SOFTBALL WILL DO, BUT IVIE FINDS BASEBALL AN IRRESISTABLE LURE

By Al Mattei

Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

You are a member of a professional softball team, having come through American amateur systems which are the envy of the world.

But you also hear an irresistable call, almost as if it was a call from God ....

Tamara Ivie has been around the diamond a while. In 1999, she participated in the highest level of professional softball, as a member of the Virginia Roadsters of the WPSL.

However, for four years, Ivie was a member of the Colorado Silver Bullets, an all-female baseball team matched against professional, semi-pro, and amateur baseball teams around the country.

When the Silver Bullets folded after their 1997 campaign, Ivie found herself without professional baseball, without an activity she grew to love dearly.

She entered national a six-team all-women's baseball league, only to see it fold after one year. This meant that, in the spring of 1999, Ivie found herself with few options.

She got a call from Roadsters' head coach Terri Pearson and Ivie, seeing the lack of options and opportunities elsewhere, joined the team.

"This was a last-minute decision," Ivie says. "I had played with Terri in college (Cal-State Northridge), and I think that's the reason that she called me up, and I signed up two weeks before the season started."

In the 1999 season, Ivie became a rock-solid addition to the Virginia franchise. She vacuumed grounders at third, gunning out runners capable of making it from home to first in a shade over three seconds.

And she becsme a clutch hitter, as she helped win an important game in late July with a bases-loaded double thanks to a patient hitting style, honed over many summers facing both underhand and overhand pitching.

Ivie views her original to play baseball with the Silver Bullets as a necessity as part of her life's journey.

"I didn't want to play softball anymore," Ivie says. "Baseball was a new experience for me. I felt like a kid in a sandbox again. It was the best experience of my life so far. I had to learn a new game, and it was fun."

She grew to love the game of baseball, and developed an appreciation for it. She talks about it in almost anthropological terms. Ivie is a student of baseball and softball, contrasting both the subtle and the obvious.

"Playing baseball, I learned how men think, and I think that men and women think differently on the field," Ivie says. "If I hurt your feelings as a man, I'm going to tell you, and then it's over. Women tend to hold grudges for a week, or two. Maybe, longer. I really enjoyed the in-your-face mentality, because that's what I strive to be."

Part of Ivie's enjoyment of baseball comes as a reaction to having played fastpitch softball all of her life.

"After my last year of college, I got really tired of it: I had played softball since the age of five," Ivie says. "Playing baseball with the Bullets, I didn't have to work (in the off-season) if I didn't want to: I was able to give private lessons two days a week. I can't do that now, and I have to get a full-time job in the off-season."

She talks wistfully about memories of baseball, whether it is her tenure on the Silver Bullets, an amateur over-30 baseball league, or her 1998 women's league experiences. She believes that there is still a value in having women play baseball, despite the occasional physical drawback.

"A man, with my weight and my height, who has been athlete as long as I have, is going to be stronger and faster than I am, no question about it," Ivie says. "Now, the knowledge of the game is different: I can learn quickly and know as much as they can. I have to be given that time to learn the game. If you see the number of wins (the Silver Bullets) had in the first year -- they had six wins -- and our record in their final year -- one over .500 -- we were able to have success by our fourth season. And they say in any business that it takes four years to make it."

She would love to see the Bullets reunite, and she has a perspective on how and why the team was able to succeed to the degree that it did.

"Women playing women does not have the lure of women playing men," Ivie says. "It was not a great crowd-pleaser. But women playing men can still sell in minor-league ballparks. In 1997, we drew, on our own, 27,000 at Coors Field. And that's saying something."