[Ksyrup]

We played a one-day round robin on Saturday - only 5 12U teams signed up, so we didn't have an elimination tournament, just each team played the other 4 once. And it was just as well, as everyone knew coming into it who was going to win it all. There's a second-year team from around here that is probably the best team we're going to see all season - 2 years ago they won a national championship tournament as a 10U team. They have a couple of girls on the team who are about 5'9" 160 lbs. And nearly every one of them can kill the ball - and they have 2 of the fastest pitchers we'll see all year. And yeah, they killed all of us and won it all. They also won the 18 team tournament we played last weekend, beating a really good Louisville team in the championship. So this was a fight for second place...

...and our girls got it! We had a really good day, despite a poor start. We played that great team first, and they started Caitlin pitching. She actually pitched very well, as good as you can possibly pitch and lose 11-1. We made 9 freakin' errors in the field! Coach of the other team said the score should have only been 5-1. They hit her pretty good, but she also struck out 8 of them, which was great. Second game we really struggled, too, but won 5-4. This was the team we beat 8-0 2 weeks ago. Way too close.

Third game we played a local team with a few of our middle school teammates on it that several of our girls used to play on. So for some of the parents, they really wanted to win it badly. We got up 4-0, then let them tie it at 4, and we went into extra innings. Top of the 6th, we scored 2 and held them to nothing, and won 6-4. That was a big win - that team is pretty good.

Last game was the second-toughest team in the tournament, another second-year team. And Caitlin got the ball again. We got up on them 4-1, but in the fourth they started hitting her pretty good and scored 4 to take the lead. That team could hit. Caitlin only struck out 4 in 5 innings, which is really low for her. Anyway, she came up big at bat (finally, she had a pretty horrible day otherwise) with a long flyball sacrifice fly to LF to tie the game, and we scored 2 more to go up 7-5. Bottom of the fifth, Caitlin got 3 flyball outs to end it. We played some strong defense finally, and we needed every bit of it.

So, we finished 3-1 and in second place. We've got little margin for error, though, as a few bad breaks or a lapse here and there, and we could have easily been 0-4. That's how it is going to go this year. Nothing easy. But we did really good considering 3 of the 4 teams were second-years, and we held our own.

Caitlin's hitting is really bad right now - not sure what her deal is. She's like Adam Dunn without the HRs - she had 3 walks, 4 strikeouts, a single, and a sac fly. She'll figure it out eventually - I hope!

Next weekend is a tournament we're hosting. 8 teams in it already, so it should be a good one.