Walking into practice three players short of a full team, the girls of the TJ JV softball team face the risk of disbanding.

Both of their interest meetings and tryouts have not attracted enough girls this year to make up those who have graduated or moved up to varsity.

“We had tryouts during the first week of tryouts for spring sports for four days, and we had two interest meetings, but sadly, a lot of people did not show up,” sophomore Sajana Challa said.

Due to less promotion, softball has had trouble garnering attention from incoming freshmen as well as other spring sports like crew or tennis.

“We only had seven freshmen come to tryouts, and since some made varsity, we are still short on players,” sophomore Alice Zhao said.

Currently the junior varsity team is planned to disband. However, the JV softball players might still have a chance to play this year.

“We’re only able to have a varsity team and no junior varsity team even though we have a coach so basically all we need is more players,” Challa said.

As of now, JV does not meet for practice, and are in talks of creating a developmental team if they end up not having enough girls to play a game.

“Our JV coach told us that we had to talk to the varsity coach about [a] developmental team,” Zhao said, “If we were good enough in the developmental team that might be able to pull us up into the varsity team.”
The developmental team will consist of those who were a part of the incomplete junior varsity team. The team will practice on varsity game days until they are good enough to join the varsity team. But the developmental team is still an uncertain idea. Unless more girls join, the athletes on girls’ junior varsity softball are not sure if they will get to play the sport they love.