Game Over 
Safe at Home
I never thought I’d be the kind of dad who’d spend thousands of dollars so that his eleven- year-old daughter could suffer a sore arm, practice in freezing weather, and spend every other weekend on the road playing cutthroat softball. But that was before Maisie wanted to.
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It soon got even more wonderful. In late May she was named by the rec league’s coaches to Oak Hill’s ten-and-under all-star A team, the Oak Hill Scream, along with most of the remarkable players from the previous year’s precocious B team. This made us all very happy. The very idea of it was miraculous. She was as good, or nearly as good, as her deeply biased parents thought she was. Our softball universe was quickly expanding. My daughter was now on a team full of smart, cheerful, energetic, fresh-faced killers who had a real shot at a Pony League national championship. At a practice in early June, her fastball was clocked at 51 miles per hour. We were on our way.
AS ANY HARD-CORE sports parent can tell you, a ten-and-under elite team is about far more than just teaching the children to field and hit and lose gracefully. It is as much about parents and coaches learning to play nicely with each other. The Scream was a layered and complex socioeconomic unit consisting of more than 50 people: players (13), coaches (3), parents (26), and players’ siblings (at least 10 who attended practice and tournaments). The players had been playing together as a select team, the Oak Hill Groove, since the previous fall, had beaten some of the best pure select teams in Texas, and had mastered the logistics of select sports. As a group, we traveled hundreds of miles together, stayed in hotels together, took over entire restaurants, raised and spent large amounts of money together, and handled the seemingly endless details of everything from travel and hotel reservations to uniforms and tournament fees. And as the machine churned forward, the girls were pushed hard. In June and July the team practiced four times a week, two and a half hours a night. We played tournaments on the weekends, often far enough from Austin that we had to stay overnight. Most of our players went to softball camps. Some went to two softball camps. All took private lessons from professional coaches.
Not all of this was pleasant. Tournaments in small Texas towns dragged on endlessly. The team would often play six games or more in two days, always in high summer heat. Where our old rec league teams were easy and forgiving, this new group was strict and unyielding. You were expected to show up an hour before game time, and if you were late, you were scolded. If you missed a practice or a game, you were benched for one game. We had a no-swimming-before-games rule that once was enforced after a game as well, leading to a minor parent mutiny.
Such constant devotion to the team soon led to a sort of collective exhaustion. All our family did, it seemed to me, was play softball. The laundry went unwashed, the lawn went uncut, pets and friends were neglected. It was as though, suddenly, every minute of our free time was gone. Practices, which involved many parents, were often difficult, with large blocks of time devoted to intense conditioning. On a night when the conditioning was especially grueling, one of the girls vomited. At one point Maisie was throwing eight hundred to nine hundred pitches a week, many at practice but the majority at home with me. As we later learned, this was way too much and had the effect of temporarily deadening her arm; her speed dropped to 45 miles per hour. She was being tested harder physically—by me as well as by her coaches—than she had ever been in her life.
Why subject a ten-year-old girl to this, you may ask? The simplest answer is that Maisie liked it. She discovered how competitive she really was and liked the Darwinian toughness of the team’s workouts. For the first time in her life, she was lean, hard, and muscled. She liked the idea that she was an athlete and a special one. She had a new sense of her body and was proud of what she was able to do. But the real reason we stuck with the Scream was that, by midsummer, we found ourselves in the midst of our first wholly involved, and completely satisfying, team experience. In spite of the abundant discipline, the Scream was downright fun. The girls had water balloon fights and sponge fights at practice. At tournaments they hung together when they were not playing, munching hot dogs and playing tag and generally haunting the various games in brightly colored packs. They did line dances along the third-base line and dressed in funny hats and coaxed opposing teams into doing special dance-cheers at the end of games. If you have not heard ten-year-old girls doing cheers and chants, you are missing something. They chattered like magpies throughout the game, employing at least three dozen routines, and seemed to pick up new chants from other teams almost spontaneously. (Boys do not do this.) The chants ranged from rhythmic hip-hop—
My name is Maisie. Y’all, what?
I’m in da house. Y’all, what?
Came to do my thang. Y’all, what?
Not a perpetrator. What?
Just an aggravator. What?
Better known as a softball player. What?
A-ring-a-ding, a-ring-a-ding. What?
—to singsong melodies, often a benign form of trash talk.
Rollin’, rollin’, rollin.’
Pitcher’s goin’ bowlin.’
Get those worms a helmet!
What? A helmet!
What? A helmet!
As with most kids’ teams, the Scream worked mainly because the parents and coaches got along. We had (and have) three coaches, all unpaid: Mike Prinzo, a bank teller; Kris Wood, an engineering professor; and Eric Herron, a project manager with an architecture firm. Wood and Herron have children on the team. Prinzo, a 28-year-old who is first among equals, does not; he coaches because he likes doing it. Their main job—and a challenge not everyone would want—was to try to divvy up playing time fairly on a team that was loaded both with superb athletes and with strong-willed parents who were naturally looking out for the interests of their children. That they have been successful is evident: The team has stayed together. (We had one player leave in the fall, to everyone’s disappointment.) When the coaches made tactical errors, as they occasionally did—usually involving baserunning in the late innings—they were immediately engaged by the parents, and the problem was usually discussed openly. If there were hurt feelings because of this, we did not see them. This open dialogue is one of the team’s strengths. We have all seen teams destroy themselves, often in very public and very ugly ways, usually because of the real or perceived sins of coaches and the parents’ subsequent overreaction.
There was grumbling, to be sure, as there is on all teams. But it stayed at a low level. It seemed to be a necessary and healthy way of venting frustrations. It rarely went to a higher level. This was partly because many of the parents were so deeply enmeshed in the general management of the team. One handled hotel reservations, another ran the Web site and kept statistics, another ordered uniforms, another sewed patches, another made sure the girls got the right amount of sunblock, another ran the accounting systems, and others chased down sponsorships. At a practice, it was not uncommon to see nine or ten parents, in addition to the coaches, helping girls with hitting, fielding, and pitching drills.
This is going to sound odd, coming from an ambitious Softball Dad, but what the team did on the field that summer was almost an afterthought. Our family’s team experience, and our daughter’s successful integration with this group, was far more important to me than winning or losing. For the record, however, there was plenty of winning. We were undefeated in the sectional tournament, winning by a collective score of 74—2. We went undefeated in the regional tournament, winning by a collective score of 40—6. We went to nationals in late July and came within a whisker of winning it, losing to a team we had beaten several times before. We placed third. The kids, who thought they should have won, were deeply disappointed. For about a day. Then they all went on vacation and had a great time and forgot about it. One of the things you learn about kids’ sports is that parents are the ones who really mind losing. It just doesn’t bother children that much, at least not at this age. Unlike their parents, who have experienced plenty of winning and losing, and who bring lifetimes of emotional baggage to the sport, they see no larger meaning in the loss of one game or one tournament.
AFTER NATIONALS the team decided not to rejoin the rec league. As much fun as it was, it was now impossible to go back. The world had changed, and we had bigger ambitions. Playing again as the Oak Hill Groove, we’re now competing as an eleven-year-old select team in the twelve-and-under bracket against the best teams in the state, whose girls are often much bigger than ours and who occasionally clean our clocks. That’s okay. We are a team that knows how to lose. We have also beaten some very good teams and have recently placed high in tournaments. A year from now, as “old” twelve-year-olds, we are going to be very, very tough to beat. We practice twice a week, play two tournaments a month, and live the softball life. I estimate that our family will spend $6,000 to $7,000 this year on lessons, equipment, and travel to tournaments. At that rate, we will have spent $60,000 or more on select softball by the time Maisie goes to college, far more than the value of an athletic scholarship to a state school. From what we have heard, the future promises to be even more expensive, with more travel to out-of-state tournaments. Increasingly, the path to college sports runs not through high school teams but through select teams. They are the ones who are scouted by the colleges. I am trying my best not to look that far down the road. Maisie has many other interests in life and may very well not want to play softball in a few years. Who can tell?
For the moment, we are happy spending the money, even though it forces us to curtail family travel and to make economies elsewhere and occasionally to load up our credit cards. Others may think we are crazy to do it and unreasonable to put such an athletic burden on Maisie at a young age. But I don’t think so. And more important, Maisie doesn’t think so. In February her team played a tournament in San Marcos, winning all four games and outscoring the opposition by a combined 37—3. Maisie pitched two of those games. At the end of an exhausting twelve-hour day of softball, I was ready to head for home. Maisie wanted no part of that. She begged to join her teammates at Chili’s for dinner. “I want to be with the team, Dad,” she protested, when I pointed out how late it was. “I just want to be with my team.” It was an argument I was happy to lose.
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