The ten-minute countdown before the game begins. The players are hit with a rush of adrenaline as they prepare to enter the field and hopefully secure a win. Nervousness empowers them to stay motivated and focused. When they enter the field, they are met with a roaring crowd who came to cheer them on as they attempt to score more runs than the other team.
The baseball season begins close to the end of the second semester with tryouts beginning during the end of January and playoffs starting the first week of May. Each player on the team plays an equal role in contributing to the outcome of the game.
Senior Harrison Stovern is a recruit athlete on the team who is on track to get accepted into Harvard University. The coaches helped him have a better chance of getting in by putting his name as one of the recruits on a list and asking him to send in his GPA and transcript. He was recruited during the fall of his junior year. Stovern’s coach, Kyle Humphreys, has had a big influence on shaping Stovern into the person he is today.
“Harrison is one of the hardest working kids I have known. He is an excellent pitcher, he has an intelligent, but extremely nice personality and he is able to efficiently manage playing a sport as well as academics, which makes him such a well-rounded student,” Humphreys said.
Stovern first got interested in this sport when he was a kid. He would watch baseball being played on television and soon started playing it himself in his backyard when he was four. Throughout high school, Stovern played the positions of a pitcher and an outfielder, but Harvard just wants him as a pitcher. He is on the high end of the list, but is still required to go through the normal application process by filling out applications, writing essays, and getting interviewed.
“As a teacher, it’s not very often that I think of a student as someone who is so much smarter than I was in high school. When I found out he was going to Harvard, I was not surprised at all because it made sense that someone like him deserves something this big,” Humphreys said.
Stovern has been committed to the application process and to the school for eight months. He visited the campus three times during the past year. After he got his offer in November 2016, he went to the campus the next week to talk to the coaches and to take a tour of the campus. In April, he made an official visit to the campus and stayed with the athletes in order to experience the student and social life. Stovern also went to the campus to interview with an admissions officer last month.
“I was pretty amazed when I got my offer. I’ve always dreamed about going to a highly academic college. I take my school grades very seriously, so when I knew that I had pretty much gotten into this school, it was a dream come true,” Stovern said.
