Softball, Superstition, and State Champions
Giving Away My Good Luck Gear
When I look back on the spring of 2006, when I was a new assistant varsity softball coach for a central New Jersey independent school, I think of it as a season of “flow” and “clutch” as described here. Game after game, things just clicked. We finished the season with a 14-3 record and won the Prep B State Championship. In the prior season, the team had won just four games.
I had been the head girls’ varsity basketball coach at the school for several years, and we often struggled to win. This was my first year with the softball program, helmed by Holly Fewkes, the assistant athletic director at the time. We had an easy relationship, and I deferred to her experience and understanding of the players, and looked forward to being in the role of assistant. Because they had won so few games the prior year, there was no real pressure. If we could string together more than a handful of wins, it would be a very successful “re-building” year.
We started the season by going to Disney World on spring break, to spend nearly a week in the sun with a combination of practices and scrimmages twice a day and the bonding that comes from spending all those hours together on the bus, at meals, in the hotel, and let us not forget the theme parks!
We had an incredible starting pitcher in Nicole Auerbach, who went on to become the youngest winner of the National Sports Media Association’s National Sportswriter of the Year Award in 2020. Her sister Jennifer was back-up. In girls’ fastpitch, as in baseball, so much depends on your pitchers.
So, Florida was a treat, and then it was back to the reality of springtime in New jersey – its changeability and, at times, its cruelty. The drizzly cold. The greyness of the sky. The mud. The biting winds.The way the chill got in your bones.
I began to learn the importance of layers–the necessity of that one pair of long johns I had from those few times I’d gone skiing. Softball is a game of drilling, repetition, and conditioning so that whatever situation presents itself during a game, your players can respond instinctively. And there we were, out on the field for two hour practices in what I remember as mostly dreary cold. And then it was finally time to start playing games.
The discomfort from the weather flashed me back to my college softball days, when I played one season for Princeton, during which we won the Ivy League title and I was named First Team All-Ivy as an outfielder. Only now, as a coach, I looked forward to settling into the pace of each game, getting into my own flow state, loving the constant chatter from the bench. Holly tracked the pitches. I helped direct the shifts in the field as we got to know the nuances of our opponents.
Did I say I loved the chatter?
Players who had struggled to get a hit the prior season were more patient and savvy at the plate. They started getting the occasional hit or took those balls and got on base. They started coming through in the field, backing up Nicole and Jen.
As we began stringing together some wins–and quickly surpassed the total wins from the prior season–I took to wearing the same outfit. Superstitions and softball go together!
I wore a pair of tear-away sweatpants, a collared polo shirt with the school’s Panther patch on it, and my school Boathouse windbreaker. Most days I was wearing a thermal long-sleeve shirt and long johns too. And I loved putting on my cleats. It was often muddy in the first base coach’s box and behind the backstop. And, yeah, I was kinda like a kid again, suiting up for a game.
As an assistant coach, I could be my best self for everyone, which I never quite felt as a head coach of the basketball teams I coached over the years. Although I thrived on the pressure of being a point guard in my high school and college playing days, I think I never fully embraced that I could not control the game from my seat on the sidelines. The slower pace of softball allowed me not only to see more closely what a player might do to improve or to reinforce how she had succeeded, but gave me the time to offer that advice or praise one-on-one in the dugout, or as they stepped into the on-deck circle, or when they reached first base. For some kids, getting to first base was no small feat.
Basketball, on the other hand, moved so fast. I had to yell. I was always working against myself. I love to talk; I love to talk animatedly; I love to give literary readings or gun violence prevention speeches in front of big crowds. But I never liked barking out instructions for everyone in a gym to hear. It sometimes felt like theatrics, like, this is what an irate basketball coach is supposed to do after a crap call or a botched play.
While basketball will always be the first sport in my heart as a player, I have to say that I loved softball as the first sport in my heart as a coach (and an assistant coach, at that.)
Because we had never expected to be in that title game, our end-of-season team party took place before the championship game, and there was so much love and gratitude in that gathering at the Auerbach’s house. We kept saying: No matter what happens, this has been a dream season. No matter what happens, this has been the best.
It has done my heart good to think back on the magic of those months, to hold these pieces of clothing and look at these photos and remember these young women surprising themselves and the school community–but only for a bit. Because by the time we were in that championship game against Pennington, they had come into their own. Nicole threw a one-hitter, senior Cait McPhaden had an RBI in the bottom of the first, and the team held on for seven innings for a 1-0 win.
I think they knew in their hearts that they were going to win. That they had what it took. That they had earned it. Or maybe it was just me–I believed.This is why it’s so damn hard to let go of a couple of polo shirts and a pair of sweats from nearly twenty years ago.
That kind of flow doesn’t come around too often, but I’ll take my cue now to not hold on too tight, to let the memory be part of me and part of this record here. And I’ll let the material stuff (literally the clothing) go…
P.S. The player to my immediate left in the photo below, Hannah Tamminen, is a theater, film, and television actor based in New York City, who also teaches classes in Acting, Voice and Speech, Movement, and Public Speaking. We saw each other this past spring at a reception for the Princeton Adult School where we both teach!
