Jack Goldstein - Durham Academy

Although parts of my journey have been very difficult both mentally and physically, I am really thankful that I have gone through this. I don’t think that I would be where I am now without my journey.

In the fall of 2018, I was playing a regular season but I didn’t feel like myself. I assumed that it was from starting to train more often and from starting up with lifting. In late October, my knees were hurting so badly that I had to miss the last few games of a tournament. The next day, my side was hurting really badly, so I went to see a doctor. Two days later I was admitted to the hospital and soon started treatment for B-Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. My treatment has gone really well, but in the first month, I had an extreme reaction to the steroids I was given to kill off the Leukemia. By January, I had lost complete use of my shoulders, and they were pretty much paralyzed. I had to do just under a year of PT during treatment to get my shoulders back to where I could easily use them for day-to-day activities. It wasn’t until spring of 2020 that I was able to throw again. 

Baseball has really taught me to focus on the positives since it’s a sport of failure. I have learned to focus on what goes well, and learn from or improve on what doesn’t. This has helped me both on the field, in the classroom, and throughout my treatment. It has also taught me the importance of constant improvement. This has been extremely helpful to me throughout my treatment and my PT, as it has helped me focus on what I need to do each day, and not to worry about the bigger picture. This mindset of constant improvement helped me both tackle the long road back to throwing, as well as helping me feel like I was improving my game despite being unable to play.

I would tell a younger version of me to stay in the present. It doesn’t matter what is coming up or what just happened, all that you have control over is what is happening right now. You can learn from the past, but you can’t change it, and there’s no point in worrying about the future when it hasn’t happened yet. Execute the present, and allow everything out of your control to just happen.

I think that athletes need to be open about what they are going through and what they believe. They can be some of the most influential people due to the number of kids that look up to them. I’ve learned about so many professional and collegiate athletes who have gone through similar obstacles to me, and it was so motivating to see that the path back had already been traveled. The kids that look up to these athletes eventually become adults, and then teach their own kids about what they learned growing up. Athletes are extremely diverse, and their stories are too. These stories can be both helpful for people going through similar things, or can help people who aren’t similar at all still improve themselves from what the athlete learned.