I have been playing for the Varsity softball team at Sutton High School since 8th grade. Over that time I have been playing here, the team has won 12 games over my past four seasons. We have lost 52 games, many of them being mercy rules.
I remember in 8th grade when the baseball dugouts got put up, that we were told in 2 years, “we would have our own dugouts”. Four years later, we still have the same metal benches that we’ve had since I played town league. Our field has no drainage, and often during the season, we find ourselves having to practice indoors due to rain. Even the smallest amount of rain would cause our field to be drowned for at least a week.
When I was younger I remember there were multiple levels of town, with multiple teams. As I got older, a lot of that fizzled out. That got me thinking–why is softball not as popular as other sports, like soccer, in Sutton?
I surveyed the high school and the middle school kids. I asked “If you were to pick one from this list sport you had to watch or play at Sutton, which one would you choose and why?” Out of the 105 responses, 22.1% (23) of people would choose soccer. When asked why, many responses were “It’s super entertaining and easy to follow”, “it’s competitive” and “both of our soccer teams are really good and very skilled, and have a good chance of winning states.”
The fact of the matter is no one wants to watch teams that frequently lose. They want to watch the winners. They also want to watch games that are competitive. The last time that Sutton Softball won something was 2009, when they were league champions. The people want close games, not games that are complete blowouts.
Some of the other tops were volleyball at 15.4% (16), track at 14.4% (15), and basketball at 13.5% (14), which are more of our good teams that we have here at Sutton. They are also relatively easy to follow.
The issue with softball is that there are so many random rules that it is hard to keep track of everything that is going on. There are also so many things that go on at once, so you never know where to look. People want the ability to come to a sports game and know what they are talking about automatically. Nobody wants to have to study just to go to a sporting event. With softball, you cannot always tell what you are looking at. This causes people to quickly lose interest if they don’t know what is going on.
We have to build up our softball program to be able to win state championships. It starts with not only us working hard, but building up our youth organizations to be able to have feeders into the high school program. We need to work with the youth organizations directly to gain more attraction to the sport.
A few of my teammates and I were lucky enough to run a four-day camp over the summer for the youth league. This helped them learn more skills. I also feel if we have winning youth teams, this would cause them to want to play at a higher level, like the varsity or junior varsity level. I believe by taking these steps, we could see a program on the rise, and the interest in Sutton Softball would increase.
