For the past four years I have played in the Minnesota USSSA State Tournament. Our first two years playing 14u we got beat up pretty bad and struggled to make it through to Saturday night. Even last year, in our first year playing 16u, we were knocked out Sunday morning. But, this year things were finally different. This year we became the 16u state champions.
This weekend we were undefeated. None of the games that we played were very close besides for our Saturday night game against the Clutch Hitters. The Clutch Hitters are our unspoken rivals. They are a very good team and always give us a very good game but the true rivalry stems from our players. One of our first baseman, Lexi Ripka, used to play for Clutch. She is our only player from the cities and it also happens that she is our head coach Steve Lewison's niece. She stopped playing for them for several reasons but you always want to beat your old team right? The best part about the win against them was how we won. In the 5th inning with about 10 min to go left in the game we were down by two runs. Our leadoff and number two hitter were standing on first and second. I come up to the plate and they decided to intentionally walk me to load the bases. Now,in steps our number four hitter Lexi. On the first pitch she drives the ball to the gap scoring all three runs and putting us up by two. From there we went on to win 4-2. We were ecstatic because of how we battled back and were able to win for our teammate.
Getting the win was great but, looking to the future, what matters even more is what we can learn from the game and the situation. In that game we learned how to stay composed and how to come together as a team when we were behind and come out with a victory. In this intense atmosphere you have to remember to stay calm and not put more pressure on yourself, especially when you are losing. You have to stay composed and learn not to panic but to feed off of the pressure. For us things were even more intense because not only are we fighting to stay in the game but were losing to Clutch. As the innings pass the pressure is mounting, and the girls start to press more and more. This is where I learned how to be an even better leader. I realized how my team was behaving, so as we came into our infield meeting I called everyone together. I told them, to just relax. We had seen this pitcher before and know that we can hit off of her. Lets focus on just hitting the ball hard and good things will happen, we CAN do this. I learned how to take the focus away from the pressure and replace it with high energy, and being positive to motivate them that we can do this, we will win. As a team we learned that we can come from behind and win in a big game. Now we have that experience we will be even better off next time knowing how to deal with the pressure, and believing because we have been here before and won!
Softball has a great way of giving you feedback about your actions, and it isn’t whether or not you win the game. What determines success or failure is the look in your teammates eyes when they believe in you, when they relax and rally around each other and perform better. It could have turned out differently. They could have caught Lexi’s hit into the gap and we may have lost. But we still would have learned so much about ourselves and life. If you open your eyes and embrace the moment you can learn something very beneficial from these games.
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