Mo'ne Davis by Mo'ne Davis

Author:Mo'ne Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER 11

THE CHANCE TO COMPETE

AFTER ALL THE HARD WORK, SACRIFICE, AND DEDICATION, the summer of 2014, when I turned thirteen years old, was the best year of my young life.

That April baseball season started off with a bang.

On a day that was a little chilly but kind of warm, I hit a home run on my very first at bat. The next day, I hit another home run. We were winning, and the bases were loaded, and the ball faded right toward the foul line but stayed fair, and this time it made it over the wall. It was my very first grand slam.

For the next five weeks, I hit a home run every week. I don’t know how I did it. I think I retired from the twelve-year-olds’ team tied with Zion for the most grand slams—that year I hit two.

My pitches were humming also. It was kind of like I had found this zone.

“Physically she had refined her game and had command of her pitches,” Coach Steve says. “There are a lot of kids who throw harder, but none of them pitch.”

But I was throwing pretty hard. One day, Coach Steve brought a radar gun to practice and clocked one of my pitches at sixty-seven miles per hour. Wow! I wasn’t even throwing hard that day.

At the same time, we still played in the Tri-State Elite Baseball League and in weekend tournaments. After school let out in June, we played in the Cooperstown All Star Village tournament again, a thirty-two-team national tournament against teams from all across the country.

We went in as one of the tournament’s underdogs. Some of the other teams were the kind that go out every year to try to recruit the best players they can find. They do whatever it takes to win. Sometimes the kids don’t even know each other. They just fly in and out and don’t see each other in between. Their only goal is to win. That’s about the opposite of the Monarchs, where we see each other almost every day, and everyone plays baseball, basketball, and soccer, even if it’s not their best or favorite sport.

Our first game out, we beat the San Carlos Stingers on the Green Monster, the name of one of the fields that has a twenty-feet-high outfield fence. Then we beat another California team or two and even a Texas team. We proved to ourselves that we could compete with any team in the country.

It was a double-elimination tournament—lose twice and you’re out. We came out of the winner’s bracket with a 5–1 record.

“We went straight from the bottom team to the powerhouse of the tournament,” Scott remembers.

Between games, we lived in the All Star Village together. Our team stayed in the Jackie Robinson bunkhouse. The team right across from us was the Orinda Falcons, from California. We talked to them a lot, and their parents were super nice—they went to McDonald’s and brought us back french fries. We traded pins and undershirts with them and all the other kids.

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