Recruiting

So, the September after her eligibility is over, Clare found herself in a Division I dugout yesterday, doing pitching stats.  What took her so long to get there, you might ask.

Basically, decisions based on a strategy.  Clare wanted to play Division I softball without having to go halfway around the world.  We made a list of four schools, but Valparaiso wasn’t on it.  The Crusaders just weren’t on our radar.  They didn’t conduct camps in our area; we didn’t know anyone who belonged to the program; and their coaches stayed away from the tournaments Clare’s travel teams played in.  The eggs in our basket consisted of Northwestern, De Paul, Loyola and UIC.

The first two got cut by junior year high school; wildcats and demons felt like too much of a stretch.  But Clare was there for everything Loyola and UIC had to offer.  A kid dives every which way during drills to draw the coach’s attention; e-mails her stats and schedule; then hopes.  UIC showed the greater interest of the two, and who knows what might have happened had they shown up for the tournament where Clare hit five homeruns in a weekend.  But they didn’t.  Instead, Elmhurst College kept track of the compact girl with oversized pop.  And the rest is history.

From what I could tell, my daughter didn’t let the past get in the way of her new job.  She pitched in for five hours’ worth of practice and saw how a D-I program worked.  Clare compared what the coach said to how she would do things.  As our old friend Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel might say, it’ll make for an interesting dialectic.  Personally, I can’t wait to see the results.