Kid Sports Update

This has to be the latest in the school year I’ve ever gone before sharing a kid sports update. Good reason for that: we only have one kid playing any sports at the moment!

I should be writing a wrap-up of L’s kickball regular season. Her final game was supposed to be yesterday.

“So,” attentive readers may be wondering, “does that mean her team is going back to the City playoffs?!?!”

Sadly it does not mean that.

Part of that is because they’ve had four games rained out – one game has been rained out twice – and still have three games to make up.

But it also means they are sitting at 2–2 through four games and any chance to return to the City championship game is out the window.

It’s been a weird season even accounting for the rain. After being rained out twice they finally played their first game and run-ruled a poor team that seemed to have a lot of girls that had never played before.

Then they played the team, St. H, we thought would be our biggest competition. We’ve gone back-and-forth with St. H since fourth grade. Usually the team that wins goes on to win the division. There was some added drama this year because St H has a girl that spent her first seven years at St P’s but never played kickball despite being a crazy athlete.

We were up 11–5 after one-and-a-half innings…then proceeded to give up 32 unanswered runs to get run ruled in four-and-a-half innings. Naturally our former student just destroyed us, along with a few of her teammates.

After that came a sloppy, 14-run win. I say sloppy because we scored 14 in the first inning then our girls kind of played like ass.

Tuesday night we played St S, a school we’ve had had battles with back to third grade. Based on their scores we expected a very close game. We got drilled early, barely kept it under the 25-run limit, and managed to get it down to 14 runs before losing. A couple HUGE breaks went against us. The biggest was our girls forgetting how many outs there were and not doubling a runner off second to end an inning. St S added ten more runs before we could finally get that third out.

That game took 95 minutes to play, which was awful. Neither team played very good defense and the innings just went on and on and on. Thank goodness it wasn’t 95° like a week ago.

You may recall me saying last spring the City semifinal game L’s team played in was the best they’ve ever played defensively. They must have forgotten how to field over the summer because they have been brutal in the field. Some of it is being in the 7th/8th grade league where girls are bigger and can kick it farther, and there are more girls who can place the ball better to avoid the defense. But where last year it seemed like our girls made an amazing catch every inning, this year they aren’t getting to balls or are dropping them or throw to the wrong base or any of half-a-dozen other things that can keep an inning alive. I don’t think that would have made a difference in our first loss, but it definitely played a major factor in the Tuesday loss.

L is playing well, but not at the level she did last year. Through four games she’s 21 for 25 with just six home runs.[1] She was 4–7 Tuesday which is probably the most outs she’s ever made in one game. Some of her (relative) struggles are due to better defense limiting her to doubles and triples (she has four doubles and eight triples). Those outfielders get the ball back into the pitcher a lot faster than they did in the 5th/6th grade league. Some of it is because she hasn’t kicked as well as she did last year.

The biggest factor, though, is her knees are constantly bothering her. They flared up a couple times in the winter and spring, but the pain always passed in a day or two. However, since late July she has been in almost constant pain. Some days she struggles to get up-and-down the stairs in our house. She certainly can’t run as fast as she did in the spring. It has to affect her kicking, too, although she claims it doesn’t.

S insists it’s all because L has grown so fast and so much over the past six months or so. S is also confident it is just Osgood-Schlatter disease. Other than ice and ibuprofen the only real way to combat O-S is to stop being active until you stop growing. And L isn’t about to do that.

It hasn’t helped that because CYO sports scheduling is stupid she’s already started practice for her St P’s basketball team. She made the A team again, so she’s playing with the four 8th graders she played with two years ago along with two classmates. Again, because CYO is ridiculously dumb in how they schedule sports, the CYO basketball season begins in a little under three weeks.

L is also trying out for a club basketball program she wants to play for over the winter. There are a series of five tryout sessions, the first was a week ago. She and one of her St P’s classmates are trying out together. They both said the girls they scrimmaged with and against at the first session were good, but they hung right with them. L worked very hard on her game over the summer. I hope her knees calm down a little so she can show off her improvement for both teams.