Is your daughter ready for some fun(damental) softball?

[bluedot2]

All last summer, a group of about 12 10- to 13-year-old girls practiced softball and scrimmaged at Norwood Park in Chevy Chase twice a week.   Our real-game scrimmages were a big hit because we have coaches pitch, there are no bases on balls, no strikeouts, no dropped third strikes, and no stolen bases.  Basically, we have been hitting, throwing, and fielding in game conditions – really what the game is all about.  We will resume in early March and play until the weather is too cold.  We can always use more players, however.  If your daughter is interested, she is welcome to join us – we are a very welcoming group.  Your daughter can come to one practice/scrimmage or all of them.  If you are interested, you can e-mail me back at bossman_20815atyahoo.com.

We will resume in early March and play until the weather is too cold -- that will give us plenty of time to give your girls a jump on league play for those who are interested, which begins in mid-April.

When I started my free softball practices and scrimmages last spring, it was based on the belief that, with the exception of the Capital City Little League, none of the Leagues in lower Montgomery County or DC were offering age-specific coaching or rules and this was likely to kill interest in the sport among the very kids who it was trying to reach.  I have realized in the last six months that the stakes were much higher – and in a good way.

Allow me to explain:  About two-thirds of the parents who responded to my posting never had their daughters show up to even a single practice/scrimmage.  This is understandable – as kids are often over-scheduled, the parents had no idea who I was, their daughters may have been shy, and most surprising to me of all, many of their daughters never considered playing a sport because they were too intimidated.

I quickly learned that this last point should not have been surprising -- as few girls know that baseball/softball is the one sport where you don’t have to be big (football), tall (basketball), fast (soccer) or aggressive (lacrosse) to play at a high level.  Even when I stressed that to the girls who did show up --- and there were many – there was plenty of eye-rolling. 

However, in a relatively short amount of time, the girls began to realize that their answer to Casey Stengel’s famous line about the 1962 Mets, “Can’t anybody here play this game?" was “I can.”  And some of the girls started playing in Leagues this fall (which meant they could not come to my practices, which was fine) and a few went to travel softball tournaments, which neither they nor their parents knew existed, and came away saying, “I want that.”

Several of the parents have told me that the experience has been transformational for their otherwise sedentary, shy daughters and has given them a great deal of confidence as they begin wading through adolescence.

Who knew?