April 2005
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.
HI MY NAME IS SAM. I am a Softball Dad, and these are my transgressions. I took my perfectly contented daughter, Maisie, out of her cozy, relaxed little neighborhood fast-pitch softball league and propelled her into the hyperaccelerated, hypercompetitive, brutally expensive, and, to many people, absurdly professionalized world of youth tournament sports. You know, “select” teams.
Yes, I am one of those parents. I can’t help myself. I am the sort of person who will spend $150 on a bat and later wonder if I have spent enough. Unless I miss my guess, we are headed very quickly and very irrevocably in the direction of a $225-plus Miken carbon-shell bat. One of my daughter’s teammates got one, and we all agree that it is a very fine bat. Very fine indeed. We spend $80 for Ringor baseball cleats, which happen to be purple (matching the team’s primary color), as are my daughter’s wind suit, helmet, and other pricey paraphernalia, all of which also bear her name and number. Though I have not yet shelled out upward of $1,000 for a backyard pitching machine, I confess it has crossed my mind. More than once. We spend $110 a month for hitting lessons and $100 a month for pitching lessons. We send Maisie to softball camps. We spend two weekends a month (December excepted) in glamorous places like Seguin, Willis, San Marcos, Katy, Richmond, Harlingen, and Killeen, watching tournaments in which the girls play as many as eight games, often ending at midnight or later. We practice long hours in the blistering summer heat and in the icy northers of January. If I sound like one of those middle-aged, testosterone-crazed, frustrated former athletes who are playing out all their pathetic dreams of glory in the lives of their children, well, I would like to point out that I have plenty of company. There are millions out there like me whose children play for select teams—privately run organizations that practice and play far more often than traditional recreational teams. They, and their sons and daughters, are attending marathon volleyball tournaments waged across forty nets at convention centers. They drive five hundred miles so that eight-year-olds can play hockey, pay $400 a month for traveling soccer teams, and fork over $3,000 to attend a single national competition. There are even select dance teams these days.
Like it or not, this is all part of the brave new world of kids’ sports, and in case you are wondering, the families who participate in them are not all Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. Most are ordinary, middle-class Americans who are stretching to afford it. Since the eighties, when America decided that it was quickly becoming uncompetitive with the rest of the world in everything from automobiles and electronics to mathematics and Little League baseball, select teams have been multiplying like bacteria. Remember when we were all appalled to learn that the Taiwanese Little League boys played year-round? Not only that but, unlike their more relaxed and eclectic American counterparts, they focused on only one sport. And they played it all the time. Oh, the horror. After a number of butt-whippings in baseball, soccer, and other youth sports, America got the message: The more you practice, the better you are. Which brings me back to me, and us. I am not suggesting that massive global forces beyond my control caused my family to follow this course. We chose our fanaticism freely. Still, I never thought we would end up at this level of involvement. Like most of our fellow softball parents, we drifted our way into it, inning by inning. And suddenly one day we found ourselves signing up for private pitching lessons and heading to the west side of Houston for an egregiously long weekend of softball in 98-degree weather, camped in a two-star motel next to an interstate highway. Of course, the thing everyone wants to know is, Is this really worth it? Is it the right thing to do for our daughter, who is now almost twelve? How could it possibly be?
SOFTBALL WASN’T ALWAYS LIKE THIS. I remember an earlier, simpler time, back when Maisie played in a low-key recreational league—the kind of competition where the playing fees are minimal and every kid gets to play—on the west side of Austin. I have a photograph of her from those days. She is six years old, dressed in a Yankees uniform, and looks as cute as a bug’s ear. She is poised to catch a ball with her glove turned upward. This is precisely the wrong way to catch a ball, of course. It pretty much guarantees that the ball will land in her face. Even so, from her earliest playing days, I was convinced that my daughter had talent. Maisie played for five idyllic years in the rec league. I coached for three of those years and was content to be where we were.
Then came the 2003 sectional tournament. It was held in suburban Leander, where all-star teams from the greater Austin area competed for the privilege of moving on to the regional tournament and thence to nationals. (Pony League, the sponsoring organization, is roughly similar to Little League.) Maisie, who was then nine, was selected for the ten-and-under all-stars. My wife, Katie, and I were thrilled. Maisie had become a pretty good pitcher, at least by the standards of her rec league. And now she was going to compete against the best players from recreational leagues all over Central Texas. I had ambitions for my daughter. The team had a lot of talent. I had high hopes.
We were annihilated. We made a quick, painful exit. Girls were in tears. I was in a state of dull shock, made worse by the knowledge that the teams that had beaten us were nowhere near the best in the tournament. That honor belonged to two astonishingly talented teams from a small league in southwest Austin known as Oak Hill. I’d watched their A team play and could scarcely believe what I was seeing. They hit screaming line drives, ran like deer, and played flawless defense. They had a harrowingly fast ten-year-old fireballer whose pitches had been clocked at upward of 50 miles per hour—equivalent, in batter reaction time, to an 86-plus-mile-per-hour fastball on a baseball diamond. (By comparison, Maisie threw 39 miles per hour.) They’d won that game by fifteen runs and won the tournament easily. They would go on to win both the regional and the national tournaments. Just as amazing, Oak Hill’s B all-stars—most of whom, like Maisie, were only nine—finished second at sectionals, second at regionals, and third at nationals that year. I soon learned that Oak Hill, a “rec,” league no bigger than ours (six teams) and a mere four miles down the road, had been producing dominant all-stars like that for a long time.
Sports parents will recognize this moment, the revelation that comes at the intersection of “what is best for my child” and dreams of wild, transcendent victory. I did not know what they were feeding those girls in Oak Hill or how they could possibly be so much better than everyone else, but I knew that I wanted my daughter to experience some of that magic. She knew nothing about Oak Hill and had no sense of what it might mean for her to be able to compete with players who were that good. No matter. I already had my eye fixed firmly on the future, which is where the modern sports parent lives. Often far in the future. As we would later discover, the more competitive your team is, the more the parents will be busy calculating their child’s prospects for playing top-level select or high school ball, her prospects for a college scholarship, even the Olympics. It is a curious pairing—kids living in the moment, dealing with victories and losses as they come, while Mom and Dad are relentlessly planning events years down the road, imagining victories in hypothetical futures. I wasn’t dreaming of athletic scholarships quite yet, but I had at least figured out our next move. The following spring I registered Maisie at Oak Hill.
I’m not sure exactly what I expected to find there—a boot camp for überathletes, perhaps, run by square-jawed men with nonexistent senses of humor and voices like sandpaper. What I got instead was a friendly, well-run, mommy-and-daddy-coached league where everyone seemed to know everyone else, where coaches and parents behaved decently, and where there was an amazingly high level of parental involvement. But just being competent and nice obviously did not produce the sort of ponytailed assassins I’d seen at sectionals. What Oak Hill had that our former league did not was a group of two dozen players and their parents who were drop-dead serious about the sport. We had never seen ten-and-unders like this. They played all year long. They went to two or three camps a year. They took private hitting and pitching lessons and bought the best equipment. They were out in the batting cages on dark, chilly January nights and pitching in the rain. Because Oak Hill had produced so many champions, they all had high expectations, too. But perhaps Oak Hill’s main advantage was that in a league with seventy-plus girls, around half of them organized themselves into three teams that played outside tournaments against select teams on off-weekends. Such teams are somewhat rare and are called by the jargony term “rec-select.”
For many parents, the question of rec or select is the central dilemma of youth sports—whether to leave their children in low-pressure, parent-coached recreational leagues with light practice schedules and games on local fields or join a demanding select team with paid coaches, lots of practices, and a good deal of weekend travel. At that moment, no one in my family was yet ready to do the latter. We wanted nothing to do with the nightmare stories we had heard of girls burning out at thirteen or fourteen and of families stretched to the point of exhaustion. Nor did I buy the argument that by not putting my daughter onto a select team at a young age, I was seriously harming her chances of future athletic success. As it turns out, these were pointless philosophical arguments. Stopping our slide into select ball was like trying to prevent the sun from coming up.
But for now we did not have to decide. Oak Hill’s ingenious solution to this problem was to straddle the two worlds, keeping players and parents within the cozy rec-league family while letting girls who chose to do so play outside competition on parent-coached select teams. We joined one of those teams. It seemed like a small step at the time, but it made a huge difference. Maisie loved the new Oak Hill work ethic. She practiced hard, pitched to me every night in the street in front of our home—an almost meditative form of father-daughter quality time—and had a wonderful season.
