Strike Three!

I played one year of t-ball in first grade then followed up with a five-year career of softball. I was known to my teammates as "Animal." You might think with my vivacious personality that my nickname came from a crazy energy that flowed through me on the field and when I was up to bat...but you would be wrong.

The origins of "Animal":

In my first year of the game, the ball came to me at second base and instead of throwing the ball to first, I quickly walked over to first base and handed the girl the ball. I don't think we got the runner out with that innovative play...

So forever after that the coach called me "Animal"; probably half-sarcasm and half-inspiration attempt.

The name may have helped me get through being up to bat, at least. I think being left-handed made the pitchers nervous already, but then the added bonus of everybody on my team calling me "Animal" didn't hurt in making the other team, and especially pitcher, wonder what I was capable of. I think it was because of those two things that I got walked a lot. It is good to mess with your opponents' minds...especially when you've got nothing up your sleeve and you've got to bluff a bit.

I have two distinct memories of softball...no, three.

First (the one I almost forgot, but the one that explains so much):

At practice one time the coach was batting balls to all of us. We were all standing in the outfield catching grounders (balls that roll on the ground). The ball came to me, I moved my mitt right in front of the ball, it rolled on to my mitt up my extended arm and with mighty force punched me right in the mouth.

Blood. Lots of blood with facial injuries; to a hypochondriac like me, it was a death sentence. That moment fixed the fear of balls into my soul forever after. I still flinch.

Two:

Further on into this career of mine, I believe the last two years (so 5th and 6th grades) of practices I stopped showing up. It wasn't that I didn't want to go. It was that I started becoming a flake with the beginning of puberty (I am still a flake, by the way). Both my parents worked. My dad got home around four-thirty, and then my mom would get home around six o'clock. Practice would start before dad came home so it was up to me to remember to leave the house and walk or ride my bike back to school on time.

When I came home from school I would turn cartoons on with the thought that I would just watch one while I ate a snack and then I would leave for practice. I always forgot all about practice. This did not make for happy teammates. I would forget about practice and then show up to the games. Not cool.

Three:

I think not showing up to practice leads me beautifully into number three: my batting skills, or lack thereof. My team did not win many games. For a long time I always thought my team losing games was my fault. A long time. I felt horrible. And though everybody on the team works together to win or fail, and it wasn't just me making mistakes on the field, I took all the credit for our losses.

A big part of that was my coach putting me up to bat at the end of the sixth inning. This is how it would work out: The first two batters would strike out and then my coach would call on me to be the third. In my eleven-year old interpretation, I thought he was putting me up to bat in hopes that I would keep the team going up and that we could get the three or four points we needed to win the game.

As an adult I see clearly. He didn't call me up, the wimpy nonathletic girl, in hopes that I would be the savior for the team and keep us going: he wanted to go home! He put me up to bat so that the game would end. And every game that happened, I thought I had lost the game. Reasoning skills not so great at that age, but feelings of guilt so very sharp.

So those are my memories of the game. Sports are not fun to me. They are opportunities to fail. Opportunities to let others down. Opportunities to get hurt. Opportunities to look silly. Isn't that sad? But those negative feelings are deep in my soul and I don't think they will ever go away.

So I walk and run on the treadmill. I get cardio on the elliptical. I do abs on my exercise ball (which is probably the only type of ball that doesn't intimidate me, by the way!). And I stay away from sports because they are not fun to me, they are demoralizing and very, very dangerous.