The kid was maybe seven years old, standing at home plate with a bat way too big for him, and he was crying. Not the dramatic crying you see in movies. Just quiet tears running down his face while he tried to pretend they were not there.

I was umpiring my first little league game, mostly because my coach said it would look good on college applications, which is possibly the worst reason to do anything. I was supposed to call balls and strikes. Nobody told me what to do when a kid just stands there crying.

His team was losing 12 to 2. Every kid on the other team was bigger and better and knew it. The pitcher threw the ball. The kid did not even swing. Strike one. The pitcher threw again. The kid barely moved the bat. Strike two.

This is where I was supposed to call the next strike and send him back to the dugout. That is what umps do. The rules are clear. Three strikes and you are out. No exceptions.

But here is what I learned about rules that day: sometimes following them perfectly makes you technically correct and actually wrong.

I called time. Walked over to the kid. Got down on one knee so we were eye level. "Hey," I said. "You see that pitcher? He is scared of you."

The kid looked at me like I was insane, which was fair because the pitcher was very much not scared of him.

"He is throwing as fast as he can because he knows if you connect, that ball is gone. He has seen you in warm ups. He knows you can hit."

Complete lie. But also, maybe not? Because the kid wiped his face, adjusted his grip, and took his stance again. Actually took his stance, knees bent, eyes focused, looking like he suddenly remembered he was a baseball player.

The pitcher threw. The kid swung and missed, but it was a real swing. A good swing. The kind of swing that says I am trying and I do not care if I fail.

I called him out. The rules are still the rules. But as he walked back to the dugout, he was not crying anymore. One of his teammates high-fived him. Another kid said "good cut" which is little league speak for "you did not embarrass yourself."

My coach later told me what I did was technically against protocol. You are not supposed to coach players mid-game as an umpire. You are supposed to be neutral, call it fair, keep the game moving.

He was right. I broke the rule. And I would break it again tomorrow.

Because sportsmanship is not about following every rule perfectly. It is about understanding what the rules are trying to accomplish and sometimes realizing the rule book did not account for a seven-year-old who just needs someone to believe in him for thirty seconds.

I still umpire. I call games fair. But I also remember that kid, and I remember that sometimes being a good sport means caring more about the humans playing the game than about whether everything runs exactly by the book.

That is what I want to bring to your program. Not just a commitment to fairness, but an understanding that real sportsmanship means seeing people first and players second.

My family has an argument every Sunday at 8:47 AM. It has been happening for six years, and it is always about pancakes.

Not whether we should have pancakes. We definitely should. The argument is about how to make them and who messed up the recipe this week and whether Dad is allowed to add chocolate chips without asking first.

This sounds stupid. It probably is stupid. But here is what that Sunday morning pancake chaos taught me about compassion: sometimes the most important thing you can do for someone is just show up, even when showing up means arguing about pancakes.

The tradition started the week my older brother came home from his first semester at college. We could all see something was wrong, but he would not talk about it. Sat in his room. Barely ate. Our house got really quiet, which is the worst sound in a normally loud family.

My dad decided we needed a project. Something to argue about that was not whatever was actually wrong. So he declared Sunday pancake mornings mandatory. Everyone had to be in the kitchen. Everyone had to participate. Everyone had to have an opinion about whether we needed more milk in the batter.

My brother showed up that first Sunday mostly because Dad threatened to eat all the bacon himself if he did not. He stood in the corner, not saying much, just watching us burn pancakes and debate whether butter or oil works better in the pan.

Then Dad handed him the spatula and asked if he remembered the flip technique. My brother said Dad's technique was wrong and demonstrated the correct way to flip a pancake, which naturally started an argument about physics and trajectory and whether my brother was making up science to win a pancake debate.

He smiled. First time in two weeks.

The arguments got more elaborate. Mom joined Dad's side on the chocolate chip question just to make it more chaotic. I started bringing random ingredients and insisting we needed to add them. My brother began researching pancake science and bringing printouts to prove his points.

Slowly, he started talking about other things. His classes. His roommate situation. The fact that he was really struggling with being away from home and was not sure college was right for him.

We kept making pancakes. We kept arguing. And my brother kept showing up.

He is still in college now, doing much better. But we still do Sunday pancakes. Because we realized that compassion is not always about knowing what to say or how to fix things. Sometimes compassion is creating space where someone can just exist without pressure, where they can argue about something meaningless until they are ready to talk about something real.

I use this approach everywhere now. When my friend was dealing with her parents' divorce, I did not try to give her advice. I just texted her every day with increasingly ridiculous memes until she felt like talking. When my teammate was stressed about his scholarship status, I started a completely unnecessary debate about whether our uniforms were actually navy blue or just really dark blue.

Not everything needs to be serious. Not every problem needs an immediate solution. Sometimes people need someone who will just be there, making noise in the background, keeping space warm until they are ready to step back into it.

That is what I learned from pancakes. And that is the kind of compassion I want to bring to any community I join. The showing-up kind. The making-space kind. The willing-to-argue-about-chocolate-chips-if-that-is-what-someone-needs kind.

Also, for the record, my brother is still wrong about the flip technique.

I quit the debate team because I won too much.

That sentence sounds braggy and weird, and I cannot figure out how to write it differently because it is just true. I was good at debate. Really good. Sophomore year I went undefeated in the regional circuit. Junior year I placed third at state.

I was also becoming a terrible person.

The thing about competitive debate is you learn to demolish arguments. You learn to find weaknesses in logic and exploit them. You learn to win even when you know your position is wrong.

I got so good at winning arguments that I started doing it everywhere. In class. At home. With my friends. My default mode became attacking whatever anyone said to prove I was smarter.

My mom tried to talk to me about it. I debated her points. My best friend told me I had become exhausting to be around. I explained why she was being unfair. My English teacher gave me a B plus on a paper I thought deserved an A. I spent twenty minutes after class explaining why her rubric was inconsistent.

I was technically right about most of this. But I was also completely wrong about everything.

The moment I realized I had a problem was when my little sister asked me to help with her science fair project. She had this idea about testing soil pH in our neighborhood. I spent fifteen minutes explaining why her hypothesis was poorly constructed and her methodology would not yield meaningful data.

She started crying. Then she said, "I just wanted you to help me, not tell me everything is wrong."

That is when it hit me. I had spent two years training myself to tear down ideas instead of building them up. I had become someone who could win any argument but could not just support my sister with her middle school science project.

I quit debate the next week. Not because debate is bad. It is not. But because I needed to unlearn what I had taught myself about how to interact with humans.

It has been hard. My first instinct is still to find the flaw in what people are saying. But now I try to find what is good about their idea first. What makes sense. What I can build on instead of tear down.

I helped my sister with her science fair project the right way. Asking questions instead of giving critiques. Letting her figure things out instead of telling her she was wrong. She got second place and was excited about it instead of feeling defensive.

I am not claiming I have fixed everything about myself. I still catch myself starting sentences with "well actually" and have to stop. But I am learning that being smart is not the same as being right, and being right is not the same as being kind, and being kind matters more than I used to think it did.

This is what I want to work on in college. Not just getting smarter, but getting better at using whatever intelligence I have in ways that help people instead of just proving I am the smartest person in the room.

Because honestly? Being the smartest person in the room is way less important than being someone people actually want in the room with them.