Women's Fastpitch EuropeanCup

Today I went with Margreet and Lotte to Haarlem to watch the Women's Fastpitch EuropeanCup. It is with all the top teams from different countries and its about 2 weeks long. Tomorrow is the championship day. There were teams from Netherlands, Russia, Austria, Italy, Germany, Czech, Croatia, England, Sweden, Belgium, Spain and a few others. Today we watched games all day and the first game was between the Fiorini Forli from Italy versus Moskovia Marino from Russia. We sat on the first base side so that we could have the sun on our backs since it was finally a beautiful day. As we were sitting there and watching them warmup and get ready for the game to start I thought one of the girls on the Italian team looked familiar and I was right. It was Stacy Nelson, the pitcher from Florida. Her hair is what really gave her away. She didnt pitch this game but Italy beat Russia very easily.

Next we watched the Viladecans of Spain play the London Angels from Great Britain.  It was a pretty close game until the end when Spain beat London by I think 3 runs or so. We then left and got some food while we waited to watch another game at 6pm. We walked around the park a bit when we got back because we were so full and had time to kill. There were 2 different fields at this complex and they were both very nice. We walked over to the baseball field where all the teams warmup and we saw Stacy warming up pitching so we went and stood behind the fence and got to watch her warmup her pitches. It was pretty cool. Then you heard her ask her catcher "Was that pitch faster than the others? Oh and are my shorts awkwardly high?" haha it was pretty funny. We then stayed over by the 2nd field and watched the beginning of Stacy's game where Italy played Russia again. They easily beat them 4-0 and she was pretty much untouchable. It was really cool to watch her throw in person since I saw so much of her on tv during the college world series. I took some pictures of her.

After watching that game for a while we walked over towards the first field to watch that game which was between 2 of the teams from the Netherlands that are in the tournament. While we were walking over I thought I saw a man who looked like Wolfi, who is the guy that sets this whole thing up for Americans to come over and who is also engaged to one of my former coaches at Redlands. I walked closer and when I was sure it was him I touched him on the shoulder and re-introduced myself and we talked for about 15 minutes. It was really random once again but also very cool. After finishing talking to Wolfi I met back up with Margreet and Lotte to finish watching the 2 teams from Netherlands play and then we came home. Here are a few more pictures of the complex (the first/main field)

On the way home from Haarlem we passed the Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and I took a few pics from the car..

Tomorrow I am going to be watching more softball since Lotte has a game with the Juniors team at the Orioles and then we are going to watch a game of 2 teams in our league. Until then..Doei!

-Olivia