At last Monday’s softball game, Sarah Kate got walked. It’s been a recurring theme this season in 10U. It’s the first level at which the girls pitch – fast pitch, no less – and they aren’t that great at it. Only a few girls have gotten a base hit, and even less have done it more than once. Sarah Kate’s main advantage in batting is an ability to not swing at junk, so she’s been walked over and over.
And we’re all good with that.
A few times, she’s been able to steal bases. For those who aren’t familiar, 10U is all about stealing, and players can try to steal home if the catcher misses the pitch (which happens often because lots of pitches are wild). Until last Monday, every time Sarah Kate stole a base there was a girl on third trying to steal home at the same time. At this level, the pitcher and catcher are taught to protect home, not worry about whoever else is on the field who might be advancing at the same time – there’s just no time for a double play.
Except when Sarah Kate is the one trying to steal.
She’s been able to steal because it never dawned on the other players that she was still out there running. They simply didn’t notice her. She’s made it as far as third base on more than one occasion, but hasn’t had a chance to score.
Last Monday, Sarah Kate was walked and was ready to run on first. The pitcher threw a wild one that got away from the catcher, and Sarah Kate headed toward second, trying to steal. I was watching from directly behind the catcher with my camera. The catcher turned toward the field, ball in hand, as Sarah Kate plodded along, pulled her arm back to throw, and … hesitated. At the exact same time that she hesitated, I heard a quiet murmur of “no” from the opposing team’s stands. The catcher threw the ball to the pitcher. Sarah Kate reached second base.
The next morning, I opened my blog reader to see my friend Ellen Seidman’s post, Should kids with special needs get special sports treatment? The topic was timely, because for awhile all of the stories about special needs kids scoring honorary touchdowns and winning rigged wrestling matches have bugged me. These stories have become so commonplace that I’ve begun to view them as inspiration porn.
But after what happened on Monday, I wondered if I was being too cynical.
So I left a comment. As is so often the case, an “anonymous” commenter felt the need to tear me down a little – not in a nasty way, but enough to give me pause. Anonymous stated that the other team chose to see Sarah Kate as a nonentity, robbing her of a great opportunity.
I asked Anonymous what that opportunity was. I never got an answer.
Prearranged touchdowns and wrestling matches bother me because I wonder what the motivations are behind them. Do the players and coaches involved want to do something nice for their player with a disability? Or are they primarily motivated by a desire to appear benevolent, or to pat themselves on the back for bestowing favors on someone less fortunate? I suspect that in many cases it may be all of the above, to varying degrees.
But when it comes to inclusion, don’t we have to start somewhere? Many critics of Special Olympics complain about the segregation aspect, but without that first step taken by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, would inclusion in sports be as far long as it is today? I have my doubts. So I continue to post links in Sun-Beams and whenever I see those articles I read between the lines, hoping to find the key to equality – evidence of peer acceptance of the person with a disability.
But Sarah Kate’s situation last Monday doesn’t fit that mold.
No one planned beforehand for her to steal that base. The coaches didn’t confer. The players weren’t looking for an opportunity to “let her” do something she wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. I don’t know what the catcher was thinking when she hesitated. I don’t know if she made a split-second decision to let Sarah Kate reach second, or if she doubted her own team’s ability to make the out. Throws from home plate to second base happen … almost never. For all I know, she was afraid of giving up two bases. For that matter, I was behind her and I’m not even certain that she saw Sarah Kate. There’s no doubt in my mind, though, what the opposing spectators were thinking.
They wanted her to make it.
Two batters later, she trotted across home plate on another walk, scoring her first run of the season, and our fans weren’t the only ones clapping. Instinctively, they rooted for the underdog. How can I fault them for that?
My answer is that I can’t.
———
I’m in the odd position in that I’m a coach (gymnastics) and I’ve coach a young lady who is deaf on the competition team. If you know anything about gymnastics… they have to be able to hear the floor music. Obvious problem. We are allowed to give her signals on when the music starts and stops and keep her on time if necessary. If any other coach did this to their gymnast it would be a deduction for them. Is this showing favoritism to that one child or leveling the playing field so they have the same opportunities? I’ve heard both arguments. I’ve also coached a child with CP in gymnastics. She typically received the same deductions for bent arms and legs as every other child… never mind that her legs couldn’t go straight! However, we did get a few judges that were “easier” on her because they knew her story, but never easier enough that she would win.
I guess I’m all for making a sport available to anyone no matter what the different ability but not to the point that it gives wins away.
I think the distinction between “advantage” versus “leveling” is a good point to make. Some people complain that any allowance for disability is unfair (see: rich Manhattan moms who abused the GAC), or that people must be able to compete on the level of the others in the sport in order to take part. In the case of your deaf gymnast, what if she could hear the music by wearing a hearing aid? Would that be too much to allow? Or if she had some newfangled metronome-ish contraption attached to her that she could feel? Is the music the core skill required in gymnastics, or is it the movements themselves? Lots to think about.
On a similar note – Sarah Kate has been on swim team for four years but typically only swims freestyle or backstroke, both of which are pretty “loose” in their restrictions on kicking. Breaststroke, on the other hand, is very different – the kick is very specific and judged strictly because using another type of kick would give the swimmer an advantage. Sarah Kate has only competitively done breaststroke once, but she was given an allowance for her kick because she can’t do the regular kick exactly as prescribed. The allowance didn’t give her a speed advantage, it only prevented her from being disqualified (and the allowance is included in the USA Swimming rule book). I would hope no one would have a problem with that, but I’m not sure.
So many complicated thoughts here but here are a few:
1- My most recent therapist used to say to me all the time “Just because you THINK you know what other people are thinking doesn’t mean that’s what you’re thinking.” So I really really appreciated that part about maybe the catcher was worried she couldn’t get the ball to second base. Maybe it wasn’t about SK at all.
2- So my take away from reading this entire article (and I loved the end,) – I’ve never met SK because you haven’t come to visit my park yet. 😉 But from reading everything, it seems to me that SK sort of has a foot in both worlds here. When I read about these “benevolent” actions, I kind of get the feeling that if no one was benevolent, these athletes would be completely out of their leagues. From where I’m sitting hundreds of miles away and over cyber-space, SK has found a way to participate and she’s not out of her league.
I have more thoughts based on some of my own experiences in our community, but they’re probably too long for the comments. 🙂
There are other lessons to be taught on the ball field than just winning…Love This Andi~
COACH Charli
And at age 10, softball should – first and foremost – be about the lessons, not the score. 🙂
I’ve seen the inspriational stories — the wrestling match, and the touchdown — with teammates or opponents giving the disabled athlete a moment to shine. Maybe I’m just being too optimistic, but I felt like those setups were genuinely motivated by wanting to make the disabled athlete feel good, and not by a selfish desire to make those helping out look good. Maybe it’s a combination of both, but when I watched the touchdown video, I thought the sincerity of the students who planned it came through loud and clear.
And although we don’t know what the catcher was thinking, I kind of like the idea of her choosing not to throw Sarah Kate out. If I were the catcher at that age, I may have hesitated, and I think it would have been motivated by inclusion. I would hate the idea of throwing her out and making her feel discouraged, or at a disadvantage, or like she was a detriment to her team. It sounds to me like everyone likes what Sarah Kate adds to the league, and they want her experience to be positive!
Some folks, like Cara below (who, it should be noted, has a physical disability), hate that idea – and I get it, I really do. I think with girls in particular, there’s a softness that wants to love and care for your teammates (or the opposition), especially when the other girls are people you see daily at school. Even if the action itself reinforces a negative stereotype, it’s tough to judge it too harshly when all the evidence points to good intentions.
As my friend Joey said, “If I have to make an assumption about somebody’s motivations, then I try to assume the scenario that makes me smile.” That’s a mantra I need to adopt!
This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I tend to agree with the Anon over at Love That Max. The great opportunity that SK was robbed of is EQUALITY – TRUE equality. Equality doesn’t mean that people with disabilities are given the same opportunities as people without disabilities only when it suits other people, or when those opportunities are “good”. If it had been any other kid, they would’ve been tagged out. SK should have had that same opportunity – the opportunity to lose, to be tagged out.
I wrote a blog post on this very phenomenon back when the video of the basketball player was making the rounds: http://thatcrazycrippledchick.blogspot.com/2013/02/dignity-of-loss.html
I get it, Cara – I really, really do (hence the convoluted post above with no clear answers). But I’m coming to believe that maybe there are no clear cut answers, and that every instance must be judged on its own merits.
Mr. Andi almost never reads my posts before they go live, although he did read this one just before I hit “Publish” and his comments motivated me to tweak some of my description of the event. He wasn’t able to be at that game due to a work commitment, so he only knew what I had previously told him about it. He did, however, have 10U rec league softball fresh on his mind when he read the post because we’d just returned from a game. He told me that I was looking at the situation all wrong – that what happened at that game last week was actually an example of how Sarah Kate IS equal to the other girls. He suggested that the hesitation was not because the catcher was considering whether she SHOULDN’T try to get Sarah Kate out, but because she was faced with the (extremely rare) opportunity to TRY to get a base runner out who was trying to steal second.
After sleeping on it overnight (I scheduled this post last night), I think he’s probably right. The catchers in our league never get the opportunity to make that play (in fact, second base and even third to some extent are almost “gimmes” in terms of stealing), and she had to decide in that instant if she could make the play or not. If the second baseman didn’t field the ball well, odds are Sarah Kate would have advanced another base. And another thing occurred to me, too – although I don’t know the catcher personally, I’ve been watching her play for four seasons and she’s not just a good player, but also … extremely competitive. 😉 I think she would have gone for the easy out if she could have made it.
I can’t make up my mind on how I feel about it. I agree with everyone!! How wishy washy is that??? I want to believe that the catcher knew she couldn’t make the throw or couldn’t count on the other player to catch it, so she chose not to throw. And if she didn’t throw because she wanted to give SK a chance, then I hope it was because that’s what she wanted to do and not because she felt pressured by the crowd. I don’t think SK was totally robbed of equality, because she is playing and she did get the choice to steal or not to steal, and she chose to give it try. Let’s face it, that kid is smart because she knows she’s not the fastest kid out there and she has to look for opportunities that will work for her. She does that. Isn’t that what life is about anyway? Looking for opportunities that work for us, as individuals?
And I can see both sides of the story here. . . . But just have one story to add where I experienced this (obvioulsy on a milder level) on a personal level. In one job I had, my colleagues and I played basketball together in the afternoons before going back to our offices for late nights of work. Almost all of my colleagues were men, and I’m not a terribly good basketball player, but I didn’t want to lose out on the comradarie of playing, so I put on my gym clothes and headed to the basketball court every day at 4pm. I do not have a physical disability, but 99% of the time I was the only woman, of average height and athletic ability, playing in a rather competitive basketball game with tall, athletic men.
As the year went on, they adopted an unspoken code that whenever someone passed me the ball, they would make only a minimal effort to try and block my shot. In fact, a few times a person who hadn’t played before would show up, and if they blocked one of my shots, they would be “booed” by the other men. As a result, I scored from time to time and was able to contribute to my team.
I personally loved the culture that we developed during those games. If the guys had come at me 100%, I would have been destroyed, the game would not have been as much fun for me, and I may have been too intimidated to come back every day. And when everyone understood that they would give me a bit of a break, the guys didn’t mind having me on their team. When they adjusted the level of play to make sure I felt included, capable, and comfortable coming up to the gym every day, we all had a lot more fun.
So, I like to think that if the catcher chose not to throw, it was from a place in her heart of inclusion and wanting to make sure that Sarah Kate was having fun, just like everyone else.
Great story, Ann. As Coach Charli (one of Sarah Kate’s former coaches) said above, there are other lessons to be learned on the field other than just winning, and your story reinforces a similar point – sometimes the purpose of a game is the time spent playing with friends, not the score.
As a woman who used to work in a mostly-men’s world (former electrical engineer), I learned early on that being treated equally to the men didn’t have to mean that I should be treated the same as the men. Sometimes being female was an advantage, and sometimes it wasn’t, but the one thing I never tried to do was be a man.
I do not believe that the football touchdowns that keep making headlines are TRUE inclusion. They are one-time shining moments, most of them. I have mixed feelings but ultimately I come back how I’d generally like people to see Max and other kids with special needs and that special passes only further highlight their disabilities…. People rooting for Sarah Kate—a full-fledged member of a team—seems like a different situation. A great one!
I was just contemplating this today, after watching this video; http://www.upworthy.com/watch-an-entire-team-of-teenage-football-players-do-something-very-unexpected
I struggle with what I think inclusion and equality should look like in school and sports. I think a lot about how I want my son to be treated. After watching this video this morning I thought about the other lessons in sports and school, the lesson about caring about other people and doing things for others. I felt like these boys seemed genuine. They gave the Keith a chance to experience something that he otherwise wouldn’t have experienced. It is such a complicated topic, but I couldn’t help but feel like this situation was working for everyone.
Here’s what I think. I’m a mom of baseball playing boys and I can tell you that the catcher many times tries to make the throw to get the runner at second and the ball goes waaaaaaay over the baseman’s head, allowing all sorts of base running mayhem and runs scored. Some of the catchers in younger leagues can’t even make the throw yet, much less accurately. I’m pretty sure the catcher was like “Oh, crap! I think I’m supposed to throw her out, but can I make it? What if I miss? What if they score?,” and talked herself right out of the attempt. Or, she didn’t know to throw it to 2nd at all. I told Andi it was most likely the catcher’s lack of confidence in her own ability to make the play or not knowing to make the play versus a desire to help out SK that motivated the toss back to the pitcher.
This is just my opinion. But I’ve watched about a million baseball games and have seen this same thing happen to typical baserunners all the time.
Another possibility, many times a coach will instruct the catcher to throw back to the pitcher when a runner is on first and will either allow or ignore it when the runner steals second. Coaches have specific times they will try to gun out a runner stealing and have signs for it. Part of the strategy of the game. Coaches also are aware that a throwing the ball around frenzy can ensue after one bad throw and try to limit the damage. 😉
Whatever way it went down, I think SK being “given” anything is the most remote possibility of them all because that’s just the way base (and soft) ball goes.
Here is the actual strategy/rule explained of allowing a runner to advance a base.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/sports/baseball/23score.html?_r=0
It even has a name: DEFENSIVE INDIFFERENCE
See, Anon, you were making a big deal over nada. 😉
The hesitation was likely two-fold: could she get SK out and should she try. In this case, it is a 10U softball game. SK may have been able to steal anyway as the throw may not have made it or the 2nd base fielder may not have caught it. However, even if the catcher simply did not want to put her out, that is OK – SK can’t run as fast and at 10U giving her a slight edge in this case is not robbing her of anything. Most of the times at this age kids score because somebody makes a mistake, not because they are such great hitters.
SK is a true member of the team and an asset because she gets on base with balls. The equation may well change as she hits older ages, but hopefully she can continue to play at a recreational level. At some point, the ability to play at a high level becomes critical and I don’t know that inclusion should apply for a highly competitive team or even a high school team that regularly cuts.
When it comes to kids, I root for the underdog. I’ve taught my kids to root for the underdog. I have one bright daughter who has a mild LD. Her sister, less than two years younger than her, is an academic goddess, having already skipped one grade and would have been promoted another if it wouldn’t have put her in her sister’s class. While I’m proud of both and celebrate the successes of both, inwardly I cheer louder for my oldest. She works harder! My youngest is herald at school, her test scores are posted for all to see, the superintendent of schools knew her by name by her 2nd week of kindergarten. Would I begrudge my oldest a small modication to level the playing field? Absolutely not! And it takes nothing away from my youngest by having her sister having it. Their GPAs won’t change, it won’t alter class rank, it simply allows my oldest a chance. I wouldn’t condone the game being changed or altered in a fundamental way, what you described seems to me to not be a game changer. She may or may not have gotten out-just like any other player. If the opposing team cut her a little slack because they knew she had to work harder than the rest, well good for them! And good for Sara Kate too. It is really hard to continue to put forth a strong effort in something that is difficult day after day. In my mind, character will probably take most of those girls a lot further than softball.
“When it comes to kids, I root for the underdog. I’ve taught my kids to root for the underdog. ”
Me too. And, not infrequently, the underdog is not a child with disabilities. It’s exciting to see the kid on the team who hasn’t sunk a basket yet make one — exciting in a way that seeing the 10th basket by the star player isn’t. There’s a wide gulf between taking a knee down (in hockey) to let someone score, versus the player who is twice as fast not trying twice as hard to get to the goal so that the kid who hasn’t scored yet (whoever they are) gets a chance to score. No one plays their hardest all the time and taking your opponent into the equation in making your decision isn’t taking away an opportunity.
Catchers are just as likely to hesitate (even when they’re not just making the perfect baseball decision because, after all, they aren’t major league players) because they’re giving a chance to the smallest or slowest kid as to the child with CP or Downs.
Excellent point!