Do you have any suggestions for the beginning of my college essay?

Question

If you don’t know the rules of Tennyball, they are pretty simple: each team gets two outs, the neighbor’s yard is the home run marker, the middle of the oak tree in left field stands as one foul poll, the bushes in right as the other. We use the broken recycling bin as the strike zone. Nine innings, three to four people per team. Tennis ball. Metal bat. Pretty simple.
Those are the rules, those were the rules about ten years ago when me and my friend Keith started Tennyball in my front yard, otherwise known as “Brislin Stadium”. This section of lawn became the common meeting grounds for my group of friends for years to come. We would ride the yellow bus to the stadium after school; when people got too cool for the bus, they would get dropped off by their older brothers. Eventually, people started parking their own cars next to the stadium.

Answer 1

Never start anything with "The rules" its a good way to have your reader lose interest and shut their mind on your paper. Start with the description of Brislin Stadium and your friends and then go into the rules after you have grabbed your readers by having them get some empathy for your characters and setting.

Answer 2

You should try addressing the reader, mainly in your sentence "I can’t think of a bigger risk than leaving your family..." You should change "your" into "my own," it would be more consistent with the rest of your paragraph and as well as not directly addressing the reader. Overall its pretty good, though its a bit wordy, try cutting condensing some sentences, its a bit wordy and if possible use some more vocabulary, but good job!