Colin Connolly
2-18-25
Revised Draft

      What is “family”? The Google definition is “all the descendants of a common ancestor”. I believed this my whole life, that in order to be “family” you had to be blood related in some way.  So many times in my past I have held on to this feeling of family with people, these people who have done hurtful things to people like my siblings and parents,  I am supposed to forgive just because they are my “family”.

    Family has always been something that I valued. I just never knew how many forms it could be in. My senior year of high school, I started to see things a little differently. My high school baseball coaches always stressed something we called Brotherhood. I am sure everyone has heard the word Brotherhood, but it meant something different to my coaches. In order to be successful, they believed we needed to become a family. The head coach would say, “we have no captains on this team, we have 24 brothers”. In my 2 prior years of being on varsity, when everyone heard this, they would laugh. Those teams were the most talented teams I have ever played on, with around 9 players combined from both of them going D1. With the team my senior year, we didn’t have that. We were very good and talented, but we no longer stood out. The first series of the year, we got swept losing all three games. Everyone just expected to win. We had to find a way to stand out from every other team, and we found a way to do it. It was becoming a family. 

I chose this topic because I believe having people who support you is one of the most important things you can do for yourself, no matter who they are. These 24 guys and 2 coaches taught me how to be strong for people you care about and how to never give up on one even in hard times. That first series of the year, we could have given up and packed it all in right there. Instead, we fought when times were hard together, and ended up being really successful going 15-4 and just falling short of the County Semis. That is what families do, fight together. In my definition, family is when you know someone would go to war for you. I would do that for all of them, and I believe they would do the same for me. 

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