MESAC Softball tournament was from Wednesday April 12th to Sunday April 16th and it was really one to remember.
This was actually the first sport I actually got to travel for, and it being a MESAC sport even more special.
The first day of the tournament we played against the American School Dubai and it was a close came, but we lost 11-13. We also played a game against the American School of Doha in which we also lost 5-14 so we didn’t get off to a great start.
The second day of the tournament was when things started to become a bit of a disaster.
Our pitcher, Santana Baca, had injured her arm by when she was catching a ball during a game, she rolled onto the ground to catch it and in doing so she dislocated her shoulder, and when she rolled again she relocated it (ouch), but her arm is still in recovery and so she isn’t allowed to play any sports for at least 6 weeks. So that sucked. But, luckily we had our backup pitcher Carly, who saved the day and took over as full time pitcher and did an amazing job taking over despite the blazing hot sun.
The next day we played well, and we improved, but we still lost both our games. We lost against the Dubai American Academy (DAA) 7-12, and we lost terribly against the American Community School of Abu Dhabi (ACS), that was a match we prefer, to forget. We lost 2-16, yeah, I know that’s bad, but not nearly as bad as we lost to them on our third and final day.
The third day, the playoffs, started off well with a win. We played against DAA for 4th place, and we actually won, shocking right? We were so happy that we won, and winning that game meant that we got to play ACS for a spot in the finals and if we lost that, we would play in the semi finals for 3rd place.
Our game against ACS was simply a disaster. We lost 18-0, but that’s not even the worst part. During our first inning when AES was fielding and ACS was batting, we had one of our players Dana, collapsed of heat stroke. I can tell you now, that was one of the scariest moments of my life. At least she’s okay though so that’s a relief but we had to end the game early with a win going to ACS due to it.
After our game against ACS, we played against the American School of Doha for third place. We were really determined that game, because we wanted to beat an AES record for Softball, as AES had never won third place or above in softball before.
We did end up losing our game against Doha, but it didn’t matter to us because we had such a fun time playing the game. We also had a lot of fun cheering, because all the other schools had looked up cheers and were using those to cheer each other and we had none, so we made our own. We made individualised cheers for everyone and we were screaming our heads off cheering, I actually partially lost my voice because of how much cheering we did.
This tournament also gave us the opportunity to make new friends from other schools, which was amazing. We especially got to make really good friends with the host school, the American School of Dubai.
One of my favorite memories from the tournament was on our last day. It was after we had the award ceremony, and we had a dinner in front of the tents where we kept our stuff. Since there were not enough tables and seats for everyone on our team to sit, we all simply sat on the ground, indian style. We also invited the American School of Dubai team to join us on the ground, which they did and we sat in one big circle and played a group handgame called “down by the banks”.
Now even though we only got 4th place overall, it didn’t matter to us because we all worked together as a team, and despite the numerous amounts of people who had to be in the ambulance, we came together and we overcame all of that and put in our best.
So this MESAC Softball tournament was really one to remember, hopefully next year more people will try out so that we can have more people to practice with. Next year AES is hosting MESAC Softball, so maybe that will attract more people and maybe we can actually break an AES record and get higher than 4th place.
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