Current Release: April 28th, 2009 | Vol. XXX Iss. 10

Photo courtesy of CJ RHODES

Friends finish careers together

By cj rhodes

cnrhodes@vwc.edu

As Washington and Lee rushed the field on Sunday, April 26th to win the 2009 ODAC baseball championship, I was overwhelmed with great memories that I have experienced on the baseball field. More importantly it came to my attention that this was the last time that I would play baseball with shortstop and longtime friend Brandon Hathaway.

My parents always said that even before I could walk, I was already swinging a bat and throwing a baseball. This was also true with Hathaway who I did not know at the time. The first team that we were on together was when we were 5 year olds and we were playing T-Ball. This was the earliest age that you could play on an organized recreational team, and Hathaway and I were doing what we loved to do.

From that point on Hathaway and I continued to grow up, playing together on the same Little League teams. We moved from T-Ball to coach pitch and lastly to kid pitch, getting better at baseball and becoming friends during that process. We won Little League championships as well as traveled many miles playing AAU and All-Star games. In Williamsburg, our age group for baseball was always headlined by the names Hathaway and Rhodes.

When it came to middle school and high school baseball, things didn t work out the same way. We lived in different zoning areas for the schools, meaning that we wouldn t be attending school together. This changed things up on the baseball field. Once again our names were what people talked about, but playing against each other instead of with. This rivalry was something that didn t change our friendship. When we met on the field, each of us wanted to do better than the other but still hoping that the other succeeded as well.

As our senior year in high school was coming to an end, it was my goal to continue playing baseball at the collegiate level. But not being around Hathaway as much as I used to, I had no idea what he was going to do. He had more options than I did, because he was also good at basketball. When I chose Virginia Wesleyan and signed to play baseball, Assistant Coach Chris Francis came down to watch me play a couple times and said that he heard about a good shortstop from the Williamsburg area. And with that notion, he ended up liking what he saw out of Hathaway and offered him to come to VWC and play baseball as well.

As freshmen, Hathaway and I picked up where we left off. We continued to make each other better, and we had the same goal to achieve. That goal was to start as a freshman and make an impact on this team. When the season rolled around, Hathaway became our team s starting shortstop, while I started at first base. Our team even gave him the nickname  Smooth, in reference to how he plays the shortstop position. It was good having him by my side during the season s ups and downs, because having his support was good enough to help get me through it. Head Coach Nick Boothe saw the drive that we had to make each other better and that in the end it benefited the team and our overall performance on the baseball field. And our hard work and dedication led to our team winning the ODAC championship that year.

Now four years later, after watching the last out recorded in my final baseball game in a VWC uniform, our baseball careers together have ended. Not only did we start playing baseball together on the same T-Ball team 16 years ago, but we ended playing baseball together as well. Over the last four years we have made up for the time that was lost going to different schools. And I have seen him make some of the most complicated plays on the baseball field look simple. I never would have thought in a million years that Brandon and I were going to play baseball in college after all that we had been through.

But it seems like the perfect ending to a great baseball story.