The Parent Trip: Kelly and Harold Johnson of Williamstown

Softball is never just about the bat, the ball, and the bases. The game yields life lessons - about confidence, interdependence, and turning loss into a chance to learn.

That's what Kelly tries to drive home to the Lady Knights, the varsity girls she coaches at Sterling High School in Somerdale, N.J.

And that commitment, along with her infectious laugh - "I could pick her out in a stadium of a million people, just by that laugh," says Harold - made him want to keep talking to the woman in the multicolor dress he met at a July Fourth party in 2010.

By night's end, they'd exchanged numbers. He broke the ice with a roguish text claiming he could hit a home run off one of her pitches. They never put that challenge to the test, but they've talked every day since.

Kelly had played ball since childhood; her backyard had both a pitching mound and a "net thing" her parents fashioned so they wouldn't have to catch every ball. At first, her pitches were erratic enough to earn the nickname "wild thing," but she worked and worked to hone her arm and her competitive edge.

"My dad taught me that any sport is 90 percent mental. Believing you can do it. Having confidence in yourself."

After that Fourth of July party, the couple met for dinner at P.J. Whelihan's, which segued into an unlikely first-date movie: the animated feature Despicable Me. For Harold, it was a welcome counterpoint to a grim year during which his mother, father, and grandmother had all died. "It was a dark place, and Kelly was some light exactly when I needed it."

He moved into her Sicklerville townhouse; a year later, while hanging out at the friend's home where they'd first met, Harold coaxed the group to the basement, sang an original song, "Never Count Me Out," while his uncle played guitar, then dropped to one knee and proposed.

If the biological clock was ticking, its beat remained muted. They decided to buy a house first, then think about kids. And once they started trying to conceive, neither expected the process to take a year. Finally, in October 2015, just when Kelly had quit counting the days since ovulation, she ducked into the bathroom with a drugstore test stick.

"I remember coming out and saying, 'I think we're pregnant.' " They announced the news to her family at Halloween with matching shirts: Harold's said "Thing 1," and Kelly's said "Thing 2," with smaller letters over her belly reading "Thing 3."

Softball practice begins in March, but winter workouts were on the calendar. It never crossed Kelly's mind to sit out the season. "I love the kids; I felt like I couldn't let them down." So, in spite of her constant first-trimester nausea - she subsisted on ginger ale and mashed potatoes - she plugged ahead, walking and using a stationary bicycle to keep herself limber and fit.

It wasn't easy to cede control, but in the spring, Kelly stopped pitching for the team's batting practices; later, she gave up coaching third base. The girls helped by hauling the gear and urging their coach to stay hydrated.

The baby - a girl, they learned, and in breech position - was scheduled to be born via C-section June 10. Kelly made two private vows: to see her history classes through the unit on the Cold War, and to see her team through the final game of the season.

By the end of May, they were in the playoffs. The Lady Knights clinched a quarterfinal game against Buena Regional High School. Six days later, the day of their semifinal game against Audubon, Kelly headed for the doctor; she was having intermittent contractions and thought her water might have broken.

False alarm: The contractions were 20 minutes apart and the amniotic sac was still intact. She was back on the softball field by afternoon, in time to see her team come from behind in the seventh inning and win, 6-5.

They faced archrival West Deptford on June 2, the day before prom, in the midst of a heat wave. "The running joke was that I was going to give birth on the field," Kelly says. "When they were in the field, I sat. The girls would tell me to calm down."

Harold had left work early to watch his wife in action. "She's super-tough," he says. "She missed zero games all season. I think she willed herself not to have the baby there."

In the end, the Lady Knights lost, 4-1. And 16 hours later, Kelly and Harold were on their way to Virtua Voorhees Hospital, with a smartphone app timing her contractions: two minutes apart. Her labor had begun early in the morning, but she urged Harold to go to work, googled "What do contractions feel like?" and started a load of laundry before texting him to come home right away.

By the time they reached triage, she was six centimeters dilated. Kelly was admitted at 11:09 a.m. Kennedy was born, via C-section, at 11:58.

The couple had known for months they were having a girl, and they'd talked at length about the lessons they wanted to pass on. "So many teenage girls today lack confidence and can be so hard on themselves," Kelly says. Harold wants Kennedy to know "you can be a lady; you can be tough; you can be smart."

He'd always been uncertain about becoming a parent. But the moment he saw the obstetrician lift up his infant daughter, something shifted: "I felt this sense of purpose that had been welling up in me for weeks."

There was that slight held breath - his own - before the baby's first cry, and her prodigious black hair, and the two words that rose from the doctors' medical murmur, words that, in this context, were a beginning and not an end. "She's out," they said.

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