The Little Team Nobody Would Take

The notice

Two weeks later, on a Saturday, the association put out the spring notice.

It went up on the board at the post office and the feed store and on the little sign in front of the Methodist church, which is how I saw it, since I still help out in the church office on Tuesdays.

Sign-ups were the last two Saturdays in March at the shelter house in the park.

Forty-five dollars a child, which covered the shirt, the cap and the umpire fees for the bigger kids. Practices to start the second week of April.

And at the bottom, in smaller print, there was a line I read twice. The T-ball division for five- and six-year-olds still had no volunteer coach.

If nobody signed up to coach by April first, the board would have to cancel T-ball for the season.

I knew how that happened, because it happens in every small town I have ever lived in. T-ball parents are young.

They are working two jobs and driving to Lima and Celina and Coldwater for shifts. Nobody has an hour on a Tuesday evening to herd fourteen five-year-olds around a dirt infield.

The year before, a young mother named Ashley had done it with her husband, and they had moved to Indiana for his work over the winter.

Nobody had stepped up since. The notice had been running for a month and the line at the bottom had not changed.

I took a picture of it with my phone, which I almost never do, and I showed it to Bob that evening when he came in from the garden.

He put on his reading glasses and held my phone out at arm’s length and read it.

He did not say anything. He handed the phone back to me and went and washed his hands at the kitchen sink.

But at supper he asked me what time the shelter house opened on Saturday, and I told him nine, and he nodded.