Sunday, December 24, 2017

Softball Flashback


This being Christmas Eve, you wouldn’t think I’d be having a travel-softball flashback, but it came ahead of Santa, anyway, courtesy of the Tribune Travel Section.  The trigger had nothing to do with softball per se.

No, it was a story on “Underground America: from holiday lights to a salt museum, subterranean surprises await.”  The first stop on our underground tour was Hutchinson, Kansas, with its 175 miles of salt caves some 650 feet below ground.  To the best of my knowledge, there are no softball fields down there.  Above ground, though, is another story.

After Clare’s junior year of high school, which featured a nice .425 batting average, the new travel coaches pushed to go to the end-of-season nationals’ tournament in Hutchinson for reasons they never bothered to explain.  In some ways, this would have been perfect, because these two guys tossed my daughter into the proverbial hole that summer.  But at least it didn’t happen in Kansas.
Parents and players rose in revolt, so we ended up spending a week in Salisbury, Maryland.  That’s where one of the coaches felt the need to tell Clare she’d never hit in college.  That’s what you call real leadership (just kidding).  So, as I watch the snow gently falling on a late Sunday morning, I can only hope that guy ended up in Hutchinson, way down in Hutchinson, that is.

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