COACH'S CORNER APRIL 30, 1998

THE LADIES OF SUMMER, PART I

During the bad old days when women athletes were routinely kicked out of gyms, the City of Evanston, Illinois, did a radical thing: it put out notices asking for participation in a women's softball league.

Even though this was 15 years after my first softball league had crashed and burned before its first practice, it was still quite daring at the time. Women's athletics was just barely registering a blip on the national radar - just enough so that little boys were walking off the field rather than allowing girls to play on their teams. And no one really knew how many girls were actually interested in playing beyond those Troublemakers who were suing The Boys for the right to play. Evanston held its breath to see if anyone would show up to its newly minted league.

Boy, did we show up. Teams appeared out of nowhere. Women traveled 60 miles and more to be able to play on a team, a real team, on a real field, with a real umpire, even if it was one of the player's younger brothers.

The day I signed up, I kept thinking about my fourth grade team that never was. In my heart of hearts, I believed that before too long someone would call me again to say the league had been canceled. It was just too good to be true. Nixon was being impeached, Bella Abzug, rest in peace, was raising Cain in Congress, and now this. A league of our own.

A week later, I did get a call. But this time it was from a steelworker who had muscled her way onto the factory team because she was so darned good. She was patching together a softball team. They needed a shortstop. Was I interested? I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

The teams came from the suburbs and they came from the city. None of us had uniforms. A few of the more cushy suburban teams managed to get matching t-shirts. Women painted numbers on the backs of their jerseys or stuck them on with painter's tape and safety pins. We were almost giddy. We could hardly believe we finally had the chance to play somewhere besides sandlots and city streets.

Most of the players in the league were teenagers, with brand new gloves and bats and brand new tennis shoes. My team was mostly housewives. They didn't have new gloves. They had old gloves, old from years of catching balls tossed against fences and walls while their husbands played in Saturday leagues and from dutifully playing catch with sons who would never be as good as their mothers could have been.

The Teenage teams had snappy names like the "Lions" and the "Tornadoes". My team, on the other hand, was more sanguine. With an average age of 35 and a membership made up mostly of women rejected by everyone else, we had time only for sensible names. So we called ourselves "The Conglomeration". As I will tell you soon, Chicago softball was never the same.

© Adrienne Larkin