This past week our ball park has been hosting our district Babe Ruth Division softball and baseball tournaments. As host field, we have been asked to do lots of volunteering including announcing, ticket and shirt sales, book keeping and concessions. We have been busy. The benefit of this is as host field, your teams get an automatic advancement to the State tournament which we will also host beginning Friday.
Our announcer one night was especially entertaining...
To really tell this story, we need to go back to the Lanesville Slugfest from last weekend. We played North Harrison and beat them during the week. Then they beat us in the championship game of that tournament (which was not related or connected to the official Babe Ruth tourneys we played this week and coming up). Let's just say the North Harrison coach was a jerk. Plain and simple. We won't go into details, just take my word for it. The parents and the girls were looking forward to meeting them again during Districts. As last week progressed, we won all of our seed games and so did North Harrison. However, North Harrison crushed all the teams they played and none of those teams scored against them. We did not meet up with North Harrison during the seed games. So North Harrison was #1 seed and we were #2 seed. This is what sets an honorable coach apart from North Harrison's coach. During a game when you are winning by a lot, an honorable coach will play his bench or bring his outfield in to play bases. There's no point in driving your win down the throats of 7 and 8 year olds and it gives your girls who may not always get much ball time to do some extra fielding. North Harrison did not do this and they even kept using pinch hitters. It's just a game and they are just kids. Yes, we want to win but there's an honorable way and a jerky way to do it.
So it was us against North Harrison again in the Championship game. We had just played a game right before that one so it was a double header for us. Fortunately it was not hot so our girls were feeling pumped up. Millie was feeling especially pumped because she hit a home run during this game and she caught a pop fly. The girls were fired up and ready to go. Here is Millie's home run.
North Harrison's coach was already making us mad before the game started. One of our moms saw him throw his empty drink bottle on the ground and start to walk away. Her (being much like myself it seems) went up to him and told him he needed to pick it up. He was, of course, jerky to her and even went to the umpire and tattled and told the umpire to keep us in control. Check yourself North Harrison Dude, you're on our turf.
When the game finally started in the rain and after 2 delays for lightening we were looking good. We were home team and we got a lead after the first inning and kept it until the third inning. We were up 12-6 but North Harrison had a great inning and got the lead on us. We slowly closed the gap over the next few innings and when they were up to bat in the 6th our coach called a time out and our girls in the field gathered for a quick pep talk when we only needed 1 more out. North Harrison's coach was so jerky he began to pitch the ball to his batter when our whole team was in a huddle. The ump looked at him and yelled "time" like the guy was an idiot, which of course he was. The coach just rolled his eyes at him like he sure didn't know any of our girls were not on the filed. Jerk, plain and simple. I feel bad for the girls who had to play for him. Well, they ended up scoring 0 that inning so we only needed 2 runs to win.
We had Presley on third with no outs and we now only needed 1 more run to win. It was looking promising...
Jerky coach called a timeout, I guess he thought we did it to be jerky so he wanted to do the same thing. Whatever, you can't get us down. Lydia was up to bat and her mom gave what must have been a good pep talk.
Lydia made a hit that was good enough to let Presley score! We were super excited of course. Our girls have played really hard the past 2 weeks practicing and getting to know each other and their new positions. I found out just yesterday that North Harrison plays these girls together as a team all season, not just in All Stars. We would be even more amazing if we did that but we like to be fair to all of our girls and let them all learn the game on equal footing. Not create a super team that our other girls can't beat. Jerky.
Trophy time. Millie was really concerned because the got plaques instead of a trophy. She was not happy, what was this plaque thing and where was her trophy she wondered...We explained it was fine and that a plaque was a different style of trophy. She reluctantly bought into it.
Our amazing team and coaches!
Part of Millie's fan club.
So who needed that automatic entry into the state playoffs because of being the host team??? Not this team. We earned it fair and square! Bring on the next round.
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