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Building strong young women on and off the field. 🥎🧡 South-metro Twin Cities youth fastpitch softball Honoring the legacy of Coach Jim Jensen through mentorship, teamwork, and a love of the game. 📲 Text "MIRAGE" to 651-888-8396

11/02/2026

We don't actually think most of these kids are going to play softball for a living.

That's not pessimism, it's arithmetic. A 12U roster is eleven or twelve girls. Some will play in high school. A couple might play after that. For nearly all of them this sport ends at some point, and the rest of their life keeps going.

So whatever we're actually building here has to survive that.

What a kid learns in this program is how to be coached. How to be the person the people around her can count on when it's cold and nothing's at stake. How to be told she's capable of more than she thought and find out it was true. How to lose on a Saturday and show up on a Sunday anyway.

None of that is softball. Softball is just the thing we happened to have available to teach it with.

That's the whole idea behind the line we keep coming back to — building strong women to impact more than the softball field. Not better hitters. Not a trophy case. Women who turn out to be a problem for anybody who underestimated them.

Winter starts now. Cages in December, dome in January, and a season that begins in earnest long before June does.

10/29/2026

Three sayings are what Jim Jensen left behind. Not one of them mentions softball.

Leave every place better than you found it.

It is never too much to ask you to do what you are capable of.

There is no I in team.

That's the whole inheritance. A man who coached elementary through high school across a variety of sports, and what outlasted him is one rule about the place you're standing in, one about the standard somebody holds you to, and one about the other eight kids on the field. Nothing about hitting. Nothing about winning. Nothing you could put on a tryout sheet.

Which is roughly the point. You can teach a kid to field a short hop in a winter. Those three take a lot longer, and they're the ones she keeps.

Ten weeks on this page, and we've mostly written about short hops, bat sizing, and the ride home from a bad game. All of it traces back to those three lines. That's the program — a nonprofit club in the south metro, home of the Minnesota Mirage, built on three sentences and not much else.

So: a question instead of a pitch, and we'd rather read the answers than keep talking about ourselves.

Somebody once expected more of you than you expected of yourself, and it stuck. Who was it?

10/28/2026

Nobody grows up wanting to play first base. It's a position you get asked to try.

Aria #9 has played just about everywhere for us over the years. That happens to a certain kind of player — the one a coach can move, because she'll go, and because wherever you put her the inning doesn't come apart. It's a genuinely useful thing to be. It's also a strange thing to be, because you never quite get a spot that's yours.

Then one game we needed a first baseman, and her name came up as somebody worth giving it a shot.

Here's what people outside the game miss about first base. It looks like the place you hide somebody. It's actually where every other infielder's mistake goes to get fixed. A throw that pulls her off the bag, a short hop in the dirt, a ball sailing with a runner two steps away — none of those are errors if the first baseman comes up with it. They're outs. The shortstop gets the line in the scorebook. The first baseman is the reason there's a line at all.

Since that game, Aria has made that play over and over, on throws that were never hers to begin with.

She didn't pick the position. Somebody asked whether she'd try it, she said yes, and she turned it into the place this defense gets bailed out.

10/27/2026

The most important coaching your daughter got this season happened in the car.

Not the ride to the game. The ride home from the bad one. She went 0-for-4, she threw one away, and for the first eight minutes nobody says anything.

What goes into that silence is the whole thing. A twelve-year-old doesn't come off the field with a verdict on herself yet. She borrows yours.

So here's the only thing we'd ask of a parent this winter, and it costs nothing. In the car, be her parent, not her second coach. Ask what was fun. Tell her you liked watching her play. If she wants to take the at-bat apart, she'll bring it up — and then you can talk about it the whole way home.

That isn't going easy on her. The expectations you set are the part that costs nothing and changes the most, which is the entire reason this program exists. It's just that almost nobody ever raised a kid's expectations of herself in a car ride after a loss.

The hard version is the kid who asks you straight out how she did. "You competed" is a true answer, and it's usually the right one.

Try it once this week. See what she says when the silence doesn't get filled.

10/26/2026

Your winter plan probably has twelve things on it. By March you'll have gotten three.

That's not a knock on your program. It's one gym night a week against a list somebody wrote in October with the best intentions — bunting, slap, short hops, footwork at second, pitch calling, baserunning reads, two different swings. Every one of them is worth doing. None of them gets done at eighty minutes a week.

Here's the exercise. Fifteen minutes with your head coaches, before the gym schedule gets locked:

Write down three things you want a 12U kid to be able to do in March that she can't do today. Not twelve. Three. Make them things you could stand there and watch her do — field a short hop on her glove side, get a bunt down with two strikes, take the extra base on a ball in the dirt.

Give each one a station and leave it there all winter. Same three stations every gym night, December through March. They'll groan about it in January and be visibly better in February. A drill rotated out after two weeks never had time to work.

Put a name on each one. Not who runs it — who owns it, and can tell you in March whether it actually worked.

That's the whole plan, and you don't need us for any of it.

Where we'd be useful is the one of your three that nobody on your volunteer staff was ever taught themselves. Usually that's the catcher, or the swing. If that's where you are, message the page in the next week or two. Winter schedules are locking right now, and a conversation in late November is a conversation about next year.

And the part we'd rather say out loud than have you wonder about: if we're in your gym, we're there to coach, not to scout, and a clinic is not a tryout. Some of our players did come up through association programs, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. What we can promise is how we behave in your gym.

10/22/2026

Go find the first picture you took of her this season and the last one. Put them next to each other.

Same kid, one season apart. The glove is in a different place. She's standing differently in the box. In the first one she's looking over at the coach, and in the last one she isn't, because by then she already knew.

That's a thing a season gives you no other way to see. Nobody watches a twelve-year-old get better in real time — it happens at about a quarter-inch a week, and you were standing too close to it.

We're putting the season album together now, and that pair is exactly what we're after. Not the best moment. The two moments.

If you've got a pair like that, send them to the page in a message — one pair, one picture, twenty, whatever you've got, any size. Nothing goes up without us asking you first, and "that one's just for us" is always a fine answer.

And go look at the two photos tonight either way. That part's for you, not for the page.

10/21/2026

Most hitters learn to hit it hard first, then spend years learning to hit it often. Amelia did it the other way around.

Amelia #13 has always found a way to put the bat on the ball. Solid contact, at-bat after at-bat. That's the hardest thing in this sport to teach, and she's had it as long as we've known her.

Here's what's changed: she's getting stronger. Same swing, same consistency, and now the ball comes off the bat a lot harder. That's what happens when strength shows up for a hitter who already knows how to hit.

Contact first, strength second. If we could pick that order for every kid, we would.

Softball parents: which came first for your hitter, the contact or the power?

10/20/2026

Three kids in your gym this winter are deciding whether softball is a thing they do. They are not your best three.

Every in-house roster has them. The kid who turns her head on a ground ball. The one who takes half a step back when the bat comes around. The one who's fine until there's a line behind her and then she can't catch anything.

None of that is effort and none of it is attitude. It's a kid who got asked to be brave in front of thirteen people before anybody asked her to be competent by herself. She's also the one who quietly doesn't sign up next year, and nobody ever writes down why.

Three fixes that cost nothing and fit on a gym floor:

Take the audience away first. Her first reps of the night happen in a corner with one partner and nobody behind her. Fear is a crowd problem at least as often as it's a ball problem, and you can't tell which one you've got while she's in a line.

Shrink the distance, not the ball. Both of you on your knees, six feet apart, underhand short hops. That close, flinching doesn't buy her anything, so her hands get to find out they're faster than the ball. Back up a foot a week and don't skip ahead.

Give her a job that isn't catching. Ten minutes as the receiver at a base on force plays. That's thirty reps of being the kid everybody throws to, and not one of them takes courage. Confidence is mostly just evidence.

What you're protecting isn't her glove. It's whether she's on your roster in two years.

Coaches — who's the kid in your gym you're already worried about come February?

10/15/2026

We're putting together the season album, and the best picture of this season isn't ours. It's on your phone.

Here's what's missing, and it isn't the swings. It's the dugout before a 7 AM pool game. Somebody's little brother asleep in a wagon. Eleven kids in a parking lot working through one bag of pretzels. The one where she's furious. The one where she's laughing two minutes after being furious.

Those are the pictures nobody takes on purpose and nobody deletes either.

If you've got one from this summer, send it to the page in a message — one or twenty, whatever you've got, no particular size or format. Nothing goes up without us asking you first, and if the answer is "that one's just for us," that's a completely normal answer.

They'll go up here later this month as the season album. Not a highlight reel. Just the season, the way it actually looked from the third row of the bleachers.

If you had to pick one photo from her whole season, which one would it be?

10/14/2026

Nobody bats second to lead the team in RBI. Alice did it anyway.

The two-hole is a table-setter's job. Get on base, move the leadoff hitter along, and hand the inning to the bats behind you. It's the spot in the lineup least likely to finish a season at the top of the RBI list.

Alice #12 finished at the top of ours.

The numbers: she hit .750 across a seven-game tournament, and over .500 for the whole fall. Over a full season, that's a hit in every other at-bat. For one tournament, it was three out of every four.

Here's the part we like best, though. Nobody drives in runs from the two-hole alone. Every one of those RBI started with somebody at the bottom of the order or the top of it getting on base and waiting for her. That's not one bat. That's a lineup working.

Softball parents: where does your daughter hit in the lineup, and does she have an opinion about it?

Address

Lakeville, MN
55044

Website

https://jcjathletics.org/

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