So after Summer ball year two, and my baseball family came
together to give every member of my team an award on top of the participation
trophy they got, and yes I do not agree with participation trophies as a rule
but for kids this age playing games where we do not keep score dangling the
carrot a little bit for them is a good thing. Really that is why I
decided to give out awards based on what my kids actually did on the field
that year. I wanted them to know that I saw how they performed and that I was
proud of them. The awards went over very well and I have to thank my collection
of baseball mom's for helping me get that done. A year and a half later kids
and parents alike still talk about those awards so I know it was worth the
effort and money I put into them.
We also added Fall Ball to the curriculum after
year two and I had about three weeks to find enough kids. Since most of my kids
had now played two years of Tball and where six and older they were all going to
be moving up to Coach Pitch leagues. So we brought back the entire team for
fall ball and got started working on those skills. Of course my whole team came
back but we still needed to find a team to play so I spent three weeks finding
every little kid I could and getting them signed up for ball. Again with the
help of my ever growing baseball family we were able to find enough kids and
even added important pieces of the baseball family for year three.
So it looked like for a long time that we
were not going to have enough kids to play at all. I went to the board and was
like look we just want to play. All my kids are coming back, I will coach both
teams I will pitch the whole game let me go find the kids to play. It took a
minute but we eventually ended up with two teams of 10 kids each. We transitioned
them from Tball to coach pitch and since it was my first experience with fall
ball we made a few critical errors along the way.
To get enough kids and insure that we could
play fall ball that year we moved a handful of Tball kids up to coach pitch
early. It was a mistake that played itself out that fall and the following
spring. So much so that instead of simply coaching one team in year three I
felt so guilty I stayed in Tball to coach all the kids that had to go back down
for one more year even though in my humble opinion most of them were ready,
save one who became a rather large issue.
This kid was five and had all the skills
to play at this level, but he was going into kindergarten and just wasn't
mentally ready to deal with his teammates or how I go about coaching. He didn't
understand that sometimes the coach yells, sometimes the coach has to yell at
the whole team to make his point, and that the coach is never happy. He was
pretty good till school started, and in our neck of the woods it’s all day kindergarten
so it’s a big change and we saw this kid change over night. One game he was the
kid we had seen all season and in practice and the next he just couldn't cope
with it anymore. I would go out and fire my team up and he would cry. I would
yell at my team and he would cry and his mother got really upset and got pretty
ugly with me in some post game comments. Again to their credit, my baseball
moms where the first to come to my defense and at this point we are talking
about moms who had let me coach their kids for three plus seasons. Let me yell
at their kids, make their kids run to fence, and gotten the most out of their
kids that I could.
Fall ball was particularly hard for me because
by that point there were at least two people too many in my marriage and my
personal life and my family were disintegrating all around me. It was hard to
keep all of that in check and it came to be that baseball became my escape from
all that especially after my now ex wife stopped attending games. Baseball was
now my happy place a place where none of the poor choices I had made mattered.
It was the few hours a week that I could be happy and smile, even though I
tried my hardest to screw that up as well. That would become a big part of my
life and the theme for how involved I got from this point moving forward.
Since I worked so hard to get fall ball
off the ground the league invited me to be a member of their board of directors
and it would set up all the things I would come to do in year three.
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