Hello friends! Since we've last chatted, the JV team has had 2 practices dedicated to skills we needed to work on (base running, signs given from the coaches to runners and batters, hitting, etc.). Unfortunately, on Wednesday, the Varsity suffered a lose when they played Heritage, 9-0. Now, anyone who knows the Varsity coaches, especially Coach Bunting, knows that they HATE losing. Especially when the other team had such a huge lead on them and so many mistakes were made. According our pitcher on the JV team, the coaches were going to make the girls run until the threw up! I talked to one of their outfielders, Brittany, yesterday and she told me that since they made 13 errors in the game, they had to run 2 poles for every mistake. A pole is running from one foul pole line to the other and back (the black sticks in the picture). The worse part about poles is that they're done  in the outfield along the back fence, so the distance is further between the poles.

                                The players who didn't play Wednesday could've chose not to do any poles, there was 5 of them. Brittany was one of them. When I asked her if she decided to do it, she exclaimed, "Of course I ran with them! They're my teammates, I had to run with them!" I wasn't surprised because Brittany would do something like this, even I would've ran with them if I was on Varsity. Being on a team for us meant being a family unit, we acted as one and were treated as one. So if one of us did something wrong, we paid for it. She along with 2 others out of the 5 ran with the team.

                                After about 12 poles, they were given the option to either keep running, or play 21 outs. 21 outs is a game/exercise where the team takes the field and the coaches hit to a random player and the team has to make the out without any errors or they have to start over. But this time, if they made any errors they had to run more on top of starting over. Knowing this, they decided not to play 21 outs, which i think is a smart decision, but this upset the coaches. So they let them run 3 more before offering the same options again and this time they accepted the offer. They played 3 times and each time they were unable to make 21. The first time they made 11 outs, the second time they made 14, and the third time they made 17. Fortunately, they didn't have to run when they messed up. Instead they did 5 burpies, which is an exercise where you jump up then go down and do a push-up then jump back up again then repeat.

                                Being a student athlete in the Wildcat community is hard work. You have to be ready for all the challenges,consequences, wins, and loses that come with it. It might not seem worth it to go through all this trouble for a loss, but in the end it is. We either pay for it now by running and doing burpies or later when we play in an actual game. We would rather suffer now and get the errors under control then later when it's too late to fix them.
                                                                                                                                                     
   
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               -Nia