I used to play softball. I started playing t ball on a team with my sibling when I was 4. That’s when my dad started coaching me. From there, I kept playing on youth teams every year. Softball for me was always the fun sport. My dad always found a way to make practice amusing. We’d play games such as sunflower seed spitting contests and home-run derby’s. At every game there was a never ending variety of crazy snacks in the dugout and continuous scream of obnoxious cheers that were the best. Even when I played on All-Star teams there was a positive energy. Once I started playing volleyball, I truly appreciated softball because it was an outlet without all the pressure. 

I’ve always loved travel tournaments for both volleyball and softball. The difference is that for softball we’d be out in the pool eating whatever we wanted, till whatever time, and setting off fireworks in the middle of nowhere while the parents were out drinking at a bar.  For volleyball, we had a schedule, people commenting on our diets, a curfew, and my mom making sure I was in bed by ten while we dissected the contents of how I played; everything was more intense.  In softball, it didn’t ruin my day when I didn’t play as well as I wanted to because I never had any crazy expectations and didn’t hold myself to a crazy standard. With all that being said, softball was never my sport like volleyball was, I never had the same type of love. What made it so worthwhile was the team and the players. I ended up playing through my freshman year in high-school but at that point I was burnt out and had hit a wall. I wasn’t having the same fun I used to have when I was younger and it was exhausting driving 45 minutes straight from softball to volleyball and then getting home at 10. At that point it had lost the purpose it originally served. I played softball for as long as I did because it was something my dad and I always bonded over. We’ve never been as close as when I was playing softball. Volleyball for mom, softball for dad. I’ll always love softball and it will always be a big part of my childhood.