Softball, by the Numbers

OVER 1.2 MILLION GIRLS PLAY SOFTBALL, and in the 2022-2023 season, 357,110 girls played high school softball. 1,300 girls play baseball in 28 states. This is Internet research.

1972, the year Title IX was passed. This is a historical fact.

34,673 girls played college softball in the 2022-2023 school year. Odds of playing softball in college are 10:1, which is much better than tennis (23:1) but not as good as ice hockey (5:1), and definitely more than baseball, where 6 women played in 2021. Also Internet research.

8u, 10u, 12u, 14u and 16u age groups. “U” stands for “and under.” During the pandemic, like many other parents, we wanted to get our children outside as much as possible. The pandemic was our introduction to team sports, and softball.

10u, where my daughter started. 12u, current age group.

64 pounds (now almost 70 lbs!), 4 feet 6 inches, the weight and height of my daughter, who is “undersized” (not short or skinny, descriptive words and phrases not to be used to describe girl’s physical attributions; the opposite of those words are not to be used either). Compare that to girls who are over 100 pounds and are 5 ft. 10 inches. You simply can’t do anything about that, but hope that she grows taller, but not wider.

5 worn jerseys, all with her last name and “22” on the back. 1 white jersey and 1 black jersey. One is to wear for practice and one is for games, though we can never remember which. 1 red jersey, which has not been worn yet. 1 tan jersey with green writing, her first team, with the girls who were prone to crying. They lost every game. As Tom Hank’s character famously said in “A League of Their Own”, there’s no crying in baseball. There should be no crying in softball either, but there is. 1 blue jersey, my daughter’s second team, where they won every game except for 1, because a handful of girls could hit. They had 1 good pitcher and that’s all you need for 10u rec ball to win.

2 seasons rec, 2 seasons club. Rec is where everyone gets to play, no matter what ability, no matter what level of desire and commitment. Club is where you have to try out and travel. Girls beam with pride when they are chosen to be in a club.

150 college commitments on the premier club team in our area. “I want to do 14u on that team,” my daughter said, after seeing them take the field at a tournament. “Let’s try to get base hits on 12u first,” was my response. It’s hard to keep girls focused on the present, instead of the supposed gold ring of a D1 college scholarship. The premier club team, and similarly situated others, I hear, are $2800 a season, and there are 3 seasons in a year. Current team is 1/3 of that.

2 pairs of long underwear when it gets cold, as its California and you play year- round, which includes 40-degree weather December and February.

10+ ice packs, 4 ice trays, 2 cold towels, and 12 bottles of Berry Cool flavor Gatorade for the 90-degree days in the inland cities of Manteca and Sacramento.

1 catcher’s bag, handed down from Sophia, who is now in high school and no longer plays catcher. This bag will likely be handed down to another girl as mine will likely play centerfield. She is the fastest runner on the team. Apparently, girls in softball don’t run that fast, and now that I think about it, they don’t, as softball tends to attract girls that don’t like to run.

8 pairs of socks which include 1 pair of pink, 1 pair green, 2 black, 2 white, 2 red.

1 pink bag, replaced by 1 black bag that she uses to carry her bat, her gloves, and whatever else. Pink is no longer allowed.

1 tutu with ghosts on them for a Halloween themed tournament. I was surprised that tutus were allowed on the field. The tutus were worn over their pants. Despite the tutus, the team was gold runner-ups in that tourney, and they still slid into bases when needed, so tutus were deemed okay.

35 10u softballs, intermixed with 6 12u softballs (found in a field from another teams practice).

One inch and five feet. The 12u softball is one inch larger than the 10u softball, to accommodate supposedly bigger hands and more strength. Five feet is how much farther a pitcher stands from the plate than in 10u.

3 mitts. Her old catcher’s mitt, the mitt she uses now to field, and a new catcher’s mitt. She is angling for a bigger glove. Our response is that if you learn how to catch properly you don’t need another glove.

2 visors and 1 pair of sunglasses. She continually has to keep track of these for fear of losing them, and she is constantly leaving them in the dugout.

2 pairs of batting gloves. A San Francisco Giants themed pair when they were giving away kids gloves, and 1 new pair when she outgrew them.

4 bats. This is where many parents go deep and dark into makes and models. Ghost, Louisville, DeMarini and many others make bats that are $400+ composite bats. I’m not sure what composite bat means, but I know it’s not aluminum. It seems to be an unwritten rule that you should have a $400+ bat during a game, as opposed to the $60 or so aluminum practice bat. They do share if needed. We have the infamous Ghost bat which supposedly hits the farthest, but is notoriously the most fragile. It cracks early, even though some of these cracks are good versus bad. We have not learned to tell the difference.

29 drop 11. 29 inches is the length. Substitute “drop” for “minus”. 29 minus 11 is 18. Therefore, the bat weighs 18 ounces. As girls get older, they need new bats.

2 helmets. The cute purple one – her first helmet- that made her look like a bobblehead because she was so tiny, and now the standard issued black one we had to purchase for the club team.

.331, my daughter’s batting average, .665 OBP (“on base percentage), 7 home runs, 7 RBIs (“runs batted in”), zero strike outs(!), in her last season, and I could list more, but it would bore you as softball (and its cousin baseball), is full of stats that are meaningful only if you read meaning into them. I don’t know what many of the acronyms mean anyway.

4. The number of fly balls my girl caught in games that resulted in an out.

Thousands of dollars spent on softball lessons to undo the gorgeous tennis swing (which we spent thousands of dollars to develop).

1 bownet, to practice hitting 100+ balls into every night to undo a tennis swing.

9^th in starting lineup at the beginning of a season, which was hard to swallow, as new girls needed to be given the chance to play, and then worked up to 1^st, 2^nd or 3^rd in the line up, a direct result of the thousands of balls hit.

6 moms whom I have met who I really like who I would not have never met.

4-6 team coaches, all dads, except for 1 mom. The main coach is a yeller. He does not believe in handling girls with a soft touch, and that girls should be required to be tough, work hard and improve. When he doesn’t see it, they are held accountable. Just as boys would be. “Get moving. You’re too SLOW. You’re sleeping on the field. SLEEPING. STOP SLEEPING!!” This was all screamed at girls who kept missing fielded balls. “Do NOT look away as you are throwing ball. You’re LOOKING AWAY.” Interestingly, girls do not cry, and you can believe they didn’t miss fielding any balls or misthrow again that practice. The girls, including mine, when asked, all believe this style makes them better. As opposed to the “criticism sandwich” which is something to the effect of compliment, compliment, criticism, compliment, compliment. Exhausting. No one has time for that. The girls know fake compliments when they are given them.

$80/hour for a batting cage with pitching machine.

6 weeks. Injury and rehab period, where she can’t throw, as throwing with poor mechanics has resulted in Little Leaguer’s shoulder, which is inflammation in the shoulder. “Horrendous”, the orthopedist said when describing my daughter’s throwing mechanics. This made me angry. I felt like he was criticizing me as well as my daughter. Perhaps I need the criticism sandwich more than my daughter does, as she told me she was thinking, “no kidding, jerk,” during the surgeon’s diatribe.

0 parents who have demanded their kids play a certain position. Apparently, this is unusual, and a signal of a functional team.

2 social events we put together. The girls, who did not know each other very well at the time, went through the motions. At the first tournament, there was shy silence. Now they high five each other when plays are made. 3 girls yelled her name to warn her from not throwing when she raised her bad arm only to stretch.

4 times my daughter feels as if there were wrong calls, or a coach yelled at her for an invalid reason. We encourage her to challenge them, and yell back if necessary. Suffering in silence is not something we want to teach.

2 private coaches, both women and former softball players.

6 girls that she enjoys playing with as she respects their abilities, the remaining she has learned to work with. “Hold the glove this way and squeeze,” she says, as she brings the mitt in front of her face, and “not this way,” as she holds her hand away from her body and facing front, which is the way this particular girl catches a ball, resulting in too many dropped balls, yelling from the coaches and sighs from the other players.

11 women in 2022 who will work as on-field coaches in the major and minor MLB leagues. Alyssa Nakken of the San Francisco Giants and a former college softball player became the first woman to coach on the field in a Major League game. We happened to be there. When the first base coach was ejected, the announcers blared that Nakken was coming on the field. “Cool, that’s Nakken,” we said as we watched her on the jumbotron. From where we were sitting, she blended into the field. We didn’t pay particular attention to her for the rest of the game, and instead, as always, focused on our favorite players. We ate cotton candy, bratwursts and garlic fries. The Giants beat the San Diego Padres that night 13-2.