I have played softball since I was strong enough to swing a bat, and I've been around it since birth. At times it has definitely seemed like my life has revolved around softball.
Not only did I just play softball, I played travel softball. It's like a club sport, and it's super crazy intense. I started playing on the Oak Park Windmills when I was 7 years old. The thing with travel softball is that there's never an off season. Tryouts were held in late August, and you had at least two two and a half hour practices a week. Pitchers had an extra one, so I had 3, and there were optional hitting practices. We had a two week break around Christmas, but we normally had homework, yes, homework that we had to do. There was normally a tournament around Halloween, and an indoors one in late January. Then when spring rolled around, tournaments were more often and by late May there was a tournament every weekend. In July there was the "big" tournament, it was the Metro. All the best teams in Illinois competed, and whoever won was considered the best team in Illinois. The week before Metro there was at least one practice everyday, but we did get team Slurpees at the end. Depending on how you did in each tournament and whether or not you won, you racked up bids for Nationals. Nationals was about a week long tournament with teams from across the USA competing. The last Nationals I went to was in North Carolina, we ran laps around our hotel, hit wiffle balls in the parking lot, and found a school with a field we could practice on. It was nuts. The fun came after Nationals when we went to the beach or amusement park, and then we had a 3 week break until tryouts.
As you can see, my team was crazy intense. But we were really good. We won a lot of tournaments, won Metro one year, and could beat teams that were both older and bigger than us.
Obviously, when competition is this tough, you have to have major rivals, and we had many. Our biggest, the Chicago Outburst.
It started out among the coaches, there was a history we didn't know about, so we always were on top of our game to beat them, and we always did. I don't think I have ever played a game against an Outburst team where I've lost. We always respected teams and never beat them too bad, if we were up a lot we would leave the base early, or swing at balls to be courteous. Being courteous to the Outburst was unacceptable, and it never happened.
I remember at one of the conditioning practices last November, Coach Hinrichs asked me who I played for before, and I said the Windmills, then I noticed a junior in an Outburst shirt, she was good. Here's this junior in an Outburst shirt, whom I'm supposed to have this rivalry with (although I had quit travel), who was really nice and really good. And the rivalry ceased to exist anymore.
It's like All-Star teams, the competition and rivalry is fierce when you're playing against each other, but when you're combined, you become a united force.
We can only be against each other for so long, until eventually we have to join together, and sometimes when you're joined, it's even stronger.
No comments:
Post a Comment