Humans of Blair: The road from rookie to all-star

HOB: Keagan Green

Photo: Keagan Green faces down the pitcher at home base.

Keagan Green faces down the pitcher at home base. Photo courtesy of Zachary Llanes.

“I think [baseball is] a sport for everyone, you just have to be able to get over that adversity and know that you can succeed and put your trust in yourself.”

Senior athlete Keagan Green has been playing baseball ever since he was in elementary school. He’s grown to love the sport ever since. “I started around when I was seven. I played soccer before and I transitioned to baseball,” he says.

He was first introduced to the sport by some family friends who played baseball in college. Green decided to try the sport when his family enrolled him in a minor league baseball team in D.C. He currently plays for Blair’s varsity baseball team in the spring.

Green has played the sport in both school teams and county teams. He practices often and always reflects on his past games to improve every play. His personal performance stats are impressive with a 72 mile per hour (mph) bat speed and a 20 mph hand speed, almost as fast as the big leagues who average around 71.5 mph bat speed and 25 mph hand speed.

Just like anyone else, Green deals with stress and nervousness before games. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining mental balance in high stakes plays. “Especially for high school it’s a lot more pressure… I definitely get nervous, so you just gotta calm down,” he says.

His main motivation for the sport are the highlights and obstacles he encounters along his journey to improvement. Green explains how he can learn from his mistakes and use his successes in the future. “It’s a sport of failure, just being able to get over that failure can help you in baseball and in life as well,” He explains a time that he has failed in the past and how he was able to overcome it. “Through the year I’ve had a difficult time hitting and finding the barrel on the offensive side. I kept working towards where I could get to the point where I was confident” Green says.

In the future, Green hopes to continue baseball as a career. “I definitely want to play in college… if I could get drafted out of college that would be great… if I can’t do that then I would like to stay in baseball staff and be a trainer,” he says.