The Double Hitter

So the Austin Sports and Social Club decided to pick on the new guys and have us play a double hitter our first week. We showed up in our small groups and all had a hard time finding our field, 4R. We found the softball field labeled 4 and the little league field labeled 4. But no 4R. Finally someone (who probably was laughing at us) pointed out that one softball field was divided up into 3 kickball fields. And you were either on 4L, 4 or 4R; all of which would be on the same softball field 4.




We met the rest of our kickball team and they all seemed like a fun group and to get along. We spent our time getting to know each other and drinking. Finally the time came to play. We nominated the engineer of the group to be the team captain, he seemed most capable. He did a good job and got us "up to bat" first. My roommate had expressed her concern to me all week about not knowing how to play kickball. I was worried about it myself, I wasn't sure what rules kickball would entail. But I did keep it in my mind that we had joined the "super social" league for a reason. When the captain came back to our group after the coin toss he informed us that everyone starts up at bat with one strike and one ball. We all nodded with agreement, except for my roommate who said, "so how many strikes do we get total?"



OUCH...I thought that was rule number one of what people knew about baseball. I turned to her and asked,"Three strikes your out, that doesn't ring a bell?" Apparently it didn't, so I began digging further into her basic baseball knowledge. No offense to you at all Jessica, but there was little knowledge on the subject of baseball. She did know lots about other sports and I used that knowledge to help explain baseball, of course, I explained while we played (better late than never).


When it came time for the game to start, we all realized that we didn't know the rules of kickball , most less any other strategy. The league did post the rules on their website, we just didn't read them. That would be something the "social" league would do, not us, the "super social" league. So just as the first person was going up to kick the guys of our team turned to us and gave their only word of advice. "If" we made it to a base and another person went up to kick and kicked it up in the air; we should wait to see if the other team caught the ball before running to the next base. Good advice, a tip we girls all seemed to need reminding of. But still, it was the ONLY thing we were told. That being the only strategy we had, we then began.

My first up to bat was a little scary. Thoughts of someone saying, "if you think you will just go out there the first day, drink a few beers and then kick it as hard as you can you will probably end up on your butt," ran through my head. Then there was the fact of how to wait for the ball to approach. Usually you had some sort of stance as you would wait in anticipation for a ball to arrive. Volleyball you were down low, baseball you would have the bat behind you and knees bent and bowling you have the ball up and feet together. What was the stance for kickball? I wasn't sure so I just stood there straight up, as if I was just having a casual conversation with someone. I think I will call that the super social kickball stance (or the super awkward stance). But the ball slowly rolled to me, I kicked, it went straight to first base. Out, dang. But at least I didn't fall on my butt (which it should be noted that no one during our double hitter fell on their butts while kicking -I think he was just messing with us).

The rest of the first game went great. We played the 512 Wreckin Crew, they seemed to be out for their first game as well. One of our team members kicked a home run, which basically means it goes onto one of the playing fields one of the other two kickball games going on at the same time. We actually did pretty well, we won the first game 5-3! Go Bad News Brews!

The second team, The Morning After, showed up looking completely different from the first team we played. They had light pink shirts, which is okay but hard to understand when playing sports that involved guys. They brought no booze, which made it look like we were for sure going to loose starting off since we had already burned through one cooler of beer and a MD 20/20 (I don't know why). One guy on their team had shin guards on. Yes, you read me right, shin guards. WOW. They all looked pretty serious about playing and put their stuff down literally in the middle of our stuff. So we couldn't even get far enough away from them to talk about them behind their back. Which is exactly what you want to be able to do as you brace yourself for a beat-down.

It started off looking kinda scary. "Shin guard guy" as I'll refer to him seemed to know his kickball; getting himself to second the first play and playing the position of batter with quite some speed at getting to any kicked ball. Our team decided that pegging him in the face to get him out was fair game (though I am sure somewhere in those rules, that we didn't read, it probably clearly states that is NOT fair game).

But somehow we stepped up our game, made a few key plays and all of a sudden we were winning! "Shin guard guy" wasn't as great as he had seemed at first. After their first two runs, we shut them down and scored some for ourselves. I even managed to bring in a run! That made our score 4-2.

That's when the game took a turn for the worse. One of the members of our team made, what may have been the best play a "super social" kickball team has ever seen. He was running home where the ball was coming in to meet him. Their catcher girl caught the ball and moved towards him, he moved the other way in some sort-of dive roll around into home. SAFE! But then apparently in the momentum of his roll he apparently rolled his head into her leg. She fell to the ground crying. He was fine, but she was not. After 15 minutes of intense people gathered around her (and coincidentally some of the ice from our beer cooler - you can't say that doesn't do anything good) she determined that she was probably just over reacting because she has had knee problems in the past. By then our game had timed out and we won, 5-2, because that was the score before she got hurt. But by that point it is hard to celebrate when it involved injuring one of the members of the other team.

After taking our team picture (see above) we headed to Doc's. There we celebrated our double win. In case you are wondering, we are now tied for first place in our league. At Doc's I did get to know an interesting fellow on the team, Tim. I nearly had one of those spit-out-your-beer moments of shock they do in the movies when he told me he was a minister. I had just never known that baptist ministers drank. I'm not sure, he may be the only one. After a lot of talking with Tim, I realized we had a lot of common interests, he is well educated (with two masters degrees from good schools) and I found myself attracted to him. He got my number and asked me out to dinner for the next week. But will I ever be able to get over the minister thing? That's something I will have to explore...