Taylor McQuillin is a 16-year-old incoming junior softball player at Mission Viejo (Calif.) High and had a strong year for the Diablos in 2013 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 Pac 12 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 the left side.

Here is her latest blog for Student Sports Softball… today, Taylor looks back at the PGF 18U Premier National Championship and explains that, even though the OC Batbusters didn’t win it all, it was still a great experience. She also looks ahead to the future with the merger of the Batbusters-Haning and Team Mizuno-Stith teams…

Be sure to check out Taylor’s previous blogs here

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If you ask most athletes, they would say that they hate losing more than they love winning. That is what our team, the OC Batbusters, experienced at the PGF National Championship.

We took each game as our last chance to show who we were and what we were capable of, not only as an individual but as a team. We wanted to play smart and learned that we could do anything we put our mind to and that, if we play every game to our full potential, we had a chance to beat any team in our way of a national championship.

In the end we didn’t win the title, but we gave everything we had.

I’m proud of my team and everything they have accomplished this year and I couldn’t have asked for anything more in the end. They gave it their all and I was sad to have to see it end one game too early.

We lost simply because we got beat. We got beat by Team Mizuno-Stith—an amazing group of players and a really good team. That happens in the game of softball. It is simply a game, a game of ups and downs, a game of wins and losses.

But softball is also a game that introduces you to people that will be in your life forever. When the season is over it feels like it all hits you at once. Your last game of the year is a loss and that is the game that will be remembered vividly.

It is not only the loss that hits you, but the fact that people move on to different teams the next year and teammates go off to experience the college life. It is always a hard goodbye when you become so close with the girls that you got to know over the past year or even over your softball career.

Some goodbyes are always harder than others, but in the end they all hurt inside. It is always a bittersweet moment when teammates go off to college because you want them to succeed and do great but at the same time you do not want them to leave. But in the end they leave and the next year is around the corner. Each year is a new start whether you stay with the coach or you decide to move on.

I am excited to see what the future holds for me.

Being a part of the Batbusters over the past three years has been an amazing learning experience and I am honored to say that I will be a part of the new Batbusters powered by Mizuno.

To me it does not matter what people think about it because ultimately the decision was made to merge the two teams and that is how it will be. It is time for a new season and a new year of travel ball. Everyone starts over and every team works toward winning that national championship again.

I feel that this experience will be good for me. I will have the opportunity to play with amazing athletes, and play for amazing coaches. No matter what team you are on, you always want to improve. You always want to show your team that you play for them.

That is what a team sport is. You play together and learn to become one. I do not know what the future holds for me, but I am ready to find out and I am ready for this year.

The end of the year was good and if I could do the year over, I would not change a thing (except for winning the PGF championship, of course!). Our team learned from one another and by the end we realized that the only thing stopping us from accomplishing the universal goal of a title was ourselves.