determined state champions ever crowned.
Related article: High school baseball: Snow Canyon Warriors overcome adversity to win it all in 3A
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