Why The Yard?

How The Yard came to be and the steps that led to its beginning.

Growing up I was always inside a baseball facility or at a baseball field. It didn’t matter if

it was 6am and I was getting to the gym to train or if it was 11pm and just finished playing a

triple header. I was always around baseball and that’s the way I wanted it. I loved the

comradery that my teammates and I had, always pushing each other to be better than the day before. The facilities I grew up in allowed me to have these experiences and interact with other athletes that I normally wouldn’t have gotten the chance to work with.

In high school, my teammates and I would get dropped off by our parents for individual

or team training that was supposed to last an hour, sometimes an hour and a half. By the end

of our scheduled session, we’d ignore the timer and just kept training. It was almost like we

thought that if we pretended not hear our time was up, then we could just keep going. At the time we thought it would work, but eventually our parents would come inside and pretty much drag us out. The atmosphere that I was in and had a hand in creating was addictive. My teammates and I improved as individuals through our own determination and self-goals. As a group we were growing together and that was special to be a part of.

After high school the facility environment changed. I arrived at College Park and the

Terps had their own baseball facility, open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Winter break was

always my favorite time of the year at UMD. A small group of my teammates and I would head back from our respective homes in various states before anyone else would be on campus. We would be at the facility from 10am to 4pm everyday during break. We would work on every aspect of our game, while building relationships and bonds that would push us to be dissatisfied with average, or even good.

Once I got to the Minnesota Twins, I was immediately in awe of the training facilities

and all that it had to offer. From a training perspective they had everything you’d expect a

professional baseball organization to have, and some things I had never seen before like 4D