Softball team members talk about what is inside their team bags.
Junior Grace Veik brought up the useful tool pre-wrap, a thin and rubbery mesh adhesive used as a non-irritating substitute for medical tape, as she took me through what was in her bag. The team uses rolls of pre-wrap to keep hair out of their faces.
“It’s just like colored mesh,” Veik said. “You can put it in, like, make it into a headband.”
Their expansive bags hold all the gear that they need for a game or practice. Catchers’ mitts, turf shoes, and hair ties. The most noticeable items that are in their bags are their two bats.
“Some people, they just have different lengths,” Sophomore Deanna Hunsicker said. ”And some people, they might carry their old bat, in case you hit off the machine, which you don’t want to break the new bat.”
Not only did the team have the necessary gear, but some had meaningful items in their bag. Freshman Aurora Nelson said she kept the team’s kindness paper inside her bag to look at before her games. This is a paper where everyone on the softball team wrote one kind thing about each other, “Quotes of kindness,” Nelson said.
They have unique game day essentials and rituals ranging from needing an energy drink to putting on their clothes backward. One example of Nelson’s game day rituals is applying the daily devotional to the game she is about to play.
“I always do a game day devotional before my games,” Nelson said. ”I go on my phone and I look up today’s devotional, and I somehow apply it to the day in my life the game that I have.”
