A Cultural Experience

This past summer, my baseball team went to play in the Florida 18u state tournament. We lost our first game, and also our second, which put us out of the tournament. It was our second game that left a lasting impression on me. We were playing a team from Oviedo, FL, and their team was entirely Latino. We were up by one going into the bottom of the last inning, but they ended up coming back and beating us.

The problem that denied us to compete at the next level of play was our lack of team unity. That problem could more or less be contributed to the fact that we only had two weeks from the time our team was formed, to this tournament, our first game. The other team probably had more time than us, but besides that, they all had one big thing in common, their cultural background.

It seemed to be the very cornerstone of their establishment as a baseball team. They were constantly chattering in Spanish, which at times was very annoying, I have to admit, but it gave them all something to cohere to. In their celebration on the field, I finally realized the most important aspect to any sports team, is not the level of talent of the individual players, but all the individual talent unified onto the highest abilities of the team, proving once again the old saying, “there's no I in team.” This really was a time where I gained an immense amount of respect for the cultural differences that we experience in our everyday lives.