Signing Day

The sports’ pages today are full of signing-day stories:  he (definitely not she) went to this football school, or that one, or this one and that one (for the talented but confused athlete).  Division I is a world of its own.

Contrast the above to what happened with Clare as a high school senior—nothing, at first.  Athletes at Morton West didn’t go on to play in college all that much, so there was never a school-sponsored signing day.  What happened is that Clare’s softball coach Eucs told me to tell the Sun-Times where she and her son were going.  I was the official team scorekeeper, whose duties included calling up the Chicago papers with scores and recaps.  The Times also put letter-of-intent announcements in the Transactions’ section. 

So, if you looked real hard one day in the spring of 2010, you could have seen that Clare Bukowski was going to play softball at Elmhurst College.  That was it.  Pictures and breathless stories about dreams come true were saved for another day and a different sport.