I hadn’t slept well the past few days. I was quite nervous for today. I know It’s just a youth baseball house league game, but after only winning one game the past two seasons, it was nice to have a team capable of seriously challenging for the title.
I always start the season stating that winning is not what’s most important to me. It’s more about how they treat one another, the character they display when competing, and that they are having fun because otherwise, why are we here if winning is all we care about? This team carried these traits ten-fold, and displayed inspiring resiliency when times were tough.
Having expressed all those niceties, if you’ve played sports all your life and coached for over 10 years, there is at least some competitiveness to you. I like winning too. Who’s kidding who? As a coach, I just wanted to do my best to put the best lineup I can together, and come up with the right words to inspire them and help them be competitive. They had lived up to my moral expectations, but they also played their hearts out and showed that they have what it takes to play with the best too.
The Royals are an intimidating opponent for these kids. The team only lost two games all year. One however, was a forfeit because the game got out of hand, and the other was a close one because their team became unraveled – we had seen early signs of this during our first game against them in week 3. Our last game versus them was fairly calm, so the hope was this would be a competitive but clean game. One out of two ain’t bad.
This team’s weakness is their inability to handle adversity. It happens when you are plus 91 on the season. We were second place, and we were only plus 25 for context. There isn’t a lot of adversity in those numbers.
We were leading this game the entire night. It was back and forth. They didn’t know what hit them. They couldn’t believe how good our team was. They hadn’t faced our full squad yet and even tonight, we were still short two of our starting catchers.
Their tempers kicked in early from kids, coaches, and even their parents got in on the action. It was all I could do to keep our kids focused and ensure they stayed out of the nonsense. In the seventh inning however, the umpire had finally had enough and not only did they eject the opposing player making most of the fuss all game, they tossed one of our backup catchers. It bothered me even more because she is a nice kid who hardly said boo all year. She was only upset because she was bulldozed at the plate when there was clearly no play. Ooops.
We had never made it to a 7th inning all year, but up 25-17 going into the bottom of the 7th, they scored 8 runs to tie it, sending us to overtime for the first time since I began coaching 11 years ago.
I won’t get into too much of the drama that carried into the 8th inning, but after so many delays due to arguing calls and shenanigans from the other team, the game was called due to darkness.
Somehow, we were going to have to get our teams together to finish the bottom of this inning one night. As it stands, we are up 28-25. If we can hold them off from scoring 3 or more runs, we will have beaten this team for the first time all season.
I’m pretty riled up right now, but so proud of the effort our kids put forward – still missing two very skilled players. I’m not sure I will get much sleep reflecting on everything that happened. Our kids deserve so much better.