Tuesday night we played our first co-ed softball game. Our team consists of Webmail.us employees and our friends. It was Bill’s idea to start the team and we wanted to play so that we would have something to do together and have some fun. Of the 19 people on our roster, I’m pretty sure only 5 or 6 have ever played in a real softball game before Tuesday night. To say we are inexperienced would be a gross understatement. However, our team is a very competitive and eager to learn group of people. I have volunteered to coach the team to the best of my abilities.
We have been practicing for several weeks now and the improvement from week 1 to now has been dramatic. Our team is much better at all aspects of the game and they understand terms such as “cut-off”, “backup”, “calling for the ball”, etc.
So game time rolls around on a dreary and rainy Tuesday night at Tom’s Creek Park. As soon as the game before us finishes they are calling for lineups for our game. I decided to keep myself out of the lineup for several reasons, but mainly I wanted everyone to get a lot of game time experience. I hand our lineup in and we proceed to warming up. I’ve never really seen such a short warm up period but in what had to be under 5 minutes the game was starting. We were the away team so we batted first. We quickly went down 1-2-3 and were in the field for the first time.
For anyone who hasn’t been to a softball game lately the pace of the game is much, much quicker than the baseball you see on TV. Almost every pitch is hit and the bases are very short so doubles are very common. There also isn’t a lot of down time between pitches. So at the start the bottom of the 1st inning their leadoff batter grounds out to second for an easy out. Cool, 1 down 2 to go. Unfortunately the next five hitters get hits and before you can spin around twice in your chair we are down five runs. We finally get the last out right before they bat around.
As the team comes off the field I can see the shell shock on everybody’s face. So I tell everyone to huddle up and listen. I pause for a second or two and everything is real quiet. What do you say in this situation? I decide to crack a joke and say “Welcome to Softball.” Everybody laughs and I think we all relaxed at that point and the rest of the game went fairly well. Like I told my team, if you take out the first inning and the 4 run inning they had because of a two out error we would have won 5-4. :)
As far as coaching goes I think I did an OK job. There will always be things I can improve on, but overall I really enjoyed it. My favorite parts were watching people backup each other, just like I told them to do time after time in practice. Watching people line up cutoffs and actually hitting those cutoffs, just like I taught them to do. And hitting fly ball after fly ball, just like I told them NOT to do. (We’ll keep working on it.)
