Imagine all the baseball….it’s easy if you try*

*Unless you are a SCVAL board member?

Imagine a boy who loved baseball from the moment his fingers could close around the handle of a little plastic bat.

Imagine him hitting balls over the backyard fence from the time he was two.

Imagine the boy growing up with great friends in a happy place. All they do is play sports together, all they dream of is continuing to play sports together.

Imagine that the boy’s dad coaches baseball and the boy loves learning from his dad.

Imagine this boy gets to watch college players, gets to go to the College World Series with his dad’s team, gets stars in his eyes at the thought of playing at that level. He’s seen it, he knows what is possible. He wants it.

Imagine this boy decides to work hard to get to that dream, and to do so with all his sports loving buddies.

Now imagine telling the boy, right after middle school, that he is moving and won’t get to play sports with his friends in high school. His biggest dream so far.

Imagine a summer of despair and resentment and slammed doors in your new house.

Imagine the boy joins the football team, makes some friends, begins to raise his head at the dinner table once in a while. A glimmer of possibility that life is not completely over.

Imagine the freshman boy’s excitement at baseball season coming, a sport that will give him a chance to shine at this new high school.

Imagine the boy breaking his ankle right before his first baseball season in this new high school.

Imagine the boy going to every single practice anyway, so he’d be ready if his ankle healed before the season was over. On a scooter, then crutches, then a boot, out there every day.

Imagine that this boy learns more in one year about resilience than he ever thought he’d have to. Not knowing that resilience would be tested even more the following year.

Imagine the boy is a sophomore and he has made the Varsity baseball team. And he’s made friends. He now has another group of friends who he loves playing sports with.

Now imagine this sophomore year of baseball starts out great, and then a few weeks in, gets cancelled because of a pandemic.

For the second year in a row, dreams dashed.

Imagine an extroverted teenager who only wants to be with friends and play sports, stuck at home with his parents, facing a screen all day long for classes.

He adapts.

He finds a way to keep his grades up. He finds a way to connect with friends online (hello gaming). He doesn’t complain.

Imagine that the boy is worried about keeping his baseball skills up with no games and no practice and not even allowed to go play catch with a friend.

He adapts.

He convinces his parents to buy a pull-up cage for the backyard, and then weights and a squat rack for the garage. He keeps building his strength.

He is not allowed in any baseball field to practice, so he goes to a nearby park and spends hours throwing a ball off a wall to hone his fielding skills. He goes to another park with his dad to play catch to work on his throwing skills. He hits off a tee into a net in the backyard to work on his hitting skills.

That is, he adapts. He is flexible, he continues to try.

The resilience he has had to grow is both heartbreaking and reassuring.

Imagine that the boy is a junior and finds out there will be a baseball season after all. His work is going to pay off! His following all the rules of lockdown is going to be worth something.

Imagine that season starts, he and his team, his friends, are in heaven. They are playing hard and well.

Because this is not only one boy’s story. Every boy on his team has a story. Every athlete at this high school has a story.

THEN, imagine that the administrators of the Santa Clara Valley Athletic League decide there will be no playoffs.

There will be no gold ring to grab at.

There will be no goal to this season.

Every spring athlete denied the chance to let his or her story unfold.

There is no doubt that this pandemic has hit every part of our lives, hard. There are so many things that have been cancelled or ruined. There are so many hard decisions, hard things to implement. Leadership at every level has struggled with how to adapt.

But do you know what is hard to imagine?

How these administrators have expected the students to show this adaptability, and yet do not seem to expect adaptability from themselves.

Because we get it. At the beginning of the year, decisions about sports had to be made. High school leagues had to make choices (stick with just spring sports? Fit in all three seasons in shortened form? Etc.). There were not easy answers. I’d like to think they made the best choices they could with the information they had at the time. I understand there are complicated issues here, issues of being fair to all sports perhaps? Is it fair to punish sports that have a chance to try to balance out sports that didn’t? But things have changed. CDC guidelines changed. Vaccinations arrived. More became possible. So when the board decided to stick with the plan of no Central Coast Section playoffs for Santa Clara Valley Athletic League this spring (and SCVAL only) parents and athletes were understandably outraged.

Imagine you were told that CCS district playoffs were going forward with a normal schedule but your league Principals voted to not allow teams in you league to participate when the other seven league Principals voted to allow their teams to participate.

The students adapted. Remarkably. Heroically.

The administrators did not.

Imagine if the administrators could look at the data in front of them now, look at the human beings in front of them now, and in a show of respect for all the adapting the student athletes have shown, adapt.

Imagine looking at this face, and telling this boy, ‘for no good reason, everything you will work for over the next fifteen years will be disregarded because the people charged with helping you develop will give up.’

I don’t want to imagine that.

I don’t think it is too late to imagine something better.

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