Here’s “Little Mami” herself on this year’s baseball card. Charlotte moved up from tee-ball to beginner softball this year. We’ve only got a couple of weeks left to go, in fact, because the season is synced up to the school year, and they don’t have a summer softball program for the beginners.
There are some big differences between the tee-ball and softball programs, not the least of which is that while tee-ball was co-ed, now things are sex-segregated. The boys play baseball, and the girls play softball and ne’er the twain shall meet. For her two years in tee-ball, Charlotte was the only girl on her team, and most of the other teams also only had one or two girls. Now, she has an all-girl team and plays against other all-girl teams. Where were all these girls when they were playing tee-ball is what I wonder. I’m also a little surprised that there is still the old-school baseball-vs-softball divide; seems to me that the girls could play baseball just as easily, so why are they still forced to play a “lesser” sport?
The other big difference as far as the game itself goes is that this year the coaches pitch to the kids instead of using a tee. You would think this would make for interminably long and boring games, while kids swung at pitch after pitch to no avail, but no. For starters, even though the kids don’t “strike out”, the coaches do limit the number of pitches each kid can get, and do in fact make the kids sit down if they can’t hit it after 6-8 tries. But, more amazingly, the kids are actually learning to hit the ball. Charlotte, who had never once hit the ball in two years of tee-ball, and who went through the first three practices and two games without connecting, now hits the ball on every single at-bat. All the girls on Charlotte’s team can now reliably hit the ball, in fact, and a couple of them can really whack it good. Not to sound too biased, but of the teams we’ve seen, hers is the best hitting team.
Fielding? Well, maybe they’ll learn that next year. To be fair, some of the teams that don’t hit as well are better at fielding, and I suppose it depends on the ability of the coaches to a large extent. Charlotte’s coach, who is also female, is great. She really knows the game and the requisite skills and actually teaches the girls how to do it the right way. That’s quite a switch from our experiences with the various soccer coaches, who were all over the map in terms of their ability to actually coach kids.
Charlotte opted out of soccer after last spring, and I have to say I think it was a great decision. The shorter season, the better coaching, and the smaller number of people participating overall make softball a much more manageable experience for her and for us. I am quite tickled that she seems to be getting the hang of softball/baseball, since she was so clearly not cut out for soccer, and would be quite glad to see her stick with it. She needs to find a similarly less-intense athletic activity for fall and winter, but it might take a couple of years for her to grow into one.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
