End of the Season

(Disclaimer:  This entry is about me and my feelings.  I have NO ill feelings towards the other girls on the team, or to their parents. I LOVED watching all the girls play and enjoyed cheering them on to their victories and felt genuine sadness at their losses.  This is about how I felt during the course of the season.)

Yesterday was Kirsten's last softball games of the season and of her grade school years.  Collegiate organized sports are not someting in her future, although my hope is that she will enjoy many, many years of intramural and community league play.  I hope and pray that her desire and enjoyment of playing softball was not completely quelled by her senior year season.  She is young and resilient and positive so I think she will move on quite quickly.  Me, on the other hand, am old, not so resilient and a bit more jaded after enduring her senior year season, IF that is possible.  hahaha

This season was a difficult one to endure as a parent. It was a season where we saw our daughter remain in the dugout.  For the first couple of games, we thought maybe the coach was keeping her out of harm's way because she had broken her face in practice.  As the games continued, and the weeks stretched out, we could no longer give him that as an excuse.  Coach Mitch had decided that Kirsten had no value to him as a member of his team.  It became crystal clear that he had no intention of letting her contribute to 'his' team in a meaningful way.  He had decided that her contribution would consist of cleaning out the dugout and hauling gear to the bus or equipment shed at the end of the games.  His stat keepers were given more respect than our daughter.  This realization was very difficult to understand.

I readily admit that Kirsten is not the strongest player.  She is not a strong natural athlete with regard to organized sports.  However, she has played softball since she was in grade school.  The last two years she had played catcher and her coach often told us that she was a great player, and one that he could count on to be able to place anywhere and she would succeed.  She spent the last two years crouching behind home plate as the team's main catcher.  The first year, breaking in new pitchers and last year, being part of a great pitcher/catcher team.  Her batting average was one of the best of her team.  But this year was different, this year, she switched to Coach Mitch and she never stood a chance.

I will never understand what his motivation was for benching her the entire season.  Sure, she would sometimes be put in during the last inning for an at-bat.  Some of those at-bats resulted in a RBI or a solid base hit.  Most of the time, her confidence shot from lack of any coaching the entire season, she would walk back to the dugout after a strike out.  She always kept a smile on her face, but it tore her up.  It tore me up everytime during that last inning when he would decide to put her up to bat.  I knew that she would have a huge struggle...after all how could you not?  Ignored practice after practice, game after game, by a coach that could have cared less what she might have to contribute to his team.  If your Coach has no confidence in you, how do you have any in yourself?  The thing that burned me the most was the thought that when she would get up and strike out, it made her look like a shitty player, something I knew she wasn't.  Occasionally he would consult his 'schedule' and grant her the privilege of helping an outfielder warm up, or putting her in as a pinch runner.  But these instances were few and far between.  But, we continued to go to her games.  As parents, we made a decision that we would go and sit with her, knowing full well that we weren't going to watch her play.  No, we went because she was part of a team and we wanted to support that team.  We went because if she was going to endure bench time, we would be right there with her and endure it with her.

I know that my oldest daughter is an amazing person, inside and out.  I know that she is gifted in many areas.   I marveled at her maturity in keeping a positive attitude, and a smile on her face.  I appreciated her willingness to clean out the dugout each time.  I praised her for her stance that there was no way she would quit the team, even though she knew after the first couple of weeks that her fate was dugout time.  She told us that she had made a commitment and she was sticking with it, even though the rejection and humiliation were sometimes hard to take.  Dean and I tried to handle it with grace, but sometimes we failed, miserably.  We hope that the parents that we shared our grief with weren't too sick of listening to us.  Before every game we would promise ourselves to do our best to keep our mouths shut and only encourage those girls that were playing, not complain that our Kirsten was in the dugout, again.  Sometimes we managed this, and sometimes the pain of disappointment and heartache for our daughter's humiliation and rejection bubbled up and opened our mouths.  For, that we are truly sorry.  We tried, we tried really hard, but sometimes we failed.

We enjoyed the time spent with the other parents.  Honestly, the way our lives have been the last several months, that was our only true social time which we truly crave and needed.  We enjoyed watching the other girls play and their small triumphs on the field.  I cheered and screamed as if those girls were my own daughter and I did it with deep sincerity.  And then sometimes, I was quiet, fighting tears, and the deep, hollow lonely feeling that was inside of me.  I didn't want to project those dark feelings on others.  It wasn't their fault that their daughters were playing and mine was not.  That loneliness was physically painful at times, but pain builds character right?

So yesterday, when the girls' season ended at Tri-Districts I was filled with a lot of emotion.  I was disappointed that the girls' season had ended.  I was saddened that Kirsten's organized school sports days were over.  But, there was also a part of me that felt relief.  Relief that I would not have to endure the pain for another game.  I know some may read this and think I need to get a grip--it is only sports!  But it was more than that, it was watching your child be rejected, overlooked and de-valued.  That was something that will take  me a little bit to get over.