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Altered Perceptions
by Dave
Monday, April 14, 2008
I hope you played a tournament of some sort this past weekend. Maybe it was a "friendly" with 3 or more games, perhaps it was your first true tournament of the spring, or maybe you played some qualifier at which tensions were high and games were tight. Maybe it was your team's first foray into the next age bracket. Or maybe you took a seasoned team from last year, when you were young, into a competition where every other team seemed small and young. But whatever sort of competition you might have been involved in, there were a couple categories of perceptions regarding the level of play.
I guess I noticed a phenomenon a few years ago but really didn't examine whether my observations were correct or not. As the years pass, I become more and more convinced about a tendency which parents, coaches and perhaps players have to view the level of competition this year as different from last. What I mean is, when your daughter or team is one of the younger ones in an age class she is playing for the first time, you have a tendency to see the level of play as better than it really is, while, if your daughter is playing her second year as an older member of a particular age class, you tend to see play level as diminished when compared to the previous year.
I struggle with this because I'm not entirely certain about my own perceptions. I do think that in a given geographic area (say within a single state or a couple of states in one corner of the country or another), some classes are better than others. We see some group of very skilled and competitive girls at say age 12 or 14, and then watch was they reach high school and then push the upper classmen out of starting jobs. It is easy to conclude that the particular class of kids is better than anything that went before them or anything waiting in the wings. Sometimes, at least within a given area, I suppose that's true. But we shouldn't be so quick to conclude that the play level has always degraded substantially just because our kid is one of the bigger dogs in the fight now or one of the more impactful players this year while a mere bench warmer in the previous one.
There was one particular class of girls I watched over several years beginning when they were about 10-11. These girls are now in their freshman, sophomore and junior years of high school. There are more underclassmen starting for the better high school varsity teams in my area than there are seniors. Many of these kids, aside from the freshman, have been starting varsity for a couple years. It stands to reason that this "class" of kids was better than the girls who went before them.
At the same time, I had an opportunity to watch a team of girls from far outside my state compete with this particular class of kids. The out-of-state kids were young for their age category. But at a major competition, they easily defeated the kids with whom I was familiar. The young girls were an incredible force. I had never seen a team made up entirely of girls from the bottom of an age category defeat a bunch of teams made up of girls at the very top of the category before. But it happened right before my eyes so I know it is possible.
The rub came the next year when this once young team was still competing in this age group. From what I could tell, the team was entirely intact though much more seasoned and far more physically developed than they had been the year before. The names in the scorebook were identical to those the year before but the kids didn't look much like they had. They all seemed a foot taller and 30-50 pounds heavier. I had no doubt that this was the same team but they had all grown bigger, faster, stronger.
I was absolutely certain that play within the age group in question had significantly degraded. I was sort of disappointed in the level of play I observed. Last year was so much better, I lamented. I was sure that last year's champions would repeat because there just couldn't be any team this year which would stand in their way. I would have been convinced that the kids in this class just weren't as good as the kids from last year were it not for one simple reality. The team of younger girls came back to this major competition that next year and failed to win the championship. It turns out play had not degraded. Rather my perceptions of play level were wrong.
When we take a team of young girls, say 9 at 10U, 11 at 12U, etc. into a bunch of better tournaments in which there are a lot of "older girls," we have a tendency to hold our breath and just hope our kids survive. We are impressed at the level of play and know our team is not up to it. Then they do alright, survive, maybe win a couple games and we count our blessings. Those older teams didn't hit the ball the way we feared they would. Our kids played above themselves this time. We got lucky. Our kids summoned the courage to stand their ground.
A year later we return to the same group of tournaments and find all the older girls are gone. The whole place is populated with these muchkins from munchkin land and our girls are going to clean up! Then we run into one of those pesky "little" teams and they eat our lunch. We didn't go one and done but we were knocked out of the competition perhaps in the quarter- or semi-finals by an apparently much younger team. I guess we choked. It wasn't our girls' day. We just couldn't hit their pitcher because she was too slow. We should have, would have beaten that team if we played our game.
And we remain convinced that the level of play this year just isn't as good as it was last year. If we are parents of a single child, maybe last year we thought she just barely survived. And this year we see her slapping the ball all over the yard, dominating with her pitching, or making all the plays while the other, younger girls on our team just don't measure up to what we thought the caliber of kids ought to be in "travel." We feel somewhat cheated because our daughters were on a really good team last year which had bigger, more aggressive, and better skilled kids. Yet, if we look back on how the team did in this particular tournament this year vs. last, we find they did about the same! How is that possible? It must be because the level of play degraded!!!
I believe this is the tendency of parents in age group ball. But there's another, related tendency. That is the tendency to see a particular level of play as less impressive now than it was in the past.
I've watched a fair amount of play well above my own daughter's heads over the past several years. I love a good game so if there is high school games between two good teams or college games with reasonably good teams, I go watch. The NPF moved out of my area a couple years ago so I really don't get to those games often, unfortunately. But the first time I saw an 18U game, a high school game, an ASA Gold tournament, or a college game, I was so very impressed that there's no way to adequately describe the feeling.
Because my daughters are pitchers, I probably focused on that aspect of the game more than others initially. That's no longer true because I have always had a great appreciation for the play of catchers and every other player on the field during my time as a baseball fan. I love to watch a gifted fastpitch player no matter what position she plays. But initially I was taken by the skill of pitchers.
One of the first things which struck me while watching high level fastpitch games was the speed of the pitch, not to mention the slowness of change-ups! Early on, I watched an NPF game which went into extra-innings tied 0-0. Batter up, batter down swinging, looking, whatever. Once I sat behind homeplate and just couldn't believe my eyes. In my high school days, I had caught a few pitchers who topped out in the mid-80s and who had good hop on their pitches. I've watched a lot of college baseball and seen several kids who made it to the bigs, up close and personal. But I had never seen anything like a fastpitch thrown from 40 feet (really 32). That was amazing.
And the change-ups were more shocking than anything I had seen in the brother sport. if a baseball pitcher throws 85, his change is going to range (depending on how good it is and what he's trying to accomplish) from around 70-78. It is much slower than his fastball but, because it needs to make the batter commit to a swing with not enough time to recoup, reload and recommit, it can't be that slow. It comes in like any other pitch but sort of slower. The softball counterpart is a far more elegant and impressive thing. I can think of nothing quite as baffling as, more recently, a Taryn Mowatt backhand change-up.
A softball change seems to hang there like some sorty of UFO. The best analogy I can think of is the change-up Bugs Bunny throws when he is pitching against the "Gas House Gang" in the cartoons. In that program, our hero Bugs throws a change-up so slow that 3 batters in succession strike out on a single pitch. That was what the softball change-up looked like to me the first time I saw it. I nearly fell off my lawn chair at the time. I had to brace myself against gravity.
I say these were my first perceptions of softball pitching. Those were the good ole days. Nowadays, I find myself watching the same caliber of play and thinking it just doesn't seem nearly as impressive. Instead of being blown away by the pitcher's speed, movement, or qulity of changed speeds, I find myself thinking about her mechanical flaws and weaknesses. I think about how I would tell a team or a player to hit against this pitch or that one which this pitcher seems to rely upon. Everything has become watered down, not quite as good. I watch the catcher with a great arm and wonder why she doesn't do this or that to speed up her release. I watch the infielders or outfielders side arm a throw past the first baseman or perhaps get their feet tangled up because their mechanics are less than optimal.
Lest you think I'm being arrogant or believe myself to be some sort of an expert who thinks he can tell everyone what they are doing wrong, please understand that I'm still very much impressed by the majority of players I see at high level games. I've just become a little immune to my "wonder" at the skill these players exhibit. I've become more seasoned.
At first I questioned whether the skill level at this or that tournament or game had degraded. The I realized it could not have. I was just watching through inexperienced eyes. Now I have become accustomed to the speed of pitch and play and everything has slowed down for me. I imagine that's the way everyone is. After all, I cannot begin to count the number of times when people have made comments to me about how the level of play this year just doesn't seem to match up to last year. I know we all have a tendency to not recognize the degree to which we become immune to our previous wonder. And I believe this is why so many girls will play two years at one age category and then the following couple of years, their parents demand that they play up. In other words, an 11 year old plays her first year of 12U ball and then stays in that age group when she is 12. But after the following year at 14U, the parents insist she play up at 16U when she is 14. That's not necessarily a bad thing. But I believe the cause has something to do with altered perceptions.
I've tried numerous times to write something about "playing up" without success. I think I've written several tens of thousands of words on the subject but never published a single article. I've never been able to bring something on the subject to a successful conclusion. But this time I think I can accomplish the task within the context of these altered perceptions.
I beliebe many of us recognize that an athlete (or a student, artist, etc.) needs to be challenged. Our biggest growth spurts happen when we are most challenged. In youth age group softball, we see our daughters grow in the sport most when they play with the best girls against the best opponents. They improve the most when it is a question of survival rather than an issue of whether they will thrive and be the biggest stars in their category. Survival breeds out laziness. Success is important as it encourages confidence - a necessary element in any player's game. But when a girl must expend all her energy just to survive, her skill set tends to increase to meet the challenges. When the game becomes too easy, her progress retards.
So I'll close this little musing by saying that the level of play has not degraded. Your perceptions are altered by experience. Whether you are a coach, parent or player, you are subject to this phenomenon. if you have the opportunity to play up - in an older age group, against better competition, etc., go ahead and do it, provided the possibility of survival exists. if you survive a year of playing up, chances are pretty good that you'll have altered perceptions the following year. The game will have slowed down for you. And your chances for success at this level will be greatly improved.Labels: youth tournament teams
 
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