Early Life and High School
Kinsler's father, Howard, was a warden at a state prison on Tucson's Southeast Side. He has been a major influence on Kinsler. When Kinsler was four his father would toss him fly balls, and his dad says Kinsler would "get under them like he'd been doing it his whole life."
His father coached him until high school, and was especially tough. When Kinsler was 13 years old, and the best player on a PONY league team coached by his father that was playing for a championship, his dad caught Kinsler rolling his eyes as he gave the team orders. "I benched him, without hesitation", said his father. With Kinsler on the bench, the team lost the game.
Kinsler had a physical challenge to overcome. "I've had asthma my whole life", Kinsler said. "That was tough when I was younger. I woke up a lot and couldn’t breathe, and had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night. It kind of held me back from athletics. I still have it, but I control it. Now I use an atomizer or an inhaler. When I was younger, I used this breathing machine… I hated that thing. I always wanted to run around and be active."
He graduated in 2000 from Canyon del Oro High School in the Tucson suburb of Oro Valley, Arizona. Kinsler helped lead the baseball team to state titles in 1997 and 2000. He hit .380 as a junior, to earn second-team All-League honors, and .504 with 5 home runs and 26 stolen bases during his senior year, in which he was named first-team All-State and first-team All-League. Four of his high school teammates have also made it to the major leagues: Brian Anderson (his best friend in high school), Scott Hairston, Chris Duncan, and Shelly Duncan.
Read more about this topic: Ian Kinsler
Famous quotes containing the words high school, early life, early, life, high and/or school:
“Young people of high school age can actually feel themselves changing. Progress is almost tangible. Its exciting. It stimulates more progress. Nevertheless, growth is not constant and smooth. Erik Erikson quotes an aphorism to describe the formless forming of it. I aint what I ought to be. I aint what Im going to be, but Im not what I was.”
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Although good early childhood programs can benefit all children, they are not a quick fix for all of societys illsfrom crime in the streets to adolescent pregnancy, from school failure to unemployment. We must emphasize that good quality early childhood programs can help change the social and educational outcomes for many children, but they are not a panacea; they cannot ameliorate the effects of all harmful social and psychological environments.”
—Barbara Bowman (20th century)
“For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (18591930)
“By a high star our course is set,
Our end is Life. Put out to sea.”
—Louis MacNeice (19071963)
“Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums ... who find prison so soul-destroying.”
—Evelyn Waugh (19031966)