What A Season

We had our last game of the softball season on Wednesday. The Panthers were facing our arch rival, the Jaguars. The girls were on fire during the last game. In this age group, the inning ends when the defense team makes three outs on the field, or when the offense team bats the entire rotation. Our girls managed to make 3 outs in each of the first two innings, and 5 outs (we kept on going since it was the last inning of the season, literally) in the last one. The girls also did a great job batting. Almost everyone had some singles, and some managed to get pretty solid doubles and even triples. As a (assist) coach, I cannot feel more proud.

Abby also did a good job as the pitcher in the 2nd inning. Thanks to the help of our unofficial pitching coach Darryl, our pitchers had the most well developed mechanics among all the 8U teams. Abby had some consistancy issues that she needed to work on. But she fired some pretty decent strikes too. Even though she had only about 30% strikes (if there was an umpire), she managed to pitch about 75% of the ball over the home plate line. The practice really paid off. Abby, you should be proud.

I am glad that I signed up to help coach the team. It was a lot of fun and all the girls were such a joy to work with. There are so much more that I wish I could have done, but I am proud of them as is.

Watching the girls enjoy activities such as softball and soccer makes me feel that I make the right decision staying in United States instead of going back to Taiwan. I guess in a way it is a self compensation for what I wanted to do as a child but couldn't because we didn't really have the environments. I still remember going to the neighborhood Tai-Ho Elementary with some of my classmates to have pretend baseball games. We usually didn't have enough gloves and would be lucky to have 2 bats. It was still a lot of fun even though we usually could only get 5 - 8 kids to do some pseudo plays. Seeing that Abby can enjoy the softball as it should be, with well maintained fields, sufficient equipments, and enough friends, I cannot help feel part of my childhood void fullfilled in some way.

The spring season is over, but Abby's softball is not. Abby signed up for the Foster City Force, the Foster City 8U softball tournament team. We will have 3 tournaments to play before the summer ends. This weekend, we will play at the San Mateo tournament, next weekend at the Redwood City tournament. The week after the next, which is the father's day weekend, we'd play at the Billie Sue tournament in Burlingame. The girls get pretty cool blue uniform this year instead of the teal color one. They are also more ready this year than the last year, which we only had less than 10 days to recruit and be ready. I wish Abby and the team can have lots of fun in the tournaments.