If you want a good "sports book", read "The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown.
Here are some quotes from the book...I changed them a little so they apply to softball:
“The trick would be to find which few of them had the potential for raw power, the nearly superhuman stamina, the indomitable willpower, and the intellectual capacity necessary to master the details of technique. And which of them, coupled improbably with all those other qualities, had the most important one: the ability to disregard er own ambitions, to throw her ego away, to leave it swirling in the wake of his shell, and to pull, not just for himself, not just for glory, but for the other girls on the team."
“Perhaps the seeds of redemption lay not just in perseverance, hard work, and rugged individualism. Perhaps they lay in something more fundamental—the simple notion of everyone pitching in and pulling together.”
"The challenges they had faced together had taught them humility—the need to subsume their individual egos for the sake of the team as a whole—and humility was the common gateway through which they were able now to come together and begin to do what they had not been able to do before.”
“And he came to understand how those almost mystical bonds of trust and affection, if nurtured correctly, might lift a team above the ordinary sphere, transport it to a place where nine girls somehow became one thing - a thing that could not quite be defined, a thing that was so in tune with the field and the sky above that effort was replaced by ecstasy. It was a rare thing, a sacred thing, a thing devoutly to be hoped for."
Here are some quotes from the book...I changed them a little so they apply to softball:
“The trick would be to find which few of them had the potential for raw power, the nearly superhuman stamina, the indomitable willpower, and the intellectual capacity necessary to master the details of technique. And which of them, coupled improbably with all those other qualities, had the most important one: the ability to disregard er own ambitions, to throw her ego away, to leave it swirling in the wake of his shell, and to pull, not just for himself, not just for glory, but for the other girls on the team."
“Perhaps the seeds of redemption lay not just in perseverance, hard work, and rugged individualism. Perhaps they lay in something more fundamental—the simple notion of everyone pitching in and pulling together.”
"The challenges they had faced together had taught them humility—the need to subsume their individual egos for the sake of the team as a whole—and humility was the common gateway through which they were able now to come together and begin to do what they had not been able to do before.”
“And he came to understand how those almost mystical bonds of trust and affection, if nurtured correctly, might lift a team above the ordinary sphere, transport it to a place where nine girls somehow became one thing - a thing that could not quite be defined, a thing that was so in tune with the field and the sky above that effort was replaced by ecstasy. It was a rare thing, a sacred thing, a thing devoutly to be hoped for."