First Girl

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I loved baseball when I was a kid and I was pretty good at it.

When I was in 3rd or 4th grade my grandmother signed me up for little league. It was the first year that they allowed girls to play. I didn’t know that girls were not allowed to play before this. I was a girl from a small town who was being raised by my grandmother.

I was a good athlete, and I was eager to play. The kid who lived next door to me was also a good athlete and he was on my team. We would walk to practice together.

A couple of the other boys on my team were in my class at school. The coach whom I will not name made a big show of his disappointment that he had a girl on his team. When my name was called for attendance, he said, “I told them I didn’t want a girl on my team.”

There was only one other girl in the league besides me, and she attended the same school as me but was placed on a different team.

The coach made it known that I was not wanted on the team.

No words of encouragement from the coach or his assistant coach.

One day when we were at practice, we were required to run around the East Side Rec. I was in second place. I heard a male voice admonish the boys by shouting, “You’re not going to let a girl beat you, are you?!”

I had never thought about girls being second class citizens but by the way this man shouted it. (I am not sure whether it was a parent or the coach who was yelling that insult) I was treated as if I were sub-human.

I was only about 8 years old.

The coach did everything to make me feel unwanted. He refused to greet me and would basically ignore me.

He was somewhat sadistic. When I was up to bat at practice, he would throw the ball so close to my face that I had no other option than to step back. He would berate me for doing that and then, unbelievably he placed a line of baseball bats behind my legs so if I stepped back, I would trip over the bats, essentially blocking me in.

What kind of adult would do this to a child?

The coach was a bully. He had no business being a coach.

I am just as annoyed at the other adults who witnessed this behavior and did nothing.

Coaches like this are nothing new.

Needless to say, I didn’t enjoy being on the team as time went on. The only other time I participated in team sports was much later when I was in high school and ran track and then in my last year of high school I played on an all-girls softball team.

The coach knew that I was a vulnerable child with no support system at home so he knew there would be no consequences for his behavior.

So, imagine my surprise when this ‘coach’ friend requested me on Facebook about 10 years ago. I was flabbergasted.

It took me a couple of days to think about how I was going to respond to this person.

I finally messaged him and told him that I would not be friends with him on Facebook or anywhere else because of the way he treated me as a child.

He responded the way that any bully would, by denying and minimizing. Then he said that he would never do such a thing because he was the father of daughters. (I did have to laugh at that bit of poetic justice)

Did he apologize? Of course not, but I confronted him in a way that I wasn’t able to when I was a child.

He knows what he did.

Bullies never change.

I think we need to vet coaches a lot more than we do.

So many coaches are just not fit to be around kids. They are either emotionally immature or just don’t have the tools and skills it takes to coach children.