It's a sunny April weekend and immunologist Richard Locksley is drilling a cluster of teenage girls: “Hard throws please, hard throws. Way to stay down. Throw it hard over the top, don't sling it from the side.”

Locksley coaches a softball team that includes his twin 13-year-old daughters, Morgan and Sydney. In between jostling and laughing, the players respond to his near-constant chatter during an infield warm up. “Okay, everyone take an easy lap together,” says Locksley, an HHMI investigator at the University of California, San Francisco.

“If the girls are goofing around, throwing their mitts at each other, I know they're ready for a game,” Locksley says. “It's when they're sitting too quietly or looking to me for what to do next, that I know that they're too uptight about the game. Then it's time to stop coaching, diffuse everything, and get them comfortable. Then they'll do fine.”

Locksley hasn't always been so clear about his coaching style. But after seven years, he's come to realize that a well-coached team is one that knows the fundamentals of the game—and has fun. “At the beginning I took it much more seriously if we won or lost. Now I've let that go a little bit.”

Maybe a little, but daughter Sydney says he still takes it seriously enough to review the game during the car ride home. And Morgan smiles: “Sometimes he gets mad when we forget his signs; he thinks they have to be all complicated so the other team can't figure them out.”

When the twins started playing soccer and softball as young kids, Locksley, who played competitive baseball and soccer through college, was content to help the girls' soccer coach and watch softball from the sidelines. But after one season, that changed. Their first softball coach pitched to the girls with a baseball-style overhand, instead of using the underhand style required in softball. “It bugged me that someone wouldn't take the game seriously enough to even learn how to throw the ball right to the girls.”

Illustration: Peter Arkle

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