St. Louis Diamond Cats

Cats... You need to call and give the hotel your credit card number to hold your room for the State Tournament in Ft. Leonard Wood. It is possible all 5 teams will be going. The tournament is June 16th - 18th. We reserved rooms for Friday and Saturday nights. If we don't play Friday, we will probably have really early games on Saturday, so we figured we would want that Friday night room. Plus, it is possible we will play Friday night. So, please call soon. If you do not call by June 2nd, the rooms go back into inventory at a higher rate. We have 3 hotels with rooms. Neil wants us (16U team) to use the Fairfield Inn for all of our families. Please call 573-336-8600 and reserve your room from the block of rooms under STL Diamond Cats - Neil Seltzer. We have 20 rooms in this hotel, all doubles and non-smoking. The rate is $74 per night plus taxes. I would think we would need at least 12 rooms. We have 13 girls, and it depends on if all families go or not. For those of you with the 10U team, also, the 3 hotels are in a very close vicinity of each other...within walking distance. So, if the other teams are at a different hotel, it shouldn't matter. However, I will let Gary figure out how to divvy up the other rooms among his teams. If a family is unable to go, and your daughter will be rooming with someone else, let us know. We would be willing to take someone. Or, we could do the same thing as last year with some of the girls getting one room themselves - with parent supervision. They seemed to enjoy that last year. So, let us know if there are any extra girls without parents so we can reserve enough rooms.

The ASA Preseason Tourney this past weekend (Apr 28th - 30th)at ABC Park was a total rainout. We did get one game in Friday night against the Doom which we lost 6 to 5.

In a very close vote, the 2006 Diamond Cats team captains have been selected. Congratulations to Keri, Allison and Jenna.

The Diamond Cat results for this past weekend (Apr. 22nd - 23rd) USSSA World Series Qualifier is as follows:

• Saturday, April 22nd at 1:20 pm on McNair Park field #2 WON 5 - 4
• Saturday at 2:40 pm on McNair field #3 LOST 4 - 2
• Saturday at 8:30 pm on McNair field #1 WON 2 - 1
• Sunday at 9:20 am on Wappelhorst field #3 LOST 4 - 0

Diamond Cats 16U earned a 4th Place Finish! Not exactly the finish we were looking for, but still better than 1/2 the teams out there! We really looked rusty at the plate and had a few mental mistakes in the field. You could tell we had the weekend off since our last tournament. We really need to get outside and practice. Don't get discouraged, though. We still are working really hard and we will start to see improvement the more we play. Keep your heads up and your minds in the game. See you next weekend. We will let you know as soon as we have a schedule.

(04/10/06) - Results for the Show Me Showcase in Jefferson City at the Fields of Legends complex are as follows: Sunday, April 9th @10:30 am vs. Central Missouri Crush (Bushman)on Field #4 WON 5 - 4 @1:30 pm vs. Legion of Doom (Cjeka) on Field #3 LOST 6 - 1 @4:30 pm vs. Unity Elite on Field #4 LOST 3 - 1 We ended up 4th place in this tournament and faced the best competition we have seen so far this season - besides the game with Chaos last weekend. We really had a decent weekend, but saw our batting averages plummet as a team. We need to get some consistency at the plate, but hopefully that will come with time and when we get all our team playing softball every week. We need to keep in mind that the elite teams in our age bracket don't have 50% of their girls playing other sports. Most of them practice once a week, hit once a week, and all of them work with private hitting instructors another day a week. We just don't have the ability to do that yet. Once we play regularly as a complete team, we will have better results. Our pitching was great! Congrats to Bree, Jana & Lindsay. Now we will need to get the gloves and bats to back them up. Keep in mind it is early in the season, and we will only get better. Think how much further along we are this year than we were a year ago. Good job on 4th place, girls!