Ummm, I said I am venting. If you don't want to read it, you can skip my post.
DD also plays basketball. The team is well managed. No dad coaches. No bias opinions. Every kid plays the position she wants to play. All games are posted with plenty of advanced notice. Coach emails us all the time letting us know what's expected, and this guy coaches 18 teams! No more than 10 kids per game so everyone gets play time. No lying about playing tournaments, no lying about the number of kids on the team (try having 14-15 players per softball game that has 3 innings, and I would want to see if you enjoy that,) no lying about girls can play whatever position they want off season. This town does not have good softball team, period. DD has played plenty of other sports for us to know what good coaching looks like. Until you've been there, don't judge. If you like paying $1,000 per season and $120 per month on pitching lessons only to get 4 innings of pitching (15 pitches per inning) for the entire season, be my guest.
There is some great advice on the 2 pages of this thread. We have all been where you are. It's a very tough sport and even tougher when coaches don't reward playing time based on effort or even performance. I posted our story on another thread but in summary my DD worked as hard as the hardest working kids on her 10U and 12U teams but was never given the chance to pitch. We had several conversations about quitting and focusing on other sports but DD refused to give up. There were 5 girls who pitched on her 12U team and the coaches begged us to give it up and even said you're DD won't even make the HS team (4,000 students) let alone pitch.
Well guess what? DD was the starting Varsity pitcher as a freshman and led them to the semi's of states with a 20-4 record... Those other 4 kids? Not one of the them even made the HS team.
NEVER let anyone tell your DD what she can or can not do, or even worse allow her to give up based on them not believing in her.
Find that coach that sees more in her than she does in herself and turn her over to that coach. Forget the costs of this sport, if you are worrying about that then it's gonna get really hard very soon as the travel amps up.
Keep your kid in this and come back here in a few years to tell the same story I tell.