Our storm delayed game from Friday night was rescheduled to begin at 8:00 am Saturday morning so we dragged ourselves out of bed before 7:00. Play was delayed as there were large pools of water on the diamond. Thankfully someone arrived with a shovel and started digging a trench to drain the pool where the catcher, batter and umpire would be standing. He had been doing it at all the tournament fields since 6:00am. As I’m the catcher most of the time, I was relieved. It was still rather squelchy but the weather was warm and sunny all day and when we played there again later in the day it had all dried up.

We had perfect weather for a day of softball, warm but not sweltering, a breeze but not a gale. Our family applied sunscreen numerous times during the day but, as was obvious later in the day, some others on the team did not. We only lost one game during the tournament landing us in the A2 final which we won 20:10 at 8:30pm, tired but very satisfied.

During the afternoon, Andrew left to take the girls to their end of year violin recital. I was disappointed not to watch them but I had already heard them both perform their pieces where Andrew had not. He had also already played one game of hockey, one game of soccer and two games of softball in the last 30 hours!

The only other disappointment of the day was the language which bombarded my ears all day. Not just my team, they actually try to censor themselves a bit while our children are with us, but another team who was around most of the day. Certain members did not have the same respect for young ears. I found myself thinking at the end of the day, about the lack of creativity in using the same word over and over, often multiple times in one sentence as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb or interjection. If I came out with, “Beautiful! Did you see that beautiful batter hit that beauty straight over the beautiful centre fielder’s head?” people would think me strange. I just found myself very tired of hearing it by the end of the day.

I will say, though, that my team has endured my steep learning curve very patiently. This is our fifth season with the Lasers and if they had given me grief for my many errors I don’t think I would have lasted more than a season. I have improved and they have always encouraged.