I hate tee ball

Got up to Starrville Thursday night to see the first game for the twins's U10 "Hurricanes" team.

A few items of interest:

1) The twins are the two oldest players on the team.

2) Roster of 15 players. This leads to some interminable trips through the batting order.

3) Four other players (besides the twins) were on the Pandas basketball team, including Sophie, the left-handed sharpshooting guard and Eleni, the mid-season addition whose mom is 6-feet tall, and also Allison, whose dad, Mike, is the Hurricanes' head coach after serving as Sis's assistant during hoops. Sis returns the favor as an assisstant for softball.

4) One of the other moms is "Terri," the coach of the "Pinks," the team that ruined the Pandas' undefeated season in the final game. It turns out her daughter is not the monstrous center who single-handedly demolished us in hoops but one of their 'role' players.

5) In this league once again the defensive pitcher gets to throw five pitches per batter. The batter can strike out but cannot walk. At the end of five pitches the batting team coach takes over and throws up to 3 BP pitches for the hitter to hit. For the Hurricanes, Sophie was the starting pitcher. She went two innings and gave up 6 runs. The opposing team apparently had a rule not to swing at a 'defensive pitch' (i.e. thrown by a pitcher) unless they had 2 strikes on them.
Sis-B took over as the next pitcher, and promptly gave up 10 runs. Joni, the 7-year-old phenom, gave up 6 runs in the fourth inning.

6) The Hurricanes are shut out until the fourth when Sis-B, Sophie and Sis-A string together back-to-back doubles and they get on the board. Due to the interminable 15-batter batting order, each player only gets 2 ABs in the course of the game. The opponents, with a 10-player roster teeing off on their coaches' BP tossing, get 3-4 ABs per player.

7) With the score 22-5 in the apparent last inning, both coaches consult the official scorer. The league also has a rule you cannot score more than 6 runs per inning (except in the final inning), so suddenly there's a debate whether the score is actually 22-5 or should be 18-5 since the other guys scored 10 in the third inning. It's getting dark so the opponents magnanimously offer to just count it as 18-5.

The best takeaway from the game was the twins' team started out awful in softball too last summer, losing their first four or five games and barely scoring, and then came on strong about midseason, winning something like 8 of their final 12, so it ain't the end of the world.

Monday, things get crazy. At 5:00 sharp, Sis-14 plays her first game of a doubleheader at the Starrville Softball Complex. At 5:30, the twins play at Countyville, about 15 miles out in the boonies, in a game supposed to last only 1:30 by time limit. Then at 7 p.m., back at Starrville, Sis-14's team should be swinging into Game Two. So when the twins get done at Countyville, it's gonna be 'bang-zoom, get in the car.'

All assuming nobody gets mercied in a 45-minute game.

 

I don't quite understand the tournament format but had we won this morning we would've played for the championship despite being winless through the season and 2 games yesterday.

That said, we lost a 16-13 heartbreaker against one of the teams that beat us yesterday (12-5) and twice during the season, including 25-4 the day after I took over for the coaches who quit on the girls.

We had them today. We had them. We had the game.

Against their best pitcher we hit the ball and hustled around the bases, and took extra bases on pitches to the fence -- really forced the issue every time we could -- and led 12-11 with 1 out in the 5th.

But we dropped a second out, and our pitcher fatigued fast and lost her mojo and walked 3 or 4, and it opened the gates to their 5-run max inning, 16-12.

We scored a run in bottom-5 and had a runner on third but they closed it out.

We had 7 players. They had 13.

We made a double play and just about all the routine plays though we booted a handful of easy outs. They hit 3 homers to left or right because we had only 1 outfielder.

I suppose the best compliment we got was afterward, from the other coach who gave my players love as we lined up for post-game stuffs. Real love. Heartfelt. No window dressing. You can always tell when a coach is honest and sincere and when a coach throws out empty platitudes. I watched him during the game, which we led a majority of. He was nervous. He didn't think we'd put his team behind the 8-ball the way we did. He said things to his players with a little harder edge than he usually does. Afterward he told me he couldn't believe how far the girls had come since the 25-4 game, couldn't believe how well the coaches had the girls playing in the tournament, how much the team has improved, how much he was shitting his shorts throughout today's game.

We had them. We had the game. I wanted my girls to experience the elation of winning at least once. Thought we had it today. 2 outs away.

And yet at the end of the game and the medal ceremony, they were all happy as happy can be.

They told me they weren't going to play next year unless I'm the coach, especially my little lefty catcher, quick as a cat, whom 2 of the other coaches are trying to recruit.

I'm keeping the band together. We're coming back next year, and we're coming back to win games.

We finished this season winless. But I love my girls.

 

My girls U10 soccer team entered the weekend 0-6-1 with two final chances to get our first win.

On Saturday afternoon, we played the 2nd placed team in the league. The opponent as a whole was just OK, but they had the best player in the league. She scored two great goals until I told our best defender to do nothing else but play between her and the ball and we shut her down. We scored our 5th goal of the season to make it 2-1 and had a breakaway in the final minute which the keeper saved. Even though we lost, the girls were super positive.

Saturday night, one of our players had a night birthday party which most of the team attended. While that was great for camaraderie, none of the girls got to bed before 11. The next morning, the girls were sluggish for our 10 a.m. game. We played another team in the bottom half of the table and about 2 minutes into the game, I said to my assistants that we could actually win this one. Not 30 seconds later, our keeper Bucknered a weak shot from outside the box. In the 2nd quarter, the daughter of one of the assistants, who has never shown a tremendous proficiency, stripped one of their defenders at the midfield stripe, dribbled around the last player and blasted one in. She has played with the team since the 1st grade and this was her first goal ever.

Late in the 2nd, my daughter (who plays sweeper and has been a rock) whiffs on a clearance and their player pokes the ball past the keeper. Down 2-1 at the half. We are playing the best that we've played all year, but our girls keep on getting caught offsides. Not exaggerating, we must have had 20 offsides calls, each one correct.

We are piling on the pressure in the 3rd quarter to the point that our keeper never touches the ball but we can't score. To start the 4th, I switch from a 3-2-2 to a 2-3-2 and hope that our defenders come up big if tested. We finally break through with 6 minutes to go to tie the game, with the birthday girl blasting it in. A minute later, we blow a 2 v 0 chance with my best player putting a shot wide under no pressure from the keeper.

I don't want a tie so I roll the dice and go to a 1-2-4 with my daughter as the solo defender. With about 2 minutes to go, one of my midfielders intercepts a free kick from another offsides. She passes to the wing and our forward who just missed the breakaway, dribbles to the end line and drives to the net, pulling back a perfect pass for the birthday girl who side foots it in. We kill off the last couple of minutes without a scare (and the second straight quarter where our keeper doesn't touch the ball) and get our first win 3-2. Hysterics ensue.

Even though we had some bad scorelines, it was an awesome season, capped off by a BBQ at our house for the team and their parents. My end of the year present was contingent on agreeing to coach the girls in the fall, which I did.

 

Sure enough.

I buzzed up to Countryville to watch the Hurricanes and the twins face a team which already mercied the team they lost to 18-5 in the season opener.

Form holds as the 'Sting' rolls to a 24-0 win, scoring the inning-max 6 runs in every inning. The twins each beat out an infield single for 2 of the Hurricanes' 4 hits. Sis A pitches an inning, doing no better or worse than anybody else.

Then we all roar back down to Starrville, where we learn that Sis-14's 'Wildcats'? indeed got mercy-smoked in the first game of the doubleheader, 16-0, so Game 2 is already in the third inning when we arrive.

They indeed do have one really good pitcher on the mound, and the opponents can barely touch her. But there are a few errors, and a few dropped third strikes, so the opponents score 3 the first inning I watch. The ace goes another inning, and then maxes out on the league's five-inning daily pitching limit.

A second pitcher comes in; this one is decent but not dominant, and gives up a couple more runs. Sis-14, playing CF mostly, gets up to bat twice, striking out, getting hit by a pitch, and then stealing second and third before being stranded.

It's now getting late/dark and the opponents push a couple across to take a 8-7 win.