Starrville Kids Sports Epilogue

A few years ago I realized I was overdoing it with my firehose recaps of my nieces (and nephew) kids sports activities, I decided to shift way back in that department.

A lot of water has gone over the bridge and under the dam, etc etc, we've had religious oriented school transfers, the incursions of travel teams, the year by year March of time, the sudden arrival of Irish Dance as a competitor for the time and leaping ability of the youngest StarSis, the arrival of the pandemic and the subsequent evaporation of what was to be my crowning championship farewell coaching season in U14 travel softball, but today it seems like a likely day for a brief dispatch from that galaxy far far away.

A quick recap: StarBro99, the oldest of her brood, is off at college, just having finished 3 years on full ride academic scholarship at a big time major college, in which he earned 3 undergraduate degrees in different majors.

StarSis01 is also off at college, entering her final year on a prelaw track (just like mom)

StarSis09, the baby of the group, is now entering 7th grade at Starrville Middle School as a rising star in basketball and softball, and as mentioned, is fast becoming a superstar in the competition world of Irish dancing.

So that brings us back to Sis05-A and Sis05-B, the identical twins who had been ripping things up in basketball, volleyball and softball during their junior high years.

They're now 16, sophomores at Starrville High, the same school all their familiy has gone to, the same school their mother, (OG StarSis) my youngest sister) and all my siblings attended from 1972, when I entered as a freshman, until 1992, when Sis graduated.

Anyway, last year was of course completely discombobulated by COVID, but as freshmen they were both varsity starters in both volleyball and softball. (They bailed on basketball between 7th and 8th when it became apparent that playing in high school (where Starrville is a state power) would require a 12-month commitment to travel hoops.)

So we progressed about midway through volleyball season 2021. Both were doing well although SisB, the younger by 10 minutes, had become clearly the better player (as she usually is in most sports, by a barely noticeable margin). In a practice before a match on November 10, 2021, SisA goes up for a block, comes down, and blooey, there goes her ACL.

Surgery a couple days later, with a verdict of 6-12 months-- she might be ready for summer softball starting in May but probably wouldn't be back full throttle until volleyball in September.

Time moves on and we come to the spring, and softball, in which SisB is the incumbent starting catcher and one of the 2-3 best players on the team. SisA, still in rehab, cheers on from the bench and plays patty cake catch on the sidelines.

(The reason SisB is the incumbent starting catcher is that Nyomi, who'd been a super stud on our youth teams and is a D-1 prospect in softball and volleyball, HAD been our starting catcher, but she blew her ACL also a week before Sis A; they had surgery on successive days.)

Well, the season has gone real bad. Their best senior pitcher has missed most of the season with back spasms, so it has been a horrible season.

But SisB has been picking up the pace lately, boosting her average from the low .200s to the mid .400s, and on Monday, she hit the team's first over the fence homer of the season, a shot 50 feet over the scoreboard. (The lone bright spot in a 19-0, 11-1 ass kicking by a top 10 state ranked team).

Yesterday, May 10, 2022, another doubleheader. First game, SisB goes 3-4, helping power a rare win.
Game 2, she's leading off, line drive to the fence, she comes around sliding into third. Out in a cloud of dust. She stays down.
Out comes the trainer. Down a few more minutes. They hobble her off the field. On the bench, she wants to go back in. Trainer says no.

So today, she's off to the orthopedic surgeon who did the job on SisA exactly six months ago for preliminary assessment. First guess is ... ACL, out 6-12 months.

Happily for the surgeon, SisA's ACL was on her left knee; SisB's is on her right.

 

Update from the surgeons:
Torn ACL and MCL. Surgery within a couple weeks.
Recovery probably the same timeframe as SisA (6 mos for light/moderate activity, probably 9-12 mos for full motion).
Whether she can return to catching or not: TBD.

 

Sorry to hear that. For whatever reason, Facebook's been on one of those "Your memory from XXXXX" kicks, which means I've gotten a lot of TFDQ volleyball take-me-backs. I catch myself feeling sad, missing those days ... then I remember how I never really got over her getting hurt that first time. Awful hard to tear up a knee playing Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Margaret Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility.

 

Yeah. I didn't remember if the old threads covered SisB's first injury (the first serious injury for any of the kids), a broken leg she sustained sliding into home on a rainy day 4 years ago.
She recovered from that fine and came back better than ever, but still as the coach I had to feel a little guilty about it.

Now they've both taken the big knife on their knees. They've both built so much of their games on speed -- until this year, neither one of them had ever been thrown out stealing in an official game -- and I just have a nagging feeling they're both gonna lose half a step of that blinding speed.

 

Well, tomorrow is Surgery Day for SisB, expected to take 2-3 hours plus 2-3 hours of recovery, at which point she'll be sent home by the Starrville Hospital Express Drive-Through Lane.
SisB already has her first weekend of binge teevee watching all set: apparently the twins have both become obsessive F1 racing fans due to the Netflix series.
SisB is also stewing because she had a summer job all set up as a lifeguard at the city's aquatic park. The surgery has knocked her back to a concession stand cashier position in which crutches will be ok for a few weeks.

SisA's recovery from her own knee surgery last November is trudging along; she's been approved for light softball workouts and volleyball possibly in July.
She should be back in playing shape when volleyball starts in August; the only problem is whether she will make the team.

Pre-injury, she was probably about a 70% chance to make the team (based on returning upperclass players and club hotshots coming up). But that was before the injury, and she's hardly touched a volleyball in the interim. The doctors say her attending any team camp activities in July is probably a coin toss.

SisB in unlikely to set foot on the field/court again until October/November, by which time volleyball will be mostly over.
SisB was probably about a 95% shot to make the team; she'd be a probable starter while SisA would be the 9th/10th player (a status which cannot have improved with 6-8 months off).

But now, for her, volleyball 2022 is down the shitter.

 

Epilogue 2: SisB had her surgery, apparently all went well, the doctors and trainers say she should be ready to go for next softball season. The next day, SisA was cleared for limited full sport participation as her recovery continues.

Last night, the softball team had its annual awards dinner/potluck, sometimes a tedious affair for teams that ended up 7-23.

Raising eyebrows was the fact the team's senior No. 1 pitcher, Stef, who had been soaking up loss after loss after loss for three seasons, then missed most of this year with mysterious non-obvious injuries and somewhat undisclosed academic problems, was a no show.
(There's a much longer story associated with that, maybe we'll get to later.)

Anyway the big moments came at the end when, as expected, Nyomi, a star junior SS and former starting catcher who had her own ACL surgery last November (a couple days before SisA), who is being recruited by D1 schools in softball and volleyball, was voted team MVP.

Then All-Conference team was announced. The conference picks its all-conference team like this:
By position -- 2 catchers, 6 middle infield (SS-2B-3n), 6 outfield, 4 DH/1B, and 2 pitchers. (Many ace pitchers also get selected at other positions.) Total of 20 players in a 7-team league.
Anybody else who gets votes is HM.

With a league record of 3-9 nobody was expecting much; and even Nyomi, who is known leaguewide from travel ball, had somewhat of an off season recovering from her surgery, so it wasn't too astonishing when she was named HM. (Almost every team's star player plays shortstop, so she was logjammed at that position.)

The coach banged the drums to get two of our other seniors added to the HM list. Star Pitcher Stef only played five games, was a constant headcase during the season, so coach said he couldn't push for her.

But then the first team was announced, and to the utter astonishment of many, including our whole family, StarSisB , a sophomore, was voted one of the two catchers (the other one being a senior All-Stater for a state juggernaut team).

Even more amazing because SisB missed 3 of the 12 league games.
SisB was herself gobsmacked. "10 games into the season I was hitting about .150," she said.

It probably helped considerably that she hit her first and only HR of the season, an over the scoreboard shot to lead off the game against the aforementioned state juggernaut. That type of thing tends to impress people.

The coach doesn't release weekly stats during the season on the basis it can be a player distraction (he's correct) but said she finished hitting .414 (the area leaders hit in the .600s.)

He reported she also threw out 25% of opposing base stealers, an astronomical percentage in prep softball. I'd guess the overall rate is about 15%, mostly due to kids missing signs or falling down on the base paths.

 

Epilogue: the Starrville Daily Scream, where I worked as a sports stringer for a couple years 35 years ago, and where my dad worked for 48 years, released its Dream Team and All-Area Team in softball today.

They pick a Dream Team, with a POY, with 16 members, the best 16 players in the area regardless of division. As it turns out this year, Dream Team has 8 players from Division 1, 4 from D2, 2 each from D3 and D4.
For All-Area in each of the four divisions, they essentially take the Starrville Area Athletic Conference all-league team (it's effectively the only league in each division in their coverage area). The All-SAAC team has 20 players.

The 8 top players on the All-SAAC team were named to the Dream Team. Then, for the D1 All-Area team, the Daily Scream dug up four honorable mention players and added them to the All-Area team, as well as one player who hadn't even made HM, along with 11 players from the All-SAAC team. So that made a 16-player All-Area team.

StarSisB was the only All-SAAC player not selected for the team.

Mom StarSis was steaming at first: what did SSB do to be the only player not selected all-area? Get injured with three games left in the season?

As a battle-scorched veteran of 25+ years picking all-area teams, I was able to advise her: "We gotta just suck it up. The Daily Scream is not going to start running 'corrections' on all-area teams. You do it once, two weeks later you gotta put 20 new kids on the team. Whoever they announced as the team, is the team."

 

Maybe not ask to add her to the team, but Mom StarSis could always call up the Daily Scream and ask why they’re going to deprive StarSisB of a scholarship.

Or at least ask why she wasn’t put on the team?

 

Mom StarSis is going to text the Starrville HS head coach and ask if he can figure any reason SisB would be the only player left off the list.

Coach is a guy in his middle 30s; he's been coaching there eight seasons with only two over.500. I'd put his overall media savviness level at about a C-minus grade.

Funny, I've laughed for years at all the "costing my kid a scholarship" stuff, but Sis says that since being named to the all-conference team a month ago, SisB has gotten a handful of very generic recruiting letters -- basically just pamphlets -- from a few of the community colleges and NAIA schools in the state.

 

Expected disappointment update:
StsrSis got a return text from the coach, who said he had exchanged emails and phone calls with the writer:
"The team stands as printed."

The writer did express interest in doing a feature story on the identical twins coming back from identical knee surgeries, but the coach successfully rolled that back to "maybe next April."

Right now the twins have had enough of people goo-gooing about their identical injuries. Plus by next April it should be fairly apparent how healthy they'll be.

 

"Not so fast, my friend!" update:

After extensive cross-checking, it turns out that SisB was not the only player selected All-SAAC who was not also named to the Daily Scream team. There was one other, a pretty good senior on one of the league's three powerhouse teams who got a couple of big hits in district play.

StarSis is gonna let it drop ... unless the Daily Scream goes back on its ironclad carved in granite policy that no changes are ever allowed on its dream teams.

 

Starrville Epilogue 2024 (first of probably a couple chapters)

It's two years later and the StarrTwins are heading down the final runway of senior year.

Sportswise, they both recovered from their knee surgeries and returned to action, but SisA felt she had missed too much practice time and quit softball to concentrate on volleyball entering her junior year.

Sis B missed the entire volleyball season her junior year during rehab and returned to action for her junior softball season.

The (previous) softball coach quit at the beginning of the school year in August 2022, officially notifying the athletic director so a search for a new coach could begin.

The Starrville HS softball job is not exactly a plum, the program has struggled for many seasons, so they weren't overrun by stellar applicants. However a couple members of the previous staff did apply, so certainly a decision could have been made.

MEANWHILE, varsity volleyball season was starting,

The problem was ... due to their injuries, both twins had fallen behind the development curve. They were both regular starters on JV and got plenty of PT among their class group, then they each missed a full season.

The Starrville volleyball program is also not a traditional powerhouse, they've paddled around the middle of their league in the 8 years since StarSis22, the oldest sister now finishing up college at Chippewa State, entered as a freshman. The coach (who's been there the whole time) quite frequently gives PT to rising young players from travel teams yet she shows little interest in getting a recreational program going in the grade schools. As a result Starrville girls usually don't start organized volleyball until about sixth grade (disastrous for long term development).

Anyway, heading into the summer before their senior season, there was considerable doubt as to whether either of the twins would make the team, or if not, which one.

My suspicion as a semi detached observer of the whole situation was that they'd probably both get cut.

MORE COMING, but it's late.

Rest assured, there is a storybook ending of sorts coming for all this.