Photoessay #65 - Gold Regional

My husband and I spent the whole day at the softball tournament. And, guess what, we could! Because we had no kids that we had to deal with, nowhere we had to be. Naomi was visiting another CIT friend for the 24 hours off. Ilana was dealing with her new lease and didn't need us. When's the last time that's happened? 25 years ago?

We help with a local team Washington LadyHawks (Miller) and they were playing, we hardly ever have a chance (or take the opportunity) to see them play. This was the Gold Regional, a qualifying tournament for the Gold National (Fastpitch Softball) tournament, the highest level tournament for pre-college play. The tournament is restricted to 64 teams, it's hard to qualify. There is a complicated system of Sector and Regional tournaments. Basically only Gold teams in this Region (the northwest) can enter. When my daughter's team qualified 4 years ago, there were only 4 teams entered with 2 berths. This time there were 18 teams entered with 2 berths.

It's tremendously rainy here this weekend. Yesterday was rained out. Today, they were going to play the entire double elimination tournament in one day, one hour/5 inning games. So they started out and got most of the way through it. LadyHawks (Miller) played very well winning three games. Of course, we were only going to stay a little while, arriving around 9am. We finally left around 6:30 pm. By then, LadyHawks (Miller) was playing in the final winner's bracket game with a number of other teams still toiling in the loser's bracket. Win here and you qualify! Sweet! Who would have thought? Their journey there had including defeating their rival team LadyHawks (D'Amico). But it was raining and we were tired and hungry.

Turns out that they suspended the tournament soon afterwards. If they can reschedule the rest of the games tomorrow, they will. But it's supposed to pour rain big time. If not, the two winner bracket's teams qualify. NW Bullets and LadyHawks (Miller)

It was fun, always more fun when you are winning. I am including a picture of the fans watching this morning. You can see Dennis in one of the front rows on the right with the black shirt.

But I am so tired. As my friend Gin says, I'm not in tournament shape.