A Future Without Baseball Shawn Partin Essay - 2267 Words

A Future Without Baseball Shawn Partin spent his life playing baseball. From the time he was four years old he was on some sort of baseball field, â€Å"we lived right across from the field, so my mom and I would walk over there after I got home from kindergarten every day with my tee and a bat and a ball and we would hit through,† says Partin. So when he injured his shoulder in high school, he was devastated, â€Å"it wasn’t career ending, but it still set me back. In my mind, I was a failure.† This led him down a ‘rabbit hole’ where he struggled to recover and became very depressed. Eventually he struggled with substance abuse and was forced to quit baseball, giving up the chance to play baseball at a Division I university, and the dream of being in the Major League Baseball League. His shoulder injury started out as nagging injury. First, it would be sore and instead of receiving treatment for it, he would just ignore it and continue on. But then that nagging turned into pain and his shoulder would start to spasm. He eventually had a loss of range of motion that led him to being ineffective on the field and subsequently pushed him into seeking medical care. Partin had no major injuries prior to that, just a sprained ankle and as he described it, ‘creaky knees,’ so he had no idea with how to deal with his injury from a psychological standpoint. Partin said that psychological care is sparse where he is from, so he never had the opportunity to talk with somebody about his injury