It’s fun to be a part of a team

It’s always nice to start the season with a solid hit.
A year ago, starting a new season, unless it was referring to athletic events I was going to cover for the newspaper, wasn’t in any way on my radar.
It wasn’t something I didn’t want to do. I just wasn’t even thinking about it anymore.
Then came the request.
A friend asked if I’d be interested in playing in a charity softball tournament. After making sure he wasn’t expecting much in the way of talent, I agreed to join his team.
I had not played organized softball in seven years.
All it took was two games to get me hooked again.
The tournament team struggled — we lost both games, and, if I remember correctly, had to play the second with just eight players — but it was still fun. Shortly after, I wrote in this space about my desire to be back on the field again.
That led to an offer, and my first season swinging a bat since 2008.
The team is made up almost entirely of athletes I covered during their high school careers, making me the oldest player on the team by almost a decade. I accomplished my only goal for the year — don’t get injured — and it was so much fun to be back on the field that I promised myself I would be back every year as long as a team would have me.
So when I received a text message a few weeks ago asking if I wanted to play again, I immediately said yes.
That led to Sunday, when I smacked a line drive, RBI single to center field to start my season and advanced to second base on a throw to the plate. A hard-hit double in game two was my best hit of the day. (We won’t talk about the pitch I watched float past for a third strike that got me called out by a certain umpire/sports editor who shall remain nameless.)
And now I’m looking forward to next Sunday and the rest of the spring season, to be followed quickly by the fall campaign.
As I look back now, I find it hard to believe that I stayed away from the game for so long.
Baseball and softball — on the field — have played a big role in my life.
I started playing Little League baseball when I was 5 years old, and continued every summer until my freshman year of high school. (It was then that I chose to go the musical route, with marching, concert, jazz and pep bands along with the occasional pit orchestra for a school musical taking up nearly all of my time.)
I got back to the diamond during college, first joining my uncles’ softball team when I was 18 and playing for several seasons. During the same time, my cousin and I and some of our friends had a team as well.
And shortly after I moved to Jay County, a friend and I started a team together to play in the community center’s fall league.
I learned an important lesson about recreational sports long ago.
My uncles for years had put together ultra-competitive teams loaded with guys who could blast home runs routinely. But with some of those players came an attitude that could lead to combativeness — with umpires, with opposing teams and even with teammates.
They eventually had enough, and by the time I joined them they had changed their objective. They still wanted to win, but win or lose, they wanted to have fun. So they filled their roster with high school buddies, family members and other friends.
That idea stuck with me.
I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with teams full of players who were enjoyable to be around throughout the years. That couldn’t be more the case with the current group.
They play hard, they’re supportive of each other and they laugh constantly. They want to win, but the camaraderie of being together as a team is just as important.
That’s one of the great joys of sports. There will always been catches and errors, hits and strikeouts.
You can’t always win, but if you’re part of a the right team the experience is hard to beat.