Practice Makes Perfect

There was a story in yesterday’s NYT sports’ section that caught my eye.  It seems that Serena Williams has spent the past month practicing against five male tennis players.  She’s already used retired players as part of her routine, but these were current players ranking as high fifteenth on the men’s circuit.  This could start a trend, given that some of the leading women’s college basketball teams also scrimmage against men.  This is what you call upping your game.

 

I threw my daughter into the deep end of the pool, metaphorically speaking, when I had her play baseball for five years.  Softball simply didn’t register with me, and it didn’t with Clare until her male counterparts started acting like jerks.  “Nice game, bitch,” she was told during handshakes after one game, just what you want your middle-schooler to hear.  That helps explain the switchover to softball.

 

The interesting thing was that parents and coaches could tell she’d play baseball.  Part of it involved her swing.  Apparently, softball swings are geared to rising pitches, baseball swings to sinking pitches.  Despite that purported handicap, the girl holds the single-season and career homerun marks at Elmhurst College.  Lucky for pitchers in the CCIW that Clare batted with such a profound flaw in her mechanics.  Otherwise, we might be talking real Ruthian numbers.  Just kidding.  I think it was the baseball swing that made the softball swing so potent.

 

But there was something else, attitude.  Again, people would tell me they could tell Clare played baseball by her aggressiveness.  I took that as the highest of compliments.  Only the child was that way as soon as t-ball.  Clare didn’t need to be as aggressive as the boys.  She simply needed to be herself in the presence of boys.

 

But the male competition made her better.  Too bad adolescent misogyny got in the way.