And finally the report itself! I got a good grade, thanks to uncle Bryan, although my ES says I missed a few things, she says it would've been better had I detailed more about how awful the hotels were and why! LOL!
Bryan Paukovits
My uncle, Bryan Paukovits, is well on his way to becoming a professional baseball player on the Kansas City Royals. In accomplishing this he will have not only achieved his lifelong dream of becoming a professional baseball player, but someone for kids everywhere to look up to and model themselves after. It is when looking at his achievements that one realizes how hard he has worked, and how much of himself he has put into this. When meeting him, one might at first feel slightly intimidated if they didn’t previously know him; he is over 6 feet tall and in good shape for his job. But Bryan, should you take the time to get to know him, is really one of the nicest, most caring and genuine people I have ever known.
Bryan nearly always played baseball when he was a child, stopping only for a year or two at the ages of seven or eight. He always wanted to be a baseball player, and he always worked towards that goal. When he was younger he played on a baseball team every year. He played a few different positions, a lot on first base, but it wasn’t until halfway through Little League that he began pitching some for his teams. In Junior year of school, he quit playing any other position and stuck strictly to his pitching. He had now decided what, more specifically, he wanted to do as a career. He wanted to pitch.
Throughout his life, and especially when he was younger, his parents, Joseph and Holly Paukovits have been a big impact and inspiration on my uncle Bryan’s life. They encouraged and helped him push for this dream of his, taking him to the tons of baseball games for the teams he played on as a child and staying to cheer or push him on. When asked who he thought was inspiring to him, he replied: “My parents… they just always taught me to always give things a shot and never really give up.” To this day the two are always there for Bryan, and by now they’ve become proud of him for reaching and working for his dream.
He is very close with his family. Spending a lot of time in Arizona, on the road and in hotels for baseball Bryan is in this way kept from his family and hometown most of the year. When he returns home for a visit he enjoys spending the majority of his time there at home with his girlfriend, Nicole and with his parents and two sisters who also live there, Amanda and Stacy. They often get together in the evenings to play games as a family like Apples to Apples, Scattergories, etc. Also, they like to eat together. This is the way he likes to spend the main of his time visiting home. Being that he spends so much time away, by the time he comes for this rare visit he has come to miss his family a lot and just wants to spend a lot of time at home.
In 2008, Bryan had to have surgery on his elbow. This is what he describes as probably the most trying time of his life. He had broken his arm, and while there was a lot of physical pain in this, there was probably more mental for the baseball loving guy. He was forced to stay in Arizona to go through a lot of rehab. This meant he couldn’t be doing one of the things he loves best, playing baseball. It was hard for him not to be there, playing the game and to go down to the field every day, unable to do much more than lift the little five lb weights there in attempt to strengthen his shoulders and arms.
Also hard for him during this time was the fact that he had to stay in Arizona for rehab. He couldn’t see his family for an entire year. Bryan was unable to play his favorite game OR see his family, he was stuck spending most of his time in rehab or observing the precious game he could no longer be a part of at that time. His healing time from his surgery wasn’t exactly healing in any way other than physical. He worked to speed the physical healing as much as he could and just continued to work his way through.
When asked something he’d never forget, I could practically see my uncle’s evil grin as he replied bitterly, “Your mom used to put soap in my eyes.” Although the two are very close, especially now, my uncle always seems to remember and love to remind my mom, of only the mean things they did to each other when they were younger. He loves to tease her by saying things like that. He’ll tell her “Remember when you tricked me into eating that pepper when I was little?” five minutes after we walk in the door for a visit. Even though he loves to tease her, my mom and her little brother are really close now, and love seeing each other. And he wasn’t, I’ve heard, without a few mean tricks of his own.
Bryan says he was a straight A student all the way through middle school. When he hit high school he got all A’s and B’s. But after that his grades dropped. He now says he wishes he had done better in that area, “It’s not really good. I regret it now; I wish I had done better in school. It’s always good to do well in school,” he advised.
Hotels, he said were as difficult part of daily life for him. Getting a bad hotel is never fun, but when you have to live in one, as he does it’s even worse. Sometimes you’ll have a roommate. You can get a good roommate, which is good, but after six months together it’s still pretty bad. Six months of sharing a room is enough to make one tired of nearly anyone. If you get a bad roommate then it’s even worse, and the six months become a nearly unbearable period of time.
Finally I asked him about his diet. While most times I see him he eats fairly healthy, I asked if there was a specific diet he kept. I could hear him laugh when I said that. He told me there was not really any kind of specific diet he kept in season because it was so difficult to do so. “When you get out of a game you’re pretty much starving,” he said, “So you eat a lot of whatever they’re serving there, at the field, which a lot of times means peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and stuff like that.” He described how hard it was to eat healthy in such a situation, “You can’t really cook because you live in a hotel room, so a lot of the time,” he said, “I just end up eating out. I try to eat healthy when I come home though. It’s just a lot more difficult to do when in season.”
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