America at the Ballpark.

Alright…here is the scene.  Some of you have been there, some are there, and some will be there.  The rest of you…there is a big piece of life missing from your book.  There are three major towns in my rural Kentucky County.  All three communities field girl’s fast-pitch softball teams and compete countywide.  It is really frustrating to travel the “up to 20-odd miles” between ballparks during the season; but it is great for the kids to play summer ball together.   Anyway, last night was the County Championship and I was on ballpark duty with my granddaughter.   She plays in the 7-9 year old bracket and they use a pitching machine.  Now when you deal with girls this age, the physical maturity range is shocking.  Some of the kids are actually not much taller than the bats they swing, while others tower over their teammates like amazons.  The ballparks where the championship was being played had four fields and all of the fields had tournament games ongoing; some with boys, some with girls, all with different age brackets.  It was a county fair atmosphere and parking was absolutely chaotic.

From behind the backstop down each baseline past the dugouts, parents and grandparents were lined up three and four-deep with their coolers and camping chairs.  The walkways between fields, dappled with shade trees, were filled with people like you would encounter at a college game or concert.  My granddaughter’s team showed up an hour early for batting practice and this might have been the kiss of death.  It seems that the attention span for this age group is somewhere in the range of 45-90 minutes and by game time, her team was a bit slow afoot and somewhat distracted.  They got blitzed in the early innings and even though they closed to within a run or two on occasion, they never quite caught up and lost the game 14-10.  Now here is the deal…Most, not all but most, of them could not care less that they had finished second and not first in the tournament.  There were moments when they showed some competitive spirit and the action rose up to a heated level; but during most of the game, the kids were oblivious to the fact that this was the final game of the season, for all the marbles, and the winner would be the Champion.  The spectators, on the other hand, were quite a different story.  There was an abundance of off-field coaching going on, shifting players here and there and shouting out hitting instructions; all of this, of course, greatly appreciated (Not!) by the coaches on the field.  But the really interesting part was the obvious stress levels being exhibited by the onlookers.  By the actions of many, you would have thought that the war of the worlds was ongoing and they were participating vicariously through their offspring.  Fathers, mothers, and grandparents would alternately go from madly clinging to the chain link fence surrounding the field to walking away and cooling off under the shade trees.  Some of the men didn’t need to flex; the tension filled their bodies like balloons.  Some of the women could not have had more blood in their eyes if they had just walked in on a cheating husband.  Thank goodness the umpire was a young kid; an adult likely would have been infected by the inflamed passion of the crowd and taken the on-field stress level to new heights.  When the game was over, the Champions celebrated like it was 1999 and most of the losing players celebrated pretty much the same way.  To them, the first place trophies did not look that much different than the second place trophies.  Now there were grown-ups stalking around post-game that obviously needed some more time to get over the loss; but they were not out of control and not too great in number.  Most folks just kind of grinned at them and understood how disappointed they were.  After the trophy presentations, my granddaughter and I hit the road, picked up pizza, and headed to the farm.

From the moment we left the ballpark to the time we later arrived at home,  I struggled with the question of whether or not we should have a discussion about winning and losing…about whether or not this particular game should have any impact as a life lesson for this formative child.  As an ex-coach myself, I shared my granddaughter’s coaches’ frustration with their team.  They appeared to have an edge in talent and simply did not make enough plays to win the game.  I know they had to be incredibly vexed that their kids waited until the biggest game of the year to mail it in.  I wanted so badly to emphasize to her how critical it is to bear down and do your best when the stakes are high.  But the bigger question was how do you determine what is the proper level of cognizance for a kid this age to have about winning or losing a championship summer league game?  Is it really important that they understand that this one game renders a lasting verdict on the quality of their season?  How firmly should they be grasping the concept of team and how overall strength hinges on the weakest link?  What about the fact that championship-type opportunities are limited in each life and we must appreciate the chance to rise up and prove ourselves when those rare moments occur?  So…full of supposed wisdom and conflicted by uncertainty about how to choose the right message, my granddaughter and I sat out on the porch after pizza and had a talk.

I covered all the items heretofore mentioned; with some extras thrown in about “why we keep score” and “establishing behavior lessons that will stay with you for the rest of your life”.  We talked about performing under pressure; about stepping up when times get tough.  We talked about how the easy way out is not always the best way.  After I was finished talking, there was silence as she sat curled up in my lap, there in the rocking chair on the porch looking out over the barn, the cattle, and the starry sky.  After a while, I asked her if she had any questions.  “No”, she replied.  “I just want to sit here in your lap for a while”.  I was left with that melancholy feeling that all parents and grandparents have when you are overwhelmed with love and caring, and yet wondering if what you tried to do will ever have any impact.  Perhaps I was just talking to myself and trying to reaffirm what I hoped was the way of the world.  Perhaps while I was being all Solomonic, she was counting stars in the sky.  My hope is that somewhere between my words, her parents’ raising, and her life experience, she will discover and master the balance between the importance of winning and the pride of competing at the highest level you are capable of.  I fervently hope that she understands that participation trophies are meaningless unless they have first or second engraved upon them.  It is my wish for her to seize these moments to prove to herself what she is capable of achieving through personal effort and sacrifice.  I do not want her to become an uber-competitive beast; but I also do not want her to become a malleable snowflake.  I want her to appreciate the value of honest effort and accomplishment.  I want her to live with purpose and not drift along aimlessly with the crowd about her.  But most of all, I stand in awe of this child’s ability to understand so clearly what the fevered crowd around her seems to miss.  Life is an adventure.  Every day is a new trip.  Sport is just a game and this loss is gone with tomorrow’s sunrise.  A celebration of competing is sufficient in the absence of victory.   I hope that she never loses that precious gift from God, as so many of us adults have over the years.  And that ephemeral and elusive balance; the one that so few of us ever fully comprehend, much less practice…Lord, how I pray she can find that balance.

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Somewhere, embroiled in this mosaic of a rural Kentucky summertime ritual, there is a larger lesson about what our national society has become and how we are evolving as people.  The children are the future and certainly the most precious asset that we hold.  The values and principles that those children bring to maturity with them will mold this country for their generation and those that come after.  Will they be compassionate, yet strong?  Will they be competitive, yet gracious?  Will they understand the tenet of self-accountability?  Will they be sufficiently independent, yet fully aware of a team concept?  And then there is the eternal question… how young is too young to begin the discussions about moving from childhood to adolescence?  I leave it to the few readers who follow this blog to draw conclusions on these questions.  I can only hope and pray that all of the answers are somewhere in those stars my precious granddaughter was studying so intensely while I was waxing so philosophically.