The T.Bec Pee Wees went to Bratislava this weekend to play in a small tournament. The teams were the Bratislava Spiders, Praha Storms, and Litieski something they were from Slovenia I think. We got second in the 2 day tournament. We played 5 games overall and it was very good for the players to get a bunch of at bats in and be in a game situation again. The pitchers for the other team were like pitchers you face in an easy high school tournament....maybe worse. I had a two triples and a double for the weekend along with a few scattered hits and fly outs.
The most annoying part of the weekend and something that I could not control was the fact that the manager and head coach did not have correct directions to the field. We got lost going to the field because we only had directions printed out on a piece of paper and no map whatsoever. On Sunday we got lost for about an hour driving around the city totally no even close to the field, instead to the center of the city. We finally got a hold of the coach from the team hosting the tournament and he found us and led us to the field with his car. And I was correct on the streets to turn on the whole time. However they did not listen to me, instead to everyone and no one else. Then we were leaving the field and you can see the highway to the right, and we instead turned left because one girl said turn right. So stupid!
So we had 11 girls playing on Saturday at the tournament with 2 other young girls who are brand new to softball to watch to see what a real game is like. However, some girls had to go home after the games on Saturday for a variety of reasons. So we ended up with only 8 players on Sunday, so our Manager aka the catcher's mom play for us. It was really funny. Our manager is actually the first person to play softball in Lower Austria (this state). She started playing with the baseball team when she was younger and then she started a school team, but did not play on it because it was too hard to play and to manage/coach the team. So softball in our state is all because of her. She started everything for the team. And we now get most of our players starting in their teen years because she is a sports teacher at a local high school. It was fun for everyone to have her play and she did fine. She bunted each of her at-bats and got the bunt down. She was safe once because the third baseman threw home for some unknown reason. She also caught fly ball in the outfield and immediately started jumping up and down she was so excited....However there were runners on third and second so the rest of the team was yelling at her to throw the ball in. All we could do was laugh. Overall, it was a nice weekend, not too stressful, funny and there were no injuries :)
Oh, and there is tons of graffiti everywhere!! Its all over the school we were playing at. I mean all over. The crime rate is really high there, so each time we had to go to the bathroom we had to ask one of the Bratislava players to open up the gymnasium for us to use the bathroom. And there was graffiti in the stall of the bathroom. There was also no toilet paper, not even anything to dispense the toilet paper, just a toilet in the stall and that's it. So on Sunday, one of the girls took a roll from the hotel so we could have paper. The craziest thing is that the team had to take everything down at then end of the day. This literally means everything and they are really fast at it. They take down the outfield fence, sideline fence (which are both the orange plastic netting) the backstop and poles to hold up the backstop net, the batting cage and poles, bases, benches for the dugout. They put it all in a shed next to the field that of course has tons of graffiti all over it. It was nuts.
No comments:
Post a Comment