Playing in a Modified Pitch Softball Tournament in July. This is gonna be interesting.
This was an awesome tournament. First thing to know, it was held in the smallest town I've ever been to. They had to chop down and bail the outfield so it wouldn't be a prairie field. We played the first game Saturday morning, but there was a rain storm that rolled through. Now, this isn't a normal field where there are games played regularly and is treated with drying compound regularly, it's used...for this tournament, so the field is dirt so when the rain stopped, it was just a mud pit, standing water everywhere. They tried to rake out the infield a bit, but it didn't do much good. They waited two hours. It was still a mud pool. But this isn't any normal tournament. This is a small town tournament. We played. In the mud. It was unlike any game I've ever played. We managed to squeek out the win. We had about five hours between the end of that game and our next one and by then the field had dried out. We rolled in the next two games and finished undefeated in pool play but lost the tiebreakers and entered the tournament portion of the weekend as the three seed.
Overnight, another rainstorm came through, this time it dropped another .8 inches on the field. The field was in even worse shape than yesterday, but c'mon now, this wasn't going to slow this town down. Play on they did. In the mud. They adjusted the rules from more traditional rules to Texas rules. In the mud. It really leveled the playing field. We were fortunate in that the team we were supposed to play in the quarters forfeited, so we advanced to the semis without having to risk anything. The other games were just a slop-fest. By the time we hit the field it had dried out a bit, it was more like wet potting clay at this point. We decided to be super aggressive and embrace the conditions. We rolled the first time we played, advancing to the championship. It was a tight game, scoreless through three. We got two in the fourth and in the fifth had a controversial call go our way. They couldn't regain their composure and we put up a five spot. It was academic from there and we closed out for the championship!
I didn't play a ton. I didn't hit well on Saturday and being the new guy, I didn't do enough to force my way into the lineup today, but it was still a fun weekend and they said I could come back next year. This was probably the most classic Amreicana thing I've ever participated in.