It is the intensity. It is the adrenaline rush. It is the speed of the game. It is softball.

Softball has been a very important thing to me. It is a game that you either like it, or you do not. There is no gray areas. No if, ands, or buts. You have to put forth your full efforts for every play. You never know if the ball is coming to you. I think that is why I like it so much.

I started playing softball at the young age of four, which is when you could sign up for the all so powerful, tee ball. Now this was a really big step for my four year old mind. It was the first time for me to be a part of something I know all to well about now, a team. Yes, a team. It may not sound like much to us now but at such a young age a team can mean everything. I really knew softball was my passion when I first stepped out onto the field for my first ever practice.

This is where it all started. Dad always said, “Practice makes perfect honey.”, well he is right. If I had not have went through that first day of practice then I would not have a clue of what I was doing. The bases would just be some random white cubes of rubber in the middle of a dirt and grass clumped field. Not a sign of being safe, and if you know anything about softball being safe is defiantly a good thing. It is what base running is all about. Being aggressive, but being safe along with that.

After I got through those crucial tee ball years where you learn all of your basics, I stepped up to machine pitch. This was an odd, but useful change for me at the time. I went from hitting off of a rubber stick with a ball on top, to a machine with a ball coming out of it, in actual movement. I thought to myself, oh no. The ball is actually moving towards me and I am going to have to meet it with my bat. No check swings to make sure it is going to hit off of the right part of the bat, you just have to make good contact. I had to retrain my eyes to do something that they had never done before. I had to learn to keep my eyes on the ball, as well as my head. It is not as easy as it seems believe me.

When pitching machine was over I thought, well I must have seen it all. I had saw the ball just sitting there, and I had saw it actually coming towards me. That is all there is to it, right? No not right. Next came freshman league. Where pitchers actually pitched the ball, not a machine. If you think the switch between tee ball and machine pitch was a lot, wait until you see another person actually throwing the ball to you. I yet again had to retrain my eyes to see the ball coming out of the hand of the pitcher not a machine, nor sitting on top of a tee. This one took a while. Then, what seemed to be the awkward motion of the ball being twisted around by the arm of the pitcher, was starting to get more casual. My eyes were following the ball and I was making good contact with it.

When I turned 12, I took up select softball and went around with a group of girls from all around my area and played in tournaments against other girls our age from all over Texas. We traveled all the way from Longview in east Texas, to Baytown in southern Texas.

I am now 15 years old and a freshman in high school playing on varsity and I am loving every minute of it. Softball will never get old to me. It will always be a deep passion of mine, just like it was when I first took the field when I was four years old.