We are still here.
Waiting to be noticed.
Competing with football, soccer, field hockey and many other fall sports. We are the girls’ softball team, and contrary to popular belief we are still competing. We practice just as hard as any other team here and have as many as five games in one week. Yet we still go unnoticed.
The most common thing heard in the hallway is, “Oh, the softball team sucks. They are a joke.” But we aren’t a joke. We are busting our butts on the field the same way any football player or soccer player would. So we haven’t put together the best record to prove it, but every sport has a slump year or two. Everyone thinks we have had a losing program forever, but we were the district champions in 2008. Just because we aren’t living up to the winning standards of a football team or a field hockey team doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be taken seriously.
We work on mastering skills such as sliding, catching, hitting and throwing. The entire program is actually pretty good at all that too. We all have the same passion when we get on the field. Winning, right? No, wrong. It’s the love we have for the game, and the fun we have playing with each other and learning new things. Winning is always nice, and many believe it is the only way to measure how successful a team is when it isn’t. There are many ways to measure. We look at some of the plays we executed during the game. Our left-fielder threw out a girl running home, our catcher picked off a girl at third, our lead off hitter had a triple on a bunt. We look at the bright spots. If we only looked at winning and losing, we would all be miserable.
One thing softball does not lack in is spirit. Many of us have handshakes and signals we will send to each other on the field to keep our spirits high. Along with that we add some of our own elements of style whether it be with our sunglasses out in the field or the bows wrapped around our pony tail in any print starting with sparkly red and ending in cheetah. Spirit is never a concern in our program.
We have coaches that have played the game throughout high school and college and put a lot of time and work into the program. They all care about us as players and as people. They are helping us improve our game, work ethic and lessons we carry with us beyond the softball field.
Sports aren’t all about the winning record anyways. Play to have fun, meet new people and learn and grow as a person both and off the field. That is what every girl on the softball field is doing; we are growing as people and as a team. Winning record or not, we don’t deserve to go unnoticed. We are working as hard and playing as hard we can.
