Repairing Hope (Part 1)
"We’re going to have to release you."
Those seven words, spoken by my first—and only—professional baseball manager, hung in the air. On the outside, I was frozen, but my mind, like a river beneath the ice, raced furiously. For a few long seconds, as I searched for words, I thought of my dad. Just hours earlier, he’d driven all the way to this small town in Kentucky, grinning, excited to see my first professional home game.
A week ago, I’d been on top of the world, rushing to join the team on the road, leaving my car behind to chase a dream that had been in the making since backyard wiffle ball games. I had arrived beaming, two large duffel bags in hand, fresh off signing my first professional baseball contract. And Dad was here, just as excited to witness the culmination of my childhood dreams.
In hindsight, I'm not surprised I got released. I couldn’t blame them—if I were in their shoes, I would’ve released me too. Professional sports is a business, and I’d arrived as damaged goods. I’d known something was wrong for months, but the secret was now impossible to hide. My velocity had plummeted, and I was quietly battling debilitating nerve pain shooting from my side down my left leg. Soon, I would learn it was caused by degenerative disc disease, along with a slipping rib—overuse injuries that had begun to plague me halfway through my senior year of college. As I sat in the chair across from my now-former manager, attempting to hold out a sliver of hope—those seven words crushed me harder than any fastball I’d ever thrown.
“But I only threw one inning,” I thought. Just one professional inning to show for years of hard work and dreaming. I shifted in my seat, prepared to defend my case, but the sharp pain shot down my spine and leg, contrasting with the dull, hollow reality settling in: I was now jobless and soon to be careerless. Despite the long road of rehab and countless attempts at a comeback, my dream would never breathe again, and nothing I said or did could change that reality.
My thoughts shifted from my dad to my fiancée. We were just three months away from getting married, fully prepared to embrace the grind of minor league life—traveling, cheap motels, and fast food for days. It was all part of the dream, and we were ready for it. Except now, that dream had died before it even had a chance to breathe. Its death came with no climactic symphony, no eulogy, no jersey retirement, no accolades or interviews. I packed my bags in silence, surrounded by a locker room of teammates who had barely learned my name. Outside, my car waited—not to carry me toward my dreams, but to take me from a place I’d never been, through states I’d never return to, on a long, quiet, hopeless road back home.
My story reflects a common experience. It fits into that frightening category of "life not turning out the way we imagined." Whether it’s marriage, family, or career, the list of life’s unmet expectations is long, filled with countless deviations and complexities. The harsh reality is that life rarely unfolds as we imagine. In those moments, it feels as if we’re stranded in a shadowy valley, reeking of death and forcing us to confront this painful truth. We journey through life believing everything will unfold as we hope, only to face the undeniable reality that it hasn’t—and maybe it never will. In that valley, we can't see beyond the darkness; we forget there’s a sun, and we lose sight of the land we once knew this valley is where dreams go to die and hope fades from our imaginations unable to believe that something better lies beyond the valley.
Sometimes we can pinpoint how we stumbled into these valleys, while other times we feel like we’ve been blown off course by circumstances beyond our control. “Things were going so well,” “I did everything I knew to do,” or “I was just dealt a bad hand”—pick any cliché that helps; I used them all in my search for resolution. In our quest for answers and the perfect cliché to explain why we aren’t pursuing our dreams, we often convince ourselves that uncovering the hows and whys is the priority. Yet, in our focus on these explanations, we overlook the profound impact that the search—and the valley itself—has had on our imaginations.
Our first consideration is rarely how our imaginations are affected during these times. Instead, we focus on our bank accounts, reputations, families, and other more immediate concerns. Only later do we turn to the bigger life questions—the whys and hows of it all—and if there’s any emotional energy left, then we attempt to tie up the loose ends. But in moments of lost hope, no part of our lives remains untouched—least of all our imaginations.
Over the years, I’ve developed a keen interest in the imagination. For the second part of this article, I want to explore the fracture that occurs in our imaginations when reality diverges from our dreams, and how, with the guidance of coaching, we might begin to slowly repair our fractured imaginations to dream again.
To be continued…
