Connor Mansfield '22 Recruiting Profile

I have been an avid sports fan and baseball addict since before I can remember. As an individual who tends to be quite a perfectionist and hold myself to what is sometimes an unrealistically high standard; Baseball certainly pushes me in a multitude of ways. Over time, as I improved and began to face greater competition, I was forced to quickly realize that Baseball is a sport of failures. With any sport that I play, I always push myself to be the best teammate and competitor that I can. Sometimes, for me, with that ambition comes the drive and desire for perfection. However, perfection in Baseball, especially when it comes to hitting, is unquestionably impossible. In realizing this, Baseball forced me to take a step back and reflect on how I evaluate both my successes and failures. It taught me that rather than striving for perfection and not accepting anything less, I needed to instead see Baseball, hitting, and life as a whole as something to continually improve at. Rather than always being ‘perfect’, I needed to ignore any standards put upon me and solely aim to continually improve upon myself and my skills as an athlete, student, son, and person. 

One of the more challenging times of my baseball career was during the 8th-grade season. I struggled to regain my confidence and leader mentality on the field. I faced these challenges because my parents, brother, and I had just returned from a 14 month trip around the world. Early on, just when the trip has begun, I was an angsty teenager who was just beginning to experience the emotional effects of the presently occurring hormonal changes within my body. That being the case, I felt that my parents had decided (against my will) to unfairly uproot my whole life in Portland and drag me on a pointless trip where I would have to WWOOF (a.k.a. work on farms in exchange for housing and food) every single day that we weren’t actively traveling. We were on a tight budget and being that my parents would not be able to make much money while traveling, we had to rent out our house and essentially live off of the money that we made from that. However, despite the many difficult hours of work that I grudgingly completed, my parents gave me a gift that not many people ever get in their life. Through visiting so many countries and experiences the diverse collection of cultures within them, I feel that I truly came home a different person. I feel that I have so much more appreciation for the things that I do have in life and am also now capable of reflecting upon myself in a critical but healthy way. Which, has undoubtedly served me in more ways than I know as I continue my journey through high school and everything that comes along with it. Being that we live in such a multicultural world, I feel that being able to both appreciate and accept dissimilar peoples and cultures is necessary to being a Global-Citizen. Which is something that I always aim to be. Ultimately, while transitioning back to life in Portland and the sports that come along with that was certainly difficult, the experiences, memories, and perspective that I gained because of my parents' thoughtful decision to give me the opportunity to see the world were unquestionably worth the difficulty.