[Guest Post] Take Me *Home* to the Ballgame by Nicole Cooper

Of all the things to happen in college, I never expected baseball to become the antidote to my homesickness.

I’ve always been a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals—it was practically a requirement to live in the small town I grew up in. But it actually wasn’t until I left Missouri for college that I started following the team as closely as I do today. It’s no coincidence that was also when I started to feel homesick. I was no stranger to being away from home and my family at that point, since I’d gone to overnight camps during my summers for up to three weeks at a time. But something about college felt different.

My brother and I at a baseball game as kids

Suddenly, the end date for my stay was years away instead of days or weeks. College was supposed to be my new home, but it was so different from the one I left behind. It was so much bigger, so much busier, so much louder. And no one I knew was there to go through it with me. When my mom left to drive home (yes, all 1200 miles back to Missouri) after my freshman orientation, I broke down crying.

Despite the homesickness, there wasn’t a single moment when I regretted coming to MIT or wished I’d chosen a different college. I knew MIT was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up and that being here was the right thing for me, even if it was unfortunately far from home. Thankfully, over time I learned how to manage the homesickness. I joined clubs where I was able to find a great community of friends. Knowing I had friends I could lean on helped make this place feel more like a home and less like a temporary stop along the way. But another factor that helped me feel more settled was keeping that connection to my hometown, knowing that just because I’d left my home didn’t mean I’d lost it. And I was able to do that through baseball.

Because when I close my eyes, I’m back in the car with my dad, listening to the game on the radio as he drives me back and forth between scholar bowl (think team trivia on steroids), tennis tournaments, and math competitions. I’m back in my grandparents’ house, the game on the TV as we complain about all the decisions we would make differently if we were managing the team. I’m back at weekly dinners with my extended family at Culver’s (if you know you know), the ballgame playing in the background.

My dad visiting Fenway Park for the first time for a very rainy (and cold) game between the Cardinals and Red Sox!

Maybe you hate baseball (in which case I’d argue you just don’t get it, but that’s a conversation for another time). But whatever it is that connects you to your home, hold onto it. Let it get you through the homesickness, through the times you feel displaced, through the times you just need some sort of comfort. Because those times likely will come—especially if you’re from far away or an environment very different from the city atmosphere of Boston—but they’ll be easier to manage if you have that connection to your hometown to ground you.

After all, college may take you far from home, but it doesn’t have to take home from you.