After it was over, the message was very, very clear.
"We were sitting on the bus going home, and there wasn't a dry eye there," Chillicothe softball coach Greg Phillips said. "After a while, the girls came up to me and laid it out -- 'Coach, if we don't do that again, we're all quitting.'"
The Cavaliers softball players were talking about the afternoon they'd spent with the Pioneer School's preschool class -- an afternoon of T-ball, of romping around on the playground, and of new experiences.
And it made an impact.
"Those girls were serious about what they said, too," Phillips said. "They had that look in their eyes. I've seen it before, and it's not a look you want to be on the other side of. To have 11 girls and 22 eyes looking at you like that, you could tell what that day meant to them."
Wednesday afternoon, the Cavaliers softball team -- made up almost entirely of freshmen and sophomores -- made the trip to the Pioneer School as the first meeting of what Phillips -- and the team -- hope will become a regular ritual.
"For one thing, it's always good for a teenager to see how much you can mean to somebody by putting yourself out there and doing something like this," Phillips said. "I've wanted to get us out into the community and make contact on something for a while. We have a connection through (an administrator) at CHS and the principal at Pioneer School, and it just seemed to make a lot of sense.
"We're such a young team that a lot of our girls are going to be teammates for three, four years, which means that we can have the same girls around the Pioneer School's kids for a long time."
Wednesday started out as a big day for Chillicothe's girls, then just kept getting bigger.
"We got out of school early, fed the girls some pizza and then went up to the Center to meet the kids," Phillips said. "They brought two busses in, and our girls just split up -- six on one side, five on the other -- and met the kids as they got off the bus.
"It was a little awkward at first, but after we met them we took them into the gym and, after they introduced us, we started playing some T-ball. It only took about 15 minutes before you could see the personalities starting to come out, and when that happened, our girls really warmed up. We helped them run the bases, helped them hit -- things like that. And, as a coach, of course I was there scouting too.
"After that was over, we took them out on the playground, and our girls were just in heaven out there. And there was something -- and I'm getting teared up just thinking about this now. There was a boy there who couldn't get up to the slide, and I asked if I could take him down it. I'm about 6-1, and I had to do a lot of (maneuvering) to get down this slide with him on top of me, but he was just cracking up the whole time.
"That was something that probably burned 30 calories for me and didn't take much effort. But what you could see that it brought to his life -- that was special. And that was going on all over the place, with every one of our girls and with every one of the kids."
As touching as the afternoon was, there was still some business to be taken care of at the end of the day.
"It was so emotional that, as a coach, I was just wondering if I might have drained our players, because we still had a game to play," Phillips said. "I want them to have the pride of being a varsity softball player at Chillicothe High School, but I was really wondering if it might have backfired that first day. But then we go out and play Marietta, and we win 3-1. I turned to my assistant at the end of it and I just said, 'What a day for this program.' Not because of the win, but just the way everything kind of melded together."
Whether it was just the experience of the day, or if it was his players' insistence at the end of things, Phillips and the Cavaliers already have plans to meet up with the Pioneer School's preschool program in a few weeks.
"May 13, we're going to bring them to CHS and have a cookout and have another day with them," Phillips said. "We're going to play some more Tee Ball and hopefully keep this going forward. You know, this is a good community in the way it supports the Pioneer School with levies and things, but I don't think enough credit goes to the people who work with those kids and what they do. But we had some girls who said, after it was over Wednesday, that they could see themselves doing that as a career. So we might have also been introducing some 14- and 15-year-old girls to their future. That's touching."
