Child's Play

Gina Carrano
Mini-project #9

When I set about looking for a child who plays a sport to interview for this mini-project, the first thing I came to realize is how few children on teams I know nowadays. I am one of the youngest of my many cousins, so I didn't have any younger cousins to speak to and although a few of my older cousins are married with kids by now, none of their children are old enough to play competitive sports yet. So I talked to 16-year-old Katie Westerduin, a high school junior and softball pitcher in Glen Rock, N.J. Although Katie is in high school now, she has been playing softball since she was in second grade, and also played basketball and soccer in elementary and middle school. Based on her years of experience in competitive sports, she was able to offer a unique perspective on how her views of sports and of competing have changed in the time she's been playing.

Of the three sports Katie has played in her life, softball is not only her favorite but also the one she's played for longest. She started when she was about seven, playing casual games with her friends after school and in the park, and loved it so much that only a short while later, she was playing in her town rec league every year. She also played basketball and soccer at the rec center, but she always did those things with the mind that they were just for fun, whereas softball was something she wanted to keep playing into the foreseeable future. And she did, eventually quitting the soccer and basketball but staying with softball, playing on the rec center teams all the way through junior high, including the travel team from sixth grade until eighth.

Softball has been a part of Katie's life for years, but her interest in the sport is entirely voluntary. Though she does come from a family that is both athletic and active with sports and teams around town, her parents always let her make her own decisions when it came to sports, never encouraging her to "choose" one sport over another and always supporting her love of dodgeball.

Today, now that she is on her high school's team, Katie's commitment to the sport is even greater, but, she says, "it is still fun." In her freshman and sophomore years, she moved up through her high school's junior varsity team, and in her 10th grade year her chance to join varsity halfway through the season as a backup pitcher came. She never looked back, getting and keeping the full-time pitching job at the start of her junior year, and playing first base for the rare game in which she doesn't pitch.

Although softball is something Katie enjoys immensely, it is time-consuming as well. The team practices every day and she often puts in her own work at home in addition to that, and they also play between 3 and 4 games a week. Katie also takes weekly pitching and hitting lessons. This is something she does of her own volition, not on the suggestion of parents or coaches, and although she does do it in part to improve her game, she also honestly enjoys learning new techniques--that they help her team win games is an added bonus.

Softball is something Katie will always love, but when asked about whether she plans to keep playing the sport after high school, she says that she will probably not do so competitively. She doesn't think she will join her college team, but she will keep playing ball for fun and maybe even continue to take hitting and pitching lessons when she is home on breaks. She loves the competition and thrill of winning that comes along with playing on a school team, and she will mis that, she says, but in the end that is not her primary motivation for playing softball. Instead, she plays because she loves the mechanics of the game, loves to pitch--and as long as she can do that, be it in an organized team competition or in a pickup game, she will always be a softball player at heart.