Before a softball game a coach instructs his team of six to nine-year old girls. He has gathered them at the field an hour and a half before the game hoping to solve one of the many problems he’s had the first two games of the season. It is a town league in northwest Indiana and this is, for most of the kids, their first experience playing softball. It isn’t a pretty sight.
Practices are like controlling a small riot and generally include one or two girls getting hit with a ball and someone throwing water on someone else. Every five minutes or so one of the coaches has to interrupt someone who is building a sandcastle in the infield.
The scores of the games were normally double digits and decided by who could limit their errors to less than six an inning and swing at something close to a strike. Almost nobody ever got three outs, so to prevent a team from batting for the whole two hours, which was the time limit, a team could only score ten runs before it had to go on defense.
For those of you unfamiliar with fastpitch softball, games are supposed to be seven innings and last around an hour and a half. But here in town league, the games never make it past the third inning before the two-hour time limit expires or it gets too dark to play. Not that darkness matters. Most of the time nobody has any idea where the ball is.
Coaching strategy in those days, then, was to hope to be the home team so that you got to bat last or enter the last inning leading by ten runs. That way the worst you could do was tie. There were lots of ties.
Even the best coaches faced insurmountable odds. It would be impossible to teach twelve kids that couldn’t find the outfield with a map and a big white X on it, everything they needed to know. If, by the end of the season no one had died and most of them knew which end of the bat to hold, the season was considered a success.
I coached my first team in 1988. That means I’ve been coaching for thirty-two years. I’ve retired four times. I’m also sixty-eight years old and 2020 was the first year I didn’t have a team. Covid 19 saw to that. It took a pandemic to get me to stop. My coaching exodus took me from town ball to travel ball to high school ball, college ball and back to high school. I know a lot about this game. But I have no special training. There is no “softball coaching degree” that I’m aware of. So, I can’t say that I’m an expert. All of my training has been on the job. And I didn’t even have to apply to become a coach. I just had to raise my hand.
Thirty-two years ago I was sitting in a converted barn at a meeting of parents for the Valparaiso Americans which ran the “competitive” softball program in town. I dutifully sat among the other two dozen or so parents that decided to attend the meeting listening to Mike, the director with a tired face worn down by complaints. He read from his notes, his head down most of the time. Eventually he asked for volunteers to coach, which he said was “rewarding”.
Whenever someone says something is rewarding, that means it takes a lot of time, it doesn’t pay anything and it’s a job no one else wants to do. I raised my hand. Thus, I became head coach of the Vikettes, who would be runners up in the league that year and forever change my life.
I’m unretired again, back coaching high school softball where I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about viruses, social distancing and how to wash my hands the right way. Our season cancelled, summer leagues were the only place to watch a game.
So today I parked near a local softball field and sat in my car watching a coach corral his t-ball team and was reminded of that coach I watched over thirty years ago teaching his team about the strike zone. He lined the girls up against the fence where they kicked at grass and stared at butterflies. One at a time he brought them to the plate. “Now,” he said patiently, putting each into the batter’s box, “The strike zone is here, from your shoulders to your knees and over the plate.” He demonstrated by making an invisible box with his hands. “Tonight,” he said, “I want you to only swing if the ball is in the strike zone. Do you understand?”
Impossibly cute, each in turn nodded their heads, smiled and returned to the fence. Another coach arrived and tried to teach everyone how to throw while over the next twenty minutes in excruciating detail; the coach brought each girl to the plate and repeated his instructions for all twelve girls on his team.
I was impressed by his patience. As the director of the league by then, I sat in the bleachers and watched, deciding to stay through the first inning. As the game began the first girl from his team came to bat and promptly struck out, swinging at a ball that landed three feet in front of the plate and two others four feet above her head. The coach winced but said nothing.
As she returned to the dugout, he called her over and calmly asked her, “Honey, where did I say the strike zone was?” Without hesitation she turned and pointed to the plate twenty feet away where the next girl was swinging at a pitch four feet outside, “It’s over there, Coach,” she said.
Gilbert is the second son of a former migrant worker. Winner of the 2019 Passager Poetry Contest and the 2021 Rattle Poetry Chapbook Contest; he has been nominated for two Pushcart Awards. His work has appeared in Crosslimb, The Elysian Review, The Notre Dame Review, Palabra, Passager, The Tipton Review, Craft, among others.
