Softball Saturday

The other day when I started to blog about last Saturday's softball tournament, I got so caught up in talking about the little boy who is the tourney's namesake, I didn't even get around to talking about any softball! We started our first game at 10 a.m., and unfortunately it wasn't much of a game at all. The first team we played seemed as though they'd just gotten together the hour before, so needless to say we run-ruled them in the first few innings. Our second game an hour or so later was a little bit more challenging, but we still ended up winning pretty easily. Probably the biggest challenge of that game was playing on the super tiny kid's field. Our guys (and even some of our girls) really struggle not to hit the ball over the fence on this field, which can only happen twice before it counts as an out. Thankfully, we didn't have to play on the tiny field again for the rest of the day!

We played our third game sometime around 1:00, and unfortunately, we didn't play so hot this game. I think it was a combination of several factors: no good warm-up game, the heat, our overconfidence that we were going to sweep the tournament like we had the previous year. Regardless, we ended up losing to a pretty good team. Chad hit really well, but most of the rest of our team didn't. Not only that, but the other team's cocky shortstop plowed into our first baseman, Hope, causing a major collision which actually chipped her teeth! He was taking it way too seriously considering it was a benefit tourney with only about 8 teams! It most certainly didn't make the rest of our team very happy, that's for sure!

We had a break of a couple hours before our fourth game, so we were able to eat some snacks and recharge our batteries a little. We won that game pretty easily, and although I hadn't been hitting well all day, I did manage to hit a line drive to score the winning run in this one. Unfortunately, it wasn't much of a competition since we run-ruled the other team again!

After the fourth game we had a short break for the candlelight vigil in memory of Trevor, and then we went back to play the only undefeated team in the tournament, which was of course the team that had beaten us earlier. They had some really young players (like under 20) who were clearly skilled ball players, but I'm still pretty sure we could have beaten them had we been playing our best softball. Unfortunately, we most certainly weren't playing our best ball, and we also lost one of our best girl players along with one of our best guy players. Our friend Faith had to leave after the second game for a bachelorette party, and then our friend Dan started feeling sick, so he ended up leaving before the last game as well. Those losses obviously hurt us, but what hurt even more was knowing that we would have to beat this team twice in order to win the tournament, since it was double-elimination. None of us really felt like we had the energy or the drive to do so!

Although it was a reasonably close game, we certainly didn't play well enough to win, and the other team certainly wanted it more--to the point that the same cocky shortstop who'd trucked Hope earlier slid right into Nolan's legs trying to break up a double play (which Nolan made anyway, by the way). When our friend Robyn got hit in the foot with a ground ball, which was extraordinarily painful since she had a pin placed in each foot during surgery a few years ago, the other team joked happily about knocking one of our players out of the game. Overall, the other team's players were just kind of jerks to play against, which made it not so fun to play against them, let alone lose to them twice!

The good thing was that the tournament didn't last nearly as late into the night as it normally does, which I appreciated since I was still working on one hour of sleep from the night before. Although we would have rather been going home winners, we were very glad to be going home while it was still light out!

Overall it was a fairly fun day (click here for pictures of the fun), but it would have been much more fun had we been winning! Hopefully next year we'll win back that trophy!