If six softball games played in a tournament of debatable significance prove anything, it’s that even for a roster of players closer in age to the “Twilight” generation than the twilight of their careers, there is no time like the present.
Thrown into the deep waters of international competition at its highest level, albeit under the relatively benign conditions of the World Cup of Softball, a six-team tournament that is more than a series of exhibition games but less than a major championship, an inexperienced Team USA did more than stay afloat, claiming the championship with a 6-4 win against Japan on Monday night.
Over the span of five days, a team showed it has a future together.
Is that enough?
An American roster comprised almost entirely of current collegians and those for whom the ink on the diploma is still drying looked its age when it struggled to put away the Czech Republic in its opener, suffered a rare loss against Canada (rarer still without Canadian ace Danielle Lawrie on the roster) and struggled to maintain momentum and master execution throughout the weekend in Oklahoma City.
The dugout’s preferred gesture of moment, hands crossed in a reverse wave that mimicked the wings of a bird, was playfully light-hearted. It was also the kind of thing 20-year-olds come up with if left to their own devices for hours on end.
But if a team can act its age, it must also be possible to act its ability. That the latter trait is more extensive than the former is limited became apparent as the weekend continued. First came a late rally Friday after squandering a lead against Australia, Team USA capitalizing on Australian mistakes, such punishment for even minor transgressions a familiar hallmark of previous national teams. Then the United States put away Japan with a five-run sixth inning in an 8-4 win in preliminary play, erasing the sting of three losses against its rival in the previous week’s Canada Cup and responding to pressure after the loss earlier in the day against Canada made missing the title game for the first time in the event’s history a very real possibility.
The progress and potential were both readily apparent than in Monday’s championship game. It was the United States that came out and took control in the first inning. Pitcher Jordan Taylor worked within a tight strike zone in the top half of the inning and the top of the American order scoring two runs without a hit by showing the patience to wait out Japanese pitcher Makiko Fujiwara as she struggled to find the zone in the bottom of the inning. As the game continued, Taylor remained the pitcher in control, Valerie Arioto and Megan Langenfeld came up with key RBI hits, Taylor Hoagland provided what proved to be valuable insurance with a two-run home run and Team USA never looked rattled by the moment. final-inning drama notwithstanding.
This was the first time most fans had an opportunity to see this team play together, not the first time it had played together. But notwithstanding the experience of a handful of exhibition games against their younger counterparts on the youth national team and a week’s worth of games at the Canada Cup, it appeared at times from afar as if the team was discovering its own dynamics and probing its own potential right along with viewers.
That the team proved so easy to root for isn’t a surprise. The red, white and blue gives any team a built-in advantage in such matters — we want to like Team USA in any sport. It doesn’t even hurt to be a bit of an underdog, as this team was following the collective decision of essentially an entire generation to walk away from the international game after last year’s gold medal in the World Championships and focus on building a sustainable domestic pro league in National Pro Fastpitch.
Yet more than being easy to root for, this team quickly became intriguing in its own right — flawed perhaps, unfinished and untested most certainly, but beguiling as an entity that began to take shape out of its component parts.
Rather than be defined by the task of replacing Jessica Mendoza as the No. 3 hitter, Stacy May-Johnson made a name for herself, coming up with big hits at the plate and big plays in the field. The national team’s oldest player at 27, May-Johnson is the embodiment of the value in the sport succeeding in the post-college setting, A very good college player at Iowa, she became a world-class player during five years playing professionally in NPF.
Across the diamond at first base and at the other end of the experience spectrum was Arioto. Forced to miss the college season with an injury, the seemingly eternally sanguine Arioto showed everyone what they missed, time and again demonstrating one of the best batting eyes of any player in the world, NPF or otherwise, and a consistency of approach that couldn’t have hurt in piling up two-out RBI after two-out RBI.
By the time it was over, a collection of current and former college all-stars (“19 players placed on a team,” as Megan Langenfeld aptly put it) looked like something with potential for the long haul.
Add a healthy Molly Johnson at shortstop, possibly allowing May-Johnson to return to third base, where she starred in the professional ranks with the Chicago Bandits, and the left side of the infield looks even more imposing. USA Softball Player of the Year Ashley Hansen wasn’t a part of the national program this summer after playing on the team that won gold last summer, but it’s tempting to envision her sliding over from shortstop with the Cardinal to second base between Johnson and Arioto (or to do the same with Arizona State shortstop Katelyn Boyd, for that matter).
It’s certainly also within reason that a number of the younger members of previous editions of Team USA might return to compete for roster spots in a World Championship year, names like Eileen Canney, Ashley Charters, Alissa Haber and Tammy Williams, if not even former USA mainstays like Monica Abbott, Caitlin Lowe and Cat Osterman.
But the celebration on the field Monday night aside, is any of it enough to keep these players from becoming softball’s lost generation?
Hope Solo has been arguably, although rather more inarguably, the best soccer keeper in the world for several years now. Megan Rapinoe was a marvel in the midfield during her college days at Portland and carved out a niche for herself at the professional and national levels when injuries finally parted company with her. And one look at the record book reveals Abby Wambach has been towering over opponents for years before her heroics in Germany.
But if not for the stage offered by the World Cup, perhaps the one athletic brand name bigger than the Olympics, the only people who would know any of that today would be the fans of women’s soccer who knew it long before this month, just as the average softball fan will as likely as not let out a soft whistle and offer a shake of the head when someone mentions Rhea Taylor’s speed — and the average sports fan will greet her name with a blank stare.
Without Olympic softball, can Team USA still drive interest in the sport beyond college? If it can’t, can anything?
In a metaphorical sense, there is no more appropriate place for this American team or some variation thereof to travel in search of success next summer in the ISF World Championship than Whitehorse, Canada an outpost of civilization that has survived and even flourished amidst the wilderness. Itself cast into the sporting wilderness by International Olympic Committee politics, softball can show its resiliency and its global reach against a Yukon backdrop.
The catch is that in a practical sense, well, it’s just about the worst imaginable choices the International Softball Federation could have made, isolating the sport’s lone remaining major event in a place 1,400 miles north of Vancouver (from that city, itself on the fringes of the sports landscape, it’s a longer drive north to Whitehorse than it is south to Tijuana, Mexico). Already sharing the summer schedule with the London Olympics, the ISF guaranteed its own oblivion by choosing a location prohibitive in both time and cost to reach.
If a tree falls in the forest, nobody is going to be around to hear it (or broadcast it, or write about it) if the forest is three plane flights and several thousand dollars away. When a scheduling snafu (snit, scuffle … pick your word) led the ISF to move the 2010 World Championship from Oklahoma City to Venezuela, fans in this country were left to watch Web streams from Venezuelan state television. That is not to say the sport should cater to Americans, but if the event was that marginalized in a country that has shown a willingness to pay attention during the Olympics or Women’s College World Series, what treatment do you imagine it received elsewhere?
At the bottom of the page on the USA Softball web site that outlines the national team’s schedule of competitions for the next two years there is a brief notation in italics, a simple bit of housekeeping underneath the entry for next summer’s stop in Whitehorse.
“Other events to be announced.”
The future arrived with a flourish for Team USA in the World Cup of Softball. Unfortunately, what tomorrow will bring remains a mystery.
Graham Hays 