Somebody Clare
played travel ball with texted her the other day that they’d be playing one
other in Florida. The girl was on one of
the nice teams. Yes, there were teams
not so nice.
Travel softball
dates to the late ’80s. Part of the
surge in popularity of travel sports is due to parents wanting their kids to
have an edge, all the way to the pros if possible. Another part is parents hoping their kids
would be good enough to earn a college scholarship. Michele and I belonged to another group,
parents who had no idea how they’d afford it.
Travel softball
starts as early as eight and under.
Clare made her first team at the age of thirteen. We were so clueless I didn’t even know she
had made a 16u team comprised mostly of high school players. Come spring, with softball in season for
those girls, Clare was farmed out to the organization’s eighth-grade level14u
team. When the team fell apart, the 16u
coach decided he wasn’t that interested in the girl with all that raw power,
after all. Welcome to the world of
travel sports.
Clare found
another team without too much trouble, and she thrived the next two
summers. Both the coaches liked her,
with one of them spending an inordinate amount of time on her fielding. But with their girls aged out long ago, they
stepped down, to be replaced by Dumb and Dumber, minus the laughs.
This happened
the summer we were trying to get Division I school coaches to come watch Clare
play. There was one tournament in
particular; Clare hit five homeruns in two days. But no coaches showed for that tournament or
the next, when Clare was “rewarded” for her heroics with a lower spot in the
batting order. By the end of the summer,
one of the coaches was telling my daughter she’d never play in college. A great judge of talent, that man.
Now, all that summer
striving and worrying is over, along with counting pennies and dealing with
people maneuvering to have their kid play ahead of ours. The only thing left is to play a final slate
of games—and remember the home runs.
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