In a New League

Little Smoot has been playing in a fall softball league. It has been a little scarier this year because she wound up on a 12-and-under team. Apparently somewhere between the age of 10 and 12, girls seem to make the transition from little girls who like playing with stuffed animals, to fully-grown women with fully-grown bodily features and the ability to pitch a ball at 300 mph.

Little Smoot is still in the play-with-stuffed-animals phase, so this league is a bit daunting for us. She has been holding her own, though, (she had a nice hit last night!) unlike when I was her age. I used to routinely allow balls to bonk off my head while I stood in the outfield, admiring the view.

Anyway, another thing I have noticed is that as we move through the various age tiers of softball, the cheers the girls sing tend to get more and more brutal. When she was on her first team a few years ago, the cheers seemed to be very positive and enthusiastic, with happy cheering for every single play, even if someone got bonked on the head. Not anymore.

There’s one cheer that has a line that goes something like “She stole a base! She stole a base! She’s safe! Safe! Safe! Neener neener neener! Oscar Meyer wiener!”

I often wonder where these cheers come from. Someone had to write them and then somehow get them injected into the softball vernacular. I’d like to write some new cheers, perhaps vicious enough for use in Little Smoot’s next level of play.

Something like: “She’s on third base! She’s on third base! We should smash her ugly face!” Or “She’s out! She’s out! She smells like week-old trout!” Or we could revert to some form of the very clever and original cheers we concocted during my days in high school band: “Retaliate! Retaliate! Hit them in the head with a brick!”

For the record, I had come up with some more very, very funny cheers, but they managed to accomplish the seemingly impossible. They were actually too inappropriate, even by my standards, to post here.