Ok, so maybe not a thousand words, but the above picture is worth a couple hundred. Strike that, it is worth thousands of words, books should be written about the above picture, but I will keep it much shorter than that.
This past weekend my daughter's travel softball team went to Ceraland Park in Columbus, Indiana and won a tournament. They've won some previous tournaments, they've been together for a couple of years and you can see the improvement in the individuals as well as the team. This weekend they won 6 games in two days going undefeated and winning most games rather easily.
After tournaments like this many go out on the field and take pictures whether they've won or not. This day's championship was played on Mother's Day and after most pics were taken, we got the mom's behind the daughters for a good Mother's Day picture.
And the picture screams what is right and wrong in this world. I've often said that just about every single problem in our country can be taken back to the breakdown of the family. And here you have a team picture with every mother there at the tournament watching their strong daughters win. These are all Title IX mothers (the law passed mandating women equality in sports) who had the chance or did play some type of sport growing up.
And who is taking the picture? The Dads in most cases. Not all could be there and that's not a problem because they've been to many other tournaments. But the family support of these girls individually and collectively says a lot about their future successes.
I teach social studies so I am not naive to think that the socioeconomic status, the location of where these families live, etc has an effect on their successes. These young women are also successful in the classroom and with their behavior, but you can look at these mothers and their fathers and all of them have worked to be successful and offer opportunities for their children. They have taken advantage of whatever advantages they could to help their children be successful.
But it's still early, these girls are 11 - 9 years of age. That's a lot of growing up to do and the most traumatic times are approaching (the teen years), but with their families and especially strong mothers that are pictured here, these young women already have a few steps ahead of their counterparts.
