Last night was my daughters first ever softball game. She's only had two practices. Both in a gym because of rainy weather. The practices had focused on the basics, fielding, hitting, positions. All the good stuff. my daughter was nervous but we had put in extra practice on our own and she was enjoying practice.
What we hadn't practiced for and what I rather embarrassingly hadn't prepared her for, was the drug that is win. It's siren song, it's taste which even quenches. What people will do to win. And do so completely within the rules.
The other team of under 10 year old girls had been told something so simple, so obvious and so well thought out that they were nigh unbeatable. Don't swing.
For many of the girls this is the first year that they have played kid pitch. Not unrelated, most of the kids have little to no experience pitching. 3 balls is a walk. 2 a strike out. If you want to win, bet on walks. And the other team did.
What made me most proud were two things; 1. My daughter identified the tactic early and tried to convince the rest of her team to follow suit. Good for the goose, good for the other goose in this case. The only drawback is that her team, in their gigantic two hours of practice time, hadn't really learned much about the strike zone. So it backfired. Poor girls would wait. Thinking a ball was coming, receive a strike and then swing like angry Amazon warriors at the following pitch.
I can't blame them. I'd have done the same. They had practiced and been taught to try and hit the ball. To make an effort. Now here was an adversary, who was winning by not trying to hit the ball. By not swinging at all. By just standing there and passively aggressively getting ten run inning after ten run inning. To be fair. It sucked.
Yet what the other team was doing wasn't cheating. It wasn't against the rules. In fact it simply showed they knew the rules better. And as I watched the frustration on my little girls face, not about the runs or the score or the losing but about the fact that she didn't have the chance to do anything, that the other team could win just by doing nothing, I began to wonder.
Yes. They won. But they never swung the bat. They barely did anything. It's not against the rules but it is against the spirit of the game? I honestly couldn't decide.
My daughter was very frustrated, angry and dejected after the game. She didn't understand how people could be rewarded for doing nothing. Even if it was the rules. They didn't try. They won by doing nothing. It didn't seem fair.
We talked and I'll admit I didn't immediately have a good answer. Because yes, I too felt there was some injustice in that they wanted to walk and not swing. But we worked through it, we let our anger and frustration out and we came to a conclusion.
The reason the other team won is because they decided not trying was more beneficial than trying. (Trying in this case meaning swinging) The only remedy was to make not swinging more painful than swinging. If the pitcher throws two strikes, the batter is out. (remember is U10 softball). So in an unexpected moment of fatherly joy my daughter made the most logical choice she could come too.
"I will become the pitcher. And I will strike them all out if they won't swing."
Problem solving. Crisis management. Ownership of a problem. Straight out guts.
I don't care if she wins or loses or ever becomes a pitcher. That moment of clarity. To see the problem and choose to be the one who fixes it, that. That is what sports can teach her.
I can't ask for anything more than that.
And I'll try not to get too loud when she strikes the kids out.
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