June Means Baseball!

Coach-pitch baseball, to be exact. This means the coach pitches to his own team and the coaches are also in the field defensively helping the kids with where to throw the ball, who covers 2nd, that sort of thing.

MUCH different that when I was little when you learned by the big girls yelling at you. The neighborhood I grew up in had (and still does) a pretty nice softball league, not co-ed. It was for 1st-6th graders and every team had an even distribution of little kids and big kids. They even had a "draft" of sorts where they made sure each team wasn't stacked too heavy with big kids. My Dad was my coach & I remember him coming home disappointed or happy about which girls he had or had not gotten. He was always stuck with me, though, ha ha. When I was one of the "big kids" I recall being on-deck and thinking "great. A 1st grader. I'm not gonna even get up." And I can vaguely remember being a 1st grader, a tad afraid of making a mistake for fear of the big girls hollering at me.

But it's different in 2010. Kids play t-ball and then coach pitch and both are co-ed through 2nd grade. Teams are divied up by birthday, so there are no 6th graders yelling at 1st grader. In 3rd grade, it's same gender teams and the kids rely a little less on the coach. I'm still a bit old-school, prefering the "throw the kids to the wolves" method of instruction. Sink or swim.

Brett had his first game last week and did well. We need to tweak his swing a bit and work on his baserunning, too. He seemed right at home at 2nd base (my own home for many years) and just loves playing.







Taking a swing-got a solid single. If you look closely, you can see the shadow of the ball. Yeah. I got that on purspose, ha ha.




Waiting (impatiently) for the throw for the force-out at 2nd that never came.