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Lifestyles
by Dave
Monday, October 22, 2007
In a few of my e-mail exchanges with folks who are newly involved with tournament softball, I have closed the exchanges by wishing them good luck and hoping that they enjoy the travel softball lifestyle. Usually they'll respond back with something like "thanks and what do you mean about the lifestyle?" One correspondent recently asked me if I would consider writing an article about the "travel softball lifestyle" I was referring to. I'll give it a shot, though I doubt I can do justice to the overall concept.
Let me begin my saying that everything I write on this or any other subject is purely from my point of view. The universe of girls travel softball spans everything from a slapped together 8U "all-star" team which plays one or two local tournaments to an 18U ASA Gold showcase team which has several players flying Friday nights to get to Saturday practices and jumping on planes a dozen times or more each year to play tournaments. That's too big of a universe to cover in a single writing. I'm going to try to focus on the lifestyle of good 10U through average 16U tournament softball in which players drive to 10 plus tournaments each season from fall to summer. I'm focusing on the type of play in which the team competes under some sort of national umbrella organization such as PONY, FAST, NSA, ASA, etc., ultimately driving to some "nationals" tournament towards the end of the season. I'm not discussing the Little League International tournament or Babe Ruth's version of the same thing because these are entirely different animals.
The first thing anyone playing at this level will notice is the quality of play. This is where girls play "just like the boys." For the most part, the pitching is good, the defenses get the outs, and baserunning often wins (or loses) games. Games move pretty quickly and time limits of 90 minutes are usually sufficient to complete 6 or 7 innings. The games are exciting to watch. It is rare for one team to score more than 2 or 3 runs in any one inning unless there is a mismatch between levels of talent. Scores are typically in the single digits, often 2-1 or 5-3, and there is not a constant littany of walked batters. These aspects of the play make it a lot of fun to watch. For the uniniated, it is a pleasant surprise.
The next element of the experience worth mentioning is the number of games. Typically, a team will organize during the fall, practice a few times each week, play anywhere from 10 to 20 games, possibly more, and then move indoors for the winter. Some teams may play an indoor winter league (another 8 - 10 games) and almost everybody is ready to compete outdoors around April Fools Day. If you count the number of weekends from April 1 to July 31, you come up with about 17. If the team plays 10 tournaments, that leaves about 7 open but usually several of those will be filled with scrimmages. Scrimmages can be anything from a simple double header to a quasi-round robin in which the team plays 3, 4 or even 5 games in a single day. Regarding tournaments, typically a team will be guaranteed four games, assuming they lose in the first game of the championship round. Very good teams will play an additional game or possibly more on a Sunday. The end result of this is a minimum of 50 and a maximum of as many as 100 games in a season. Few teams play either 50 or 100. Most probably come in around 60-70.
60 games is a lot of softball. For the most part, your kid will vastly improve her skills with that much action. And I haven't even mentioned the practices which add significantly to the amount of experience a kid gains in travel. Practices range somewhere between once a week from September to July, including winter workouts, to several times each week. Many teams practice 2 to 3 days per week in the fall, twice a week in winter, then 2 times a week in the spring, jumping up to 3 times before tournaments and when school lets out. Each of these practices can range from a simple one and a half hours on a weekday night to four or more hours on a weekend day. I have seen some information which suggests to me that a particular 12U team practiced as long as 4-6 hours on weekends and a total of 14 hours per week throughout the winter. I've never been involved with such a team but I'm sure there are some out there which perform a routine this rigorous.
Understand that I'm not trying to scare anyone. There are plenty of teams out there which practice once a week for an hour and a half, have limited winter workouts, mostly after New Years, and which play a limited tournament schedule. There is probably a flavor for everyone. But the average experience fits somewhere in the middle of the range I have listed.
To go a bit further into the experience of tournaments, for us, the typical one is about an hour's drive away from home. We usually end up playing the first game of the day around 8:00 am. Our teams usually want the kids there an hour before game time to warm-up. That means our typical leave time is 6:00 am on a Saturday morning. You really need to encourage your daughter to wake up, do whatever morning routine she needs to be able to play, including (ahem) fixing her hair properly, eating something that will stick to her ribs, and gathering all her stuff so you can put it into the car. That's about a 5:00 am wake-up call. Over time, we have been able to get ourselves organized and put off the morning eye-rub until 5:30 or so. On occassion, we have been able to schedule starting games later and made life oh so much happier on Saturday morning. As far as Sundays go, you have less to say about when the team's first game is scheduled since that really depends more on where they are seeded after the first round.
I should also tell you that having your first game at 8:00 am does not guarantee that you will be done early. Scheduling is difficult and organizations do the best they can but sometimes you can arrive early and are just coming off the field as 5:00 pm rolls around. It doesn't happen often on Saturdays but on Sundays it is a very real possibility, assuming the team does well. The ramifications of this reality are, you need to plan meals, errands, etc. around a day or two mostly away from home. On some occassions, there is little doubt that somebody who has a swimming pool will invite everyone back to their house after the games to have an ad hoc party.
I remember when we first moved into our current house. The neighborhood was pretty small, about 40 homes, and very tight-nit. People often got together socially. We had a block party at which pretty much everyone showed up, everyone except this one family. My kids were pretty young then and we hadn't even played our first rec softball yet. This one family was never around on weekends during the day. They often had pool parties which began after dark on Sunday nights during the summer. We never really got to know them as a result. All sorts of possible explanations came to mind for their odd, almost anti-social behavior. Years later I recognized the father as we sat in our new travel softball team's organizational meeting. His daughters had been playing travel softball! They were at tournaments almost every summer weekend. The pool parties were post-tournament victory celebrations!!
Often the three day weekends which people use to get away are filled with tournaments. Those usually take advantage of the extra off day from work by scheduling games. For example, we always play a tournament on Memorial Day. That one begins late Friday for some of the more local teams. Then we play all day Saturday and hopefully stay for a while on Sunday. The latest we have ever gotten home on that Sunday is, I think around 10:30. But Monday we never plan to do anything because we are always too tired and because, if something gets rained out, there will be games scheduled. One three-day weekend we've played has a scheduled minimum 5 games, 4 in the preliminary round, and a championship on the last day off.
July Fourth works out better because, normally, depending on where the weekend falls, games are done by July 2, allowing us to catch some fireworks and maybe even attend a family BBQ. Aside from that holiday, we do not see our extended families much during the summer. They try to plan some sort of get together in August but we are usually busy again with tryouts, a post-nationals tournament, party, or some such. Then it's time for school to start up and we get a week or two of low volume, low impact softball before fall ball starts up again.
Do I need to tell you that this regimen does not leave much time for vacations? For our family, we haven't had a vacation in so long that my weak mind can't remember the last one. I suppose that isn't exactly fair. We have had vacations. We go to nationals and since there is a hotel with a pool involved, we spend a lot of money, and we have to put our dogs in a kennel, that's our vacation. This year it looks like we'll have vacations over two weeks, in two places as our kids will be playing nationals in different locales during consecutive weeks. If that happens, we'll consider ourselves lucky because we thought they would be playing in two different places during the same week. The only way we would be able to schedule a prototypical "American beach vacation" is if we went during the week, while blowing off a few practices, or if there was some sort of tournament near a beach resort!
Sometimes we are "lucky" enough to play tournaments which are located near some extended family member's home. Usually somebody will organize a BBQ or a get-together for Sunday evening. And on those occassions, our team usually plays its best, well above their heads, and goes very deep into the championship round. Extended family members are able to see the kids play a little softball and then I get to make the excuses as to why we can't make it to the party. Usually this is done around 4 o'clock Sunday afternoon. My voice is hoarse and my sister can't make out what I am saying over the background noise of kids performing organized cheers. She tells me that they spent a lot of money buying some crab or expensive steak and they'll make sure to keep it warm for us. I explain that I don't know when we'll be there because if we win this game, we have to play another for the championship. Then around 6:00 pm, I call her again and she tells me everyone is about ready to leave unless I can get there within the hour. I explain what "ITB" means and that there is no way to know if we'll be done soon. Then I call again as we are packing up the car around 7:00 and she says, "maybe next time." I croak a barely discernible "yes" and privately hope that my voice will return before that day. Then we drive the hour back to home and crash on the couches waiting for the pizza delivery guy.
You know, the softball lifestyle is not all fun and games as I have made it out to be over the past several paragraphs. There's a lot of serious business to it too. For example, you really must constantly evaluate your daughter's performance and plan some private practice sessions in order to pick up her skills. Say your daughter plays second and she's having trouble covering grounders up the middle. You are really going to want to reveiew the calendar and make sure you have time to go to the fields and hit some grounders. That is in addition to several days per week of throwing out in the yard or at an open field someplace close by. If your kid is a pitcher, you'll undoubtedly have her in lessons at least once a week and, if you are going to get your money's worth out of them, you'll want to make time for pitching practice. We try very hard to find time for at least two sessions in addition to the lessons. Those are at least a half hour long but prefereably an hour or more. And I've got two budding pitchers to make time for.
If you aren't raising pitchers - good move - you'll need to pour over your schedule and see if you can find decent softball camps which fit conveniently into it. You'll want to go to every decent clinic within an hour's drive - that goes for winter as well as the rest of the year. Whether your daughter is a pitcher or not, whether you've got her in camps and clinics or not, I strongly suggest you locate a competent batting coach and plan on doing some private or group lessons for at least 10 weeks of the year. I can't tell you how to fit this stuff into your busy lifestyle but I am confident you'll be able to do it. Just get yourself organized and try to stay that way.
In addition to becoming far more organized than you ever thought you would be, you'll also acquire numerous other skills when you become a travel softball parent. You probably will become a power buyer on ebay. You'll need to be since you will have to acquire certain pieces of equipment such as pop-up awnings, composite bats, bat bags, coolers, navigation devices (you'll need one, trust me) etc., etc. There is more stuff we have accumulated for softball than I care to list here. Much of it has been purchased at significant discount via ebay and other web sites we have found over the years.
In addition to becoming a power buyer, you are also going to learn how to clean and stop cuts from bleeding as well as any professional boxing corner man. You'll learn many other first aid tricks. You'll also be expert at lacing mitts, fixing cleats to last a couple more games, predicting weather from radar images, finding and using reasonably clean laudromats open 24 hours and located near your hotel, and most of all, you'll become a psychologist specializing not only in sports psychology but also sports parenting psychology. You'll become expert in these fields through actual first-hand experiences - not via vicarious learning.
You will learn to deal with any number of personality disorders but not the kind usually discussed on TV programming. There will be conversations with the father or mother, whose kid really doesn't belong at this level, who is 100% confident that the kid will get a full ride to college, perhaps even make Team USA, if only they shout the right encouragement during games and offer the right kind of advice between them. You will undoubtedly encounter parents who believe their kids should be treated as stars because, even though they never practice or attend any sort of lesson, they are "extremely talented" and will progress if the coach just gives them the right opportunity and instruction during games. You'll meet others who believe their child is a worthless human being unless she truly stands out from others. You'll know this when they criticize their child after she puts down the sacrifice bunt the coach signed her to do and then the next kid up hit in the winning run. You'll see this when the kid takes two strikes, putting her into an 0-2 hole, not because she was afraid to swing but because the coach gave her the take sign because the bases were loaded and this pitcher had not thrown a strike yet that particular inning. Unfortunately the kid struck out "protecting the plate" on a drop curve 12 inches outside the zone.
There are many other dysfunctional personality traits you will encounter during your visit to the travel softball world. Some of those traits will have nothing in particular to do with the game. They have some bearing on the reasons the kid plays travel to begin with but the personality stuff will not be directly softball related.
If you think real hard about your circumstances, you have 11 new sets of friends (odds are good they'll be some one parent families / possibly "alternative lifestyle" families) with all that entails. You did not meet these people and make friends with them in the usualy manner. You didn't meet them while taking a cooking class at the local community college, at a friend's party, or in any of the conventional ways people get together. You met them and agreed to spend 90% of your spare time sitting and chatting with them while watching ball games because their kids were good enough to make the same teams your kids made. You may have absolutely nothing in common with them in terms of background, politics, parenting styles, avocations, hobbies, etc. The only thing you have in common with them, at the outset, is a child who really likes this sport. Even that can be questionable at times. Worse still is that it is entirely possible that your kid is taking time away from their kid when it comes to the desired position. The possibilities are endless.
You are going to meet some socially very ambitious (dare I say competitive) people. You will meet braggarts. You will meet everything from the extremely wealthy to the troublingly poor. You will meet parents who are outstanding people and you'll meet abusers. You'll meet very sober people aas well as raging alcoholics. You'll meet people who are nice until you get to know them and you'll meet shy people who, after you get to know them may become your best friends. You can meet this assortment of people anywhere but you are going to spend all your weekends with these people for the next year.
There will undoubtedly be parents whose kids are better than yours as there will be others who aren't quite as skilled yet. Some of the parents of the least skilled kids will not see things that way. Some of the parents of really good players will resent it everytime your kid makes an error or doesn't perform quite as well as their kid. If your kid is any good, you will meet people who want to attach their wagon to your kid's. You'll meet people who blame your kid when she doesn't single-handedly beat the other team. You'll meet parents who claim that their kid is the only one giving 100% even though it was her error(s) which blew the game open for the other team.
Well, that doesn't nearly cover things. The point I wanted to make is, travel softball can be very intense. It's intense for the kids whose schedules are filled with practices, clinics, parental practice sessions, lessons, camps, and, especially loads of games. It's also intense for parents who may very well all end up hating each other rather passionately. The whole thing is a pressure cooker with all sorts of new demands, skills, experiences, etc. It's a blast. It's great people watching. The food stinks. It takes all your time, esp[ecially if you get involved with coaching and writing a blog on the subject. You'll never simultaneously enjoy and hate anything to the extent you will travel softball.Labels: parenting, teams, youth tournament teams
 
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