High school has a way of stretching youâpulling you in every direction, testing how much you can balance, and revealing who youâre going to be. For Peter Scariano, entering his high school years meant stepping into a new world while trying to hold onto the familiar comforts of baseball, brotherhood, and the steady rhythms of the game he loved. But life, as it often does, had other plans. And sometimes those plans tug you so far from your original path that even the diamond starts to feel like a distant shape in the background.
The setting for this next chapter was John H. Kinzie Elementary/Junior High School, where the swelling population of Garfield Ridge made the hallways feel like the busiest streets of downtown Chicago. The neighborhood kept growingânew houses, new families, new studentsâuntil Kinzie found itself keeping students a year longer than expected. Peter and Tony remained there through what should have been their freshman year, packed into a building trying its best to contain a postâbaby boom explosion of kids.
After that, the twins were headed to Kelly Senior High School, a place as large and loud as a small city. Kelly wasnât just a high schoolâit was an institution. Three floors. More than 2,400 students. And at the time, it was Chicagoâs largest co-ed public high school. Walking those halls required its own kind of athleticism. When the bell rang, the corridors became rivers of bodies, all pushing, moving, flowing from one class to another. Bumping into upperclassmen was⊠unwise. Getting lost was easy. Keeping up was mandatory.
The social structure at Kelly was just as overwhelming. There were the âDupersââthe kids who didnât fit neatly into any particular group. They worked on the school yearbook, wrote for the school newspaper, or ran errands for the office. There were the athletesâeasy to spot in their sweaters and letterman jackets, usually surrounded by teammates, tossing balls around in the park across the street. And then there were the âGreasersââthe tough ones in black leather jackets, hair slicked back, often accompanied by the faint scent of cigarette smoke.
Each group had its culture, its unwritten rules, its territories. You didnât have to declare where you belonged. You found yourself drifting into the spaces where you felt safest, where your people were, where your personality fit. Once you settled into your group, you stayed out of trouble and out of the way.
Lunch at Kelly’s was an event all on its own. With so many students, the cafeteria operated like a factory lineâand every clique had its unspoken place within it. It didnât matter what you bought, or even if you ate. What mattered was where you sat and who you sat with. It was all part of the high school choreographyâthe pattern of belonging teenagers instinctively follow.
But all of thisâthe noise, the groups, the chaosâmeant something else, too: baseball began to move to the edges of Peterâs life.
He still loved the game. He still played the best he could. But the all-consuming devotion of childhood had softened into something quieter and more complicated. Between school, homework, a girlfriend, and the pressure of growing up, the spacing between innings felt wider. The time to practice wasnât as abundant. The freedom to run outside for pickup games wasnât as automatic as it once had been.
This wasnât a lossâit was simply growing up.
Tony and Peter still played in the Babe Ruth League as their school years advanced. They were still a formidable battery. They still worked well together, complementing each otherâs strengths. But neither could deny what was happening: life outside baseball was expanding. And that expansion wasnât optional.
High school didnât dim their love for the gameâbut it reshaped it. Baseball was no longer the center of the universe. It was part of a larger world filled with new demands and new emotions. And in that larger world, they suddenly found themselves navigating more than balls and strikes.
Peterâs reflections on this period are rooted in realism, not nostalgia. He doesnât pretend he was headed for the majors. He doesnât claim the game slipped away because of unfairness or bad luck. What he remembers is something far more universal: the slow, natural shift from boyhood to adolescence. He remembers how responsibilities multiplied, how time seemed to shrink. How the game, once the gravitational center of his life, now orbited around school, relationships, family, and the weight of becoming older.
This chapter of his story isnât about loss. Itâs about transition. Baseball was still presentâjust in a different way. It had given him discipline, resilience, courage, and identity. It had given him his greatest joy and a set of memories that would last a lifetime. But as high school unfolded, the game had to share space with everything else growing inside him.
And thatâs the beauty of this part of Peterâs journey. It shows us that baseball doesnât disappear when life changes. It settles into a part of you that staysâquiet, steady, and ready to come alive again when you need it most.