The Little League Coach

Guest Post for The Little League Coach

Cup Stories, Part Three

It’s Official: I Am An Idiot

by Little League Mom (AKA E. Peevie)

I endured the humiliation and purchased the ding-dang cup. My cup troubles were over. Right? Wrong.

C. Peevie was excited about getting a real, big-boy piece of equipment to protect his equipment…until he tried it on. Then he was all, “Um, no, uh-uh, no-way. This hurts. I can’t even walk. I’m not going to wear it.”

Poor C. Peevie. He walked around the house like a bull-rider with a bad back, legs spread and knees bent, trying to get used to the feeling of wearing a salad bowl around his gonads. He moaned and groaned and cried and whined.

“I can’t do it, Mom,” he said. “I can’t wear this thing. I won’t be able to run. I can hardly even walk!”

He hobbled over to the couch, and gently eased himself down, with one arm behind him to support his descent, like a pregnant woman at full-term. “I can’t even sit!” he moaned. “It’s so uncomfortable.”

“You have to wear it if you’re going to play ball,” I reasoned with him. “You’ll probably get used to it after a little while, honey.” Not that I had any real idea; my experience with uncomfortable sports equipment only encompassed sports bras, and as constricting as they could be, I don’t think they ever made me cry.

Well. He wore the cup to practices and games, but he never got used to it, and he complained loudly every single time. I couldn’t imagine why the world of baseball had not come up with a better solution to testicle protection than this one, which was so obviously flawed.

And how did other parents cope with the whining and complaining? Why didn’t more boys just drop out of baseball rather than put up with the discomfort? Were parents offering sedatives to help their boys over the cup-pain hump? It was truly a mystery to me.

And then one day my friend Cuz came up to me after a game. Her son was on C. Peevie’s team, and we sometimes shared rides and stories.

“E. Peevie,” she said to me, with a strange urgency in her voice, “I have to tell you this so you don’t think anything bad happened.”

“Um, OK,” I said, feeling my stomach start to sweat.

“Lefty [her husband] took C. Peevie to the back of van,” she started out, and my eyes saucered and my fist spontaneously clenched, “to try to help him with his cup.”

“He was so uncomfortable,” Cuz continued quickly, “and Lefty figured that something must be wrong. It turns out that the cup was on upside-down.”

Since you’re reading a blog about Little League baseball, you are probably aware that athletic cups are sort of triangle-shaped. In my infinite parental wisdom, I had been loading the damn cup into the jockstrap upside-freaking-down . The wide part was digging into his thighs, and the narrow part pointed up to his abdomen. No wonder he was walking like a cowboy with a hernia. And no wonder he was complaining!

I am an idiot.

C. Peevie is now playing in the Majors, and wears his cup comfortably and uncomplainingly. All is right with the world, and the ‘nads are safely protected.

For more from this author, check out The Green Room (http://greenroomthoughts.blogspot.com/) for posts on the squirrels and the bees, weird things moms save, addictions, loss of sweet innocence, and much more!