Taylor McQuillin is a 16-year-old incoming junior softball player at Mission Viejo (Calif.) High and had a strong year for the Diablos hitting .416 with eight home runs..  A standout student with a 4.2 GPA, she has pitched for the OC Batbusters the last two years and had verbally committed to Oklahoma State as a freshman, but had to decommit due to medical issues with her father.  Currently, she has Pac12 offers from Arizona, Arizona State, Oregon State and Washington.

Perhaps Taylor’s greatest accomplishment is she has done all this despite having to overcome birth defects making her completely blind in the left eye and with only partial hearing on left side. 

Here is her first of hopefully many blogs for Student Sports Softball… today, she talks about being a competitor and what it means to win and lose—individually and as a team.

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Every true athlete hates losing more than they love winning. It comes with that desire to compete and that want to be better than someone else.

The passion that an athlete has for the sport they play is like nothing you are able to truly describe. That is the theory of an athlete. We as athletes do what we can to better ourselves and be seen.

I better myself for my team of athletes. That is what we are: we are a team of 16, a team of 16 girls competing for nine positions that will be filled with the best nine athletes starting.

The field is where players become athletes. It all starts on that field. The want to win is bigger than anything. Athletes will do whatever they can to make sure the victory is theirs.

But victories do not always happen.

Every athlete has experienced what is it like to lose and I have not met one that has enjoyed the feeling of losing. The feeling of being defeated, the feeling of being beat.

In the end, it benefits all athletes because they learn that with defeat comes pain. This pain reminds them how it feels to lose. This pain is the reason they strive to win. It pushes them to get better and fight harder because they do not ever want to feel that pain again.

So when that pain comes, they do not take it as a sign of weakness, but as a way to get stronger; to become bigger and better.

To be able to be pushed down and then get back up again is the sign of a true athlete. This is the strength our team has. Our team is so used to winning that when we lose, it kills us inside because it is a hard concept to grasp.

Losing, for an athlete, is hard to accept. But even that does not stop us from the game we play. It is what keeps us going. It is what pushes us to fight harder and come out stronger than ever before.

It teaches us how to come out with a vengeance each and every time we step on the field.

We believe that we are capable of achieving greatness and no one is going to stop us. No one will ever be able to break the bond of our team to hold us from achieving greatness. Our team comes together as one. We become one. We play as one.

We win and we lose as one because ultimately that is what makes us different from any other team. We are actually the true meaning of team. We are 16 girls that share one common factor: we are athletes.

All of us have one common goal. This is the goal of achieving greatness. This is how athletes work. This is who we have become and as a result, this is who we are: 16 individual athletes.

—Taylor McQuillin (OC Batbusters)