IN BETWEEN INNINGS: XINCHENG ELEMENTARY BASEBALL TEAM documentary photography, Taiwan, 2026
project manage Kris Chiu | journalist Zero
photography Evelyn Lee | short video (InThink Creative)

We entered Xincheng in Hualien in the late afternoon, beginning with a conversation with Coach Hu before moving into the baseball team’s daily rhythm. As evening settled, the work shifted from introduction to observation, staying with the team through the night and into the early hours of the next day.

This project follows a youth baseball team through proximity and time, staying close to routine as it unfolds across days.

From the moment the day begins, life moves in a continuous structure shaped by both training and care. Beyond practice on the field, the children’s routines extend into homework, tutoring sessions, studying, and periods of rest. Evenings are spent moving between schoolwork and shared spaces, followed by washing, changing, and the everyday maintenance of living together. These parallel rhythms sit alongside training, forming an extended system of repetition that holds the day in place.

From 4 a.m. onward, the day begins in darkness: waking, leaving for the coastline, running, training, eating, studying, gathering, washing, resting. The sequence repeats with little variation, but over time it settles into something steady—not defined by single moments, but by return and continuity.

At dawn along the Hualien coast, movement begins before light fully arrives.

The shoreline becomes part of the training itself.  Wind, humidity, the sound of waves, and the slow shift of daylight accompany each repetition. The landscape is not a backdrop, but something the body moves through and gradually learns with.  Over time, these conditions become inseparable from the rhythm of training.

Rather than isolating moments of performance, the work remains with what surrounds them. The intervals between actions begin to matter as much as the actions themselves: waiting, transitioning, maintaining, recovering. Time appears less as a sequence of events and more as something accumulated through repetition—shared meals after training, pauses before practice, laundry hanging in the wind, conversations carried through fatigue. An everyday infrastructure takes shape through these repetitions, often unnoticed precisely because of its consistency.

Within this structure, three coaches move closely with the team, each taking on different forms of presence that extend beyond training alone. Among them, Coach Hu stands out not only within the field, but within the wider fabric of Xincheng itself—someone whose work and attention connects the team to broader forms of support, and to the ongoing life of the community around them. In this sense, coaching becomes less a fixed role than a set of relations that hold the team in place across time.

Within this structure, three coaches move closely with the team, each taking on different forms of presence that extend beyond training alone. Among them, Coach Hu stands out not only within the field, but within the wider fabric of Xincheng itself—someone whose work and attention connects the team to broader forms of support, and to the ongoing life of the community around them.

The team moves through these days without clear separation between training and care, instruction and everyday maintenance.

One folds into the other, quietly, through repetition.