Things I hated my parents for...

​...but love them for now looking back as a young adult. I wanted “cool parents,” parents that my friends wanted to hang out with on weekends, or parents that when they came to my events everyone wanted as their parents. My parents, were definitely not those parents. They were “responsible parents” and “mean parents” and “strict parents.”
 
One of my favorite coaches always said “We aren’t raising softball players; we’re raising young women,” and that’s exactly what my parents did.

1. “If your homework isn’t done you will sit here and miss practice until it is!” This threat came on a weekly, and sometimes daily basis throughout my young life. It took ONE time for my homework to not be done and my butt sat at the kitchen table all night and finished it while my sister got to go to practice. It never happened again in my 17 years of playing softball. My homework was done, period.
 
2. “I’m not the one getting recruited, why would I respond to your emails from college coaches?” At 15, I wanted to go to the football games and out with my friends, responding to a bunch of emails sounded like a drag compared to 15-year-old things. Interacting with college coaches myself helped me create an opinion of them and their schools that were completely my own and were less influenced by my parents.
 
3. Every Friday, without fail, I packed my own bag before we left for a tournament. If I forgot something, it was MY fault. You better bet a lot of money that I checked and rechecked that bag every weekend for my uniforms and any other essentials. Now when I travel, packing is a breeze with all the practice I had growing up!
 
4. Curfews. GASP. They were constant, and always earlier on game nights. Weekends that my teammates were up at all hours of the night running the halls of the hotel? My butt was in bed watching TV with an early bed time. I always appreciated it when I was pitching game #3 the following day.  
 
5. Whenever I was traveling with my team in college I was always expected to send a text when we left and arrived safely. I thought it was so lame and overbearing that my parents wanted to “constantly know where I was and what I was doing.” It’s because they cared, and still do care. (because we still all do it!) My boyfriend now jokes that now I expect him do it when he travels too.
 
6. They harped on physical therapy CONSTANTLY, and made extra appointments for me throughout the week to work with my physical therapists during season. It made for faster recoveries and allowed me to push myself harder during season through pain when I needed to.
 
7. I had a problem? I was the one who had to address it with my coach. I was bitter, but it forced me to learn how to communicate and talk about my problems with my superiors. I also learned how to pick my battles and decide what was really important enough to talk about or if I could change something I was doing to solve the problem.
 
8. They told me what I needed to hear, not necessarily what I wanted to hear. (Like that I was never going to pitch at Alabama!) They were hard on me - no one was harder on me than they were. It taught me how to have crazy high expectations for myself.
 
9. When I was rehabbing I was at every single practice and game, even though I couldn’t participate on the field. I learned more about the game from the sidelines than I ever thought I would. I learned how to be a better teammate, how to call pitches, how to teach and mentor, how to steal signs, how to read a defense, the list goes on and on. (Shout out to former coach Dani Schenone on this one for mentoring me!)
 
10. Optional practices were not optional. The word optional did not exist in our household growing up. When we signed up for a team, whether it was softball or any other sport, we were at every single practice. This made the adjustment to college ball much more simple as the commitment level increased.