Having attended winter camps at Columbia and Harvard University, we stayed local once again and decided to do a summer camp at Princeton University. This would be a three day camp where players have the option to dorm at the campus. What a great opportunity to experience one of the best universities in the world!
A funny thing happened on the signup process.
My Dad usually takes care of the paperwork and legal stuff that goes into attending a camp. He told me a funny story about this three-day camp. I’ll let him tell it himself:
I rang up the camp to see if they had any experiences with a female attending their baseball camps. I inquired as to since it was an overnight camp (3 days), what arrangements would they make if there’s a girl attending? I also mentioned that if it’s too much trouble, we could simply stay at a hotel and commute each day.
The rep on the phone said that they’ve had girls attend different camps, such as wresting, but not baseball. He said he would have to do some research and then get back to me. In the meantime, I went ahead and registered her because I didn’t want to let the camp fill out.
A couple of weeks later the rep got back to me. He said that he had spoken with ‘council’ as well as coaches and that they would have Olivia on her own dorm room, and an athletic trainer who is a female would be staying in the room next to her. So now she was all set to go!
An unexpected, but extremely cool, side effect of her attending the camp was that their registration page was changed from having only Male as a gender option to Male and Female after Olivia signed up for the camp. That was very nice of the University since they just don’t come across many girls attendees. We definitely didn’t have this in mind when signing up.
So as my Dad mentioned, this was a three day camp. It was one of the hottest summers ever (July ’19) but it was also one of the best camps I’ve attended. Although I was only a tenth grader, I felt that I performed very well. On one of my at bats, I was facing a pitcher who had struck out three batters before me. I was able to get a double off him and that felt great!
I would highly recommend this camp since the staff was very friendly. They gave us freshmen and sophomores very good tips on our mechanics and most important, I was able to be exposed to other coaches from high academic schools that I’m interested in. From this camp I received other invitations from coaches who saw me here – and that has expanded my exposure to different schools and has given me a good idea as to where I stand and how much work I need to do to play at this level.
I was really looking forward to showing my progress this past summer, but unfortunately, Covid happened. I’m keeping a close eye as more schools are opening up recently. I’m already going back to Harvard this year and have some very exciting news to announce soon.