JOHN MARK MONTGOMERY

Baseball has always been a special part of my life. I grew up playing with and against all of my friends in the Gainesville Rec league in my hometown. As we got older some of my friends gave up the sport but my closest ones today stuck with it. We started playing together in the seventh grade and played all through high school and up to our senior year. I’m not sure if I’m in love with the game of baseball or the people I played it with. We would anticipate the end of school every day just so we could walk down to the field and put our cleats on. I loved every second of it whether we were playing in twenty degree weather in Boston or hiding one of our teammates uniforms in the ceiling before a game. I would’ve fought the world for any of those guys (we almost had to when we decided to get into a bench clearing brawl against a team that made us look like toddlers.) This team played every spring, summer, and fall together. After seven years and hundreds of games together we got pretty good at finding ways to win. Our senior year we won the 3AAA State Championship following a disappointing Elite 8 loss our junior year. All of our teammates before us described how sad their final game was, but ours wasn’t like that. When we won and it was all over it was a happy sensation. It was the first Monday back at school when we didn’t have practice that it finally set in that baseball was finally over for me. Even though I won’t ever step back between those two white lines, I’ll always have the guys that baseball gave me.