On Putting One's Eye on the Ball

Gym class was, more often than not, an utter nightmare for me during my school years. There were a few activities I liked and even excelled in (obstacle courses, jumping rope, the flexed arm hang test), but we never seemed to spend much time on those activities. For the most part, PE time meant chaotic, ragtag versions of team sports.

I was horrible at sports. Really horrible. I found the "team dynamic" incomprehensible to begin with, to the point where I often had to be reminded which team I was on. I generally had no clue what I was actually supposed to be doing at any given time. Team sports in particular seem to require a type of attentional breadth and vigilance I can't reliably access, and that seems to make other kinds of (necessary) cognition fizzle out from overload very quickly (which is part of the reason I hated both gym class and mandatory recess kickball growing up -- they didn't relax me or help me concentrate on studies afterward, they just left me confused and frazzled and more prone to melting down).

Plus, everything seemed far too fast-moving and unpredictable for me to possibly keep up with.* The mechanics of throwing, kicking, catching and hitting projectiles flying or rolling in my direction also pretty much eluded me throughout my entire elementary and secondary education. My motor planning was so bad that I couldn't even catch a softball in a glove when the teacher rolled it to me across the ground from a few feet away.

My memories of participation (if you can call it that) in ball-based games consist mainly of whirling confusion, garbled voices echoing through gymnasiums, getting hit in the head by balls I didn't see coming, jeers from classmates, nasty-smelling mesh shirts, getting picked last for teams, not getting picked at all and having to be "assigned" by the teacher (to a chorus of groans on the part of those who ended up "stuck" with me), and wandering in day-dreamy circles in the distant outfield.

As a grownup, I am still not so much into sports; I find watching them to be mind-numbingly boring, and I have no desire whatsoever to go out and join the local softball league. Nevertheless, it does seem that some skills have come online that I'd never in a million years have been able to predict the appearance of.

For years I thought I was totally hopeless at hitting a ball with a bat -- I don't recall ever actually hitting the ball (beyond the occasional accidental "bunt" or foul) during any childhood bat-oriented game session. This didn't bother me in particular, as I had no ambitions to become a pro athlete, but at the same time, I remained mystified at how anyone could possibly manage to use a stick to hit something flying through the air at them.

Recently, though, I somehow found myself in an impromptu backyard bat-and-ball session in which me, my SO, and his little niece and nephew were taking turns throwing a ball so one of the others could swing at it. I hadn't attempted to hit a ball with a bat for probably at least thirteen years prior to this session, and I had no expectations whatsoever of actually hitting when it came my turn to try.

Nevertheless, I hit it. Matt threw it again. I hit it again. I kept hitting it. I was shocked! Somehow, something about the relationships between bat and ball and timing and movement had managed to coalesce in my brain over many years of doing absolutely nothing to improve my hitting prowess.

In a flash, I also found that I understood what it meant to "keep one's eye on the ball" -- I'd heard that directive many times in my youth, but it had always sounded amusingly grotesque or obvious (in the "of course my eye is on the ball, but that doesn't tell me how to hit it with the bat!" sense) rather than actually descriptive of anything that would help me hit. Now, I could grok that keeping my eye on the ball actually had something to do with keeping track of where the ball was in relation to the bat, a concept which simply hadn't connected before.

Matt hadn't ever seen me try to hit a ball before, so he had a hard time figuring out what I was making such a big deal over, and he commented that he was giving me "easy" pitches. And I don't doubt that in the grand scheme of things, they were easy pitches -- even I could tell they weren't exactly fastballs, and I was using a kid-sized foam-covered bat -- but that didn't matter. Previously I'd not been able to hit any pitches!

Again, I'm not planning on going out for any teams. But I did want to write about my experience with apparent spontaneous batting ability, as it never ceases to amaze me how nonlinear skill acquisition can be at times!

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* Minor exceptions to this were badminton -- which utilized a somewhat slower-moving projectile -- and indoor hockey, which allowed me to pretty much ignore the humans and concentrate on where the puck was. Somewhat amusingly, hockey is the only activity that managed to get me sidelined several times for "violence", as apparently I was pretty possessive of the puck when I had it, and not above thwacking people with my stick!