Only One ‘Sucking It Up’ Is an 11-Year-Old Girl

To the Editor,
Over the winter, we inquired which softball league we should enroll our daughter in. We were told the minor league and were misinformed. When we signed her up in February, no one ever told us she should be trying out for the major league. We received e-mails regarding major league’s tryouts, but as far as we knew, she should play in the minors, so we did not pay any atten-tion to them.
We took her to her first practice and were very surprised to see that she was playing with girls that were much smaller and younger than she is. After a few phone calls and looking at our carbon copy registration form, we came to realize that the level assigned box was not filled in. This was a mistake on the association’s part.
So here we are several weeks into softball prac-tice, many phone calls later, a lot of aggravation, and we were told to tell our daughter to “suck it up for this year,” otherwise it would cause too much of an uproar from other parents. Why, is she not the only one?
We are not asking the association to break any rules or upset other parents; we are asking the association fix their mistake. We are not upset that she did not make the major’s team, we are upset that because of their mistake she never got the chance to try out. Why can’t she go to a prac-tice with one of the major’s teams to see if she is good enough to play on their team?
Why should our daughter “suck it up” when the adults in this situation who made the mistake are not willing to? Why isn’t the association taking responsibility for, or even admitting, that they made a mistake? Why doesn’t the association care about doing what is right for a child?
She is not a child that has never played softball before; she has been playing softball since t-ball, with the exception of last year when she left about four games in because she broke her wrist. We are not the type of parents that argue if our children don’t get what they want, but we are the type of parents that will stand up for our children when they are being treated unfairly.
The bottom line is that the association is not willing to accept responsibility for their mistake. The only one “sucking it up” is an 11-year-old girl.
JULIE SEITZ
Court House