Girls of Summer: In Their Own League by Lois Browne Page B

manager was reportedly “carrying his signed resignation around in his pocket and has been dissuaded from presenting it to Ken Sells only by the pleas of his club officials.”
    Whatever the pressure applied to be rid of Kloza, the All-American’s managers could not rest easy. The mere fact that they piloted a losing team was grounds for dismissal.
    As for Allington, once he settled into Rockford, Harrell’ s reservations seemed unfounded – for a while.
    “He was really pretty decent for that first year,” she says .
    Rockford’s management certainly thought so . The club made it out of the cellar and into the first division by the end of Allington’s first season.
    Allington’s virtues and fau lts sprang from the same source – he was baseball through and through. He had begun his career in Kansas and later played professionally with the Pacific Coast League before he turned to coaching women’s softball.
    He also worked for the technical department of Twentieth-Century Fox, and would occasionally surface as a bit player in films, including It Happens Every Spring, a baseball picture starring Ray Milland.
    Many All-American managers had already settled in the Midwest before they began working for the League, but Allington had family ties in California. He was divorced, but his teenage daughter lived there with relatives. Nonetheless, the profile of the League was growing, and Allington was happy to take on the job of managing the second-division Peaches. It was the kind of challenge he liked.
    Allington was an interesting figure . His strongest endorsements came courtesy of those who never played for him. More than any other manager, he taught his teams how to play baseball.
    He insisted on the basics; daily practice was mandatory . Players were expected to master the hit-and-run, the bunt, the proper fielding techniques, and to do so quickly.
    On the road, players had a 10 a.m. wake-up call, followed by a team meeting an hour later . The purpose of these meeting was to memorize the contents of the rule book, by means of question-and-answer sessions.
    After a game was over, aboard the bus heading to the next game, Allington would hold court behind the driver. Every play – winning or losing – would be dissected, every player challenged to justify her performance.
    Some managers never discussed a game . Once it was over, it was history. Many players on other teams would have rebelled against such rigors, but Allington took care to select players who wanted to learn, to absorb his expertise. He was an expert talent-spotter.
    Dorothy Ferguson credits him with exploiting her potential:  “I was never a hitter, but I could run and I had a good arm . So be brought those things out in me.”
    Allington was not liked by everybody all the time . He would stop at nothing to motivate his players; it was his way or the doorway. Dottie Kamenshek says that you learned or cracked under the strain.
    Players with fragile egos – or rookies, accustomed to small-time success – made painful adjustments, or quit, or asked to be traded. Others, like Kamenshek, weathered the rough patches in return for demonstrable gain. She would stay after practice for additional instruction:  “He’d put a handkerchief on the first or third baseline to mark the place he wanted the bunt to stop. And we’d practice for hours to get it there.”
    Kamenshek was left-handed, and Allington taught her to delay assuming her stance until the last possible moment, then drop the bunt towards third and run away from it:  “That way, you got two steps toward first before the ball was even on the ground.”
    But all was not smooth in their relationship. In 1945, Allington cost her the League’s batting championship.
    “ I was leading, going into the last two weeks,” she says, “and for some reason he came up to me and said, ‘So you think you can hit. You haven’t learned anything yet.’ I suppose he thought it would make me hit better. I