Playing to Win

I bit my nails as I glared out the car window. I hated when my mom talked about my future in sports like it was no more pressing than her grocery list. She probably thought she could swap items out just as easily as replacing Double Stuf Oreos for chocolate chip cookies. ‘No softball at your new school, sweetie? No problem. We’ll just swap it out for scrapbook club.’

Why didn’t she understand, for some things in life, there were no substitutions?

My mom would never dare treat my brothers this way. But then again everything in life was easier for boys, wasn’t it?

I was still trying to absorb the bitter reality my mom had just served as my new high school came into view. The unimpressive brick building was barely visible between the lush, green pine trees. It was a stark difference from my last school in Arizona, and the one before that in California. Before that was New York, then Massachusetts, then California again, then Nevada, then . . .

Honestly, it’s too exhausting to recount.

To say I was used to starting over was an understatement. Each year brought a new school, a new start, a new team. That’s the deal when your dad is David Prince, retired MLB legend turned college baseball coach. He had to go where the jobs were and we had to go with him.

Well, not all of us.

Not anymore.

This was the first time I’d be starting at a new school alone. I was used to having my brothers with me to help ease the transition. But as of last year, I’m the last of the Prince kids without a high school diploma.

Sometimes being the youngest is the worst. Actually, it’s always the worst.

I love my family don’t get me wrong, but there are a few things you probably need to know to understand where I’m coming from.

First of all, I’m the youngest of five children. All of them boys. Except me of course. The funny thing is, I was supposed to be a boy. Or at least that’s what the doctors thought.

How they could get something like that wrong in this day and age is beyond me, but it’s just my luck that they did.

My parents were expecting baby number five to be another bouncing baby boy. One more to add to the Prince brood of blue-eyed boys; Sam, Zach, Luke and Will. But what they got was a big old surprise.

Me.

The crazy thing is . . . sometimes I think my life would be a heck of a lot easier if I’d just been born the boy everyone was expecting. Because being a tomboy isn’t easy.

By the time I was born my name had already been painted on my blue nursery wall and printed on my token Prince infant-sized baseball jersey. Luckily, my parents picked a name a girl could rock—Alex.

That’s me—Alex Prince.

Actually, my name is one of my favorite things about me. It has swagger. It’s probably the best thing to come out of my doctor’s gender blunder. If my mom had known she was having a baby girl, she would’ve named me something ridiculous like Rosebud or Petunia. As it was, she’d made my dad repaint my room pink, and traded out all my practical baby boy clothes for frilly things made of ruffles and lace.

I get it. I really do. My mom had been an army of one in a house of testosterone for a long time. When I came along, she thought she was finally getting reinforcements. The trouble was, she got me, a total tomboy.

By the time I could walk she knew she could kiss her ideas of pedicures and princess parties goodbye. My idea of dress-up was putting on my dad’s old baseball jersey and playing catch with the boys.

At sixteen, not much has changed.

My mom still desperately decorated every new bedroom of mine in powdery pink pastels and I still wore baseball hand-me-downs and played catch with boys. But now, I wasn’t toddling after them—more like running circles around them.

The truth was, I was a good athlete. More than good. Thanks to the tough love of my brothers and tutelage of my dad, I could outplay just about anyone who stepped foot on a baseball field with me—male or female.

But if the sinking feeling in my chest was any indicator, I wouldn’t be doing any of that at this new softball-less school of mine.

I wasn’t sure how my dad was going to pull a softball team out of thin air, but he’d never let me down before. He didn’t seem as bothered as my mom that his daughter had turned out to be a tomboy. I decided not to waste time dwelling on my current sports dilemma. I had other things to worry about. Like not being pegged as the weird new girl.