Travel
baseball and softball have a certain Bataan-Death-March quality to them, what
with the heat and the play-to-you-drop aspect of the losers’ bracket. With effort, it’s an acquired taste.
We
travelled for five years, from the summer after eighth grade to just before
Clare started college. There were
Toledo; Kankakee; Lee’s Summit; and a whole bunch of Podunks in between. For three years, Clare played on a team whose
home field was adjacent to a quarry; the earth shook only some of the
time. Did I mention the heat? OK, what about the uncertainty over
playing? And did I mention the heat?
You
do this because of your kid. With luck,
you get some memories along the way, like seeing Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz
sing the National Anthem one July at Nationals or watching your daughter park
nine out of ten balls over a fence in a homerun hitting contest she
(co-)won. Did I mention the mother who
nearly keeled over from the Kansas heat?
We
did it so long I miss it dearly, even when I don’t, which is most of the
time. Yesterday, Clare spent over ten
hours with the Valpo coach at a tournament in Indiana and got very
sunburnt. Welcome to the club, kiddo.
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