Youth Sports

Here I sit in a hotel room in Houston.  I did not sleep well, but the bottom line is our daughters team will be competing for the Texas Director's Cup title in soccer.  The schedule has been turned upside down due to the nasty rain yesterday so we play this afternoon.  This gives me some time to reflect and comment on youth sports.

Topics covered:

Select soccer
Coaching baseball
Choosing a sport

First lets rant about select soccer.   Although our kids get excellent training, select soccer is extremely expensive.  Added to the thousands of dollars for fees are travel costs.  These go up tremendously when team advance into the playoffs.  I guess right now we are blessed that this is something we can afford for the kids to do.  After the expense comes the politics.  Good or bad select soccer is a BUSINESS.  Recently our son's coach was let go.   I will not go into the details but the result of this business decision is that the club lost a good coach, some families behaved in totally unacceptable ways, and one or both sides are lying threw there teeth.  On the positive side I love watching our kids play and try their personal best.  I am trying to calm down as a parent fan and just enjoy the experience.  Occasionally I do have to be vocal regarding a bad call or to motivate our children.  Truth silent parents are better parents.

Speaking of being silent I wish I had not over heard a couple of the Dad's from the baseball team mumbling how they would be better coaches.  In youth sports the coaches are volunteers.  We volunteer because we love the game of baseball and we love to watch kids advance their skills.  This season has not been a strong season for our team.  That being said we are playing at the top level.  I know the boys have the skills, but unfortunately we cannot play the game for them.

This leads me to the last topic, choosing a sport.  Our son is 10 years old.  He is about to tryout for a select soccer team.  I definitely encourage this because soccer is a well rounded sport and the select coaches definitely know what they are doing.  But my son is also pretty darn good at baseball.  He struggles at the plate, but he is a thinker and understands the idiosyncrasies of the game.  Does he really have to choose a sport at the age of 10?  The other sad part is that baseball and soccer are played during the same season in Texas, so he will not be able to play both in high school.  He is also pretty good at golf, but I am thinking that is also a spring sport in Texas.  When I grew up I had the opportunity to play every sport - baseball, basketball, golf, tennis, football, and bowling.  Select soccer is going to be extremely expensive, so we will need to see how passionate he is for the game.  My wife argues if he chooses baseball then we need to get him the same level of coaching they are getting for soccer.  I honestly do agree.

All that said I will conclude by saying youth sports are killing us parents.  We have to leave work early to get the kids to practice and to games.  We have to work late at night to make up for the missed time from the office.  Definitely blessed that we work for great companies that permit this flexibility.  Finally we had to split up the family this weekend in order to cover the two sports.  That is not always an easy decision nor fun.

Kids go kick some butt today.  Good luck to the Dallas Texans Austin Division 97 Girls White team.  Compete and do your personal best at the state finals.  As for the Mustang Diamondbacks please play well and win today so I have the opportunity to coach one more game next Thursday.

Play ball!

I love youth Baseball!

Last night I had so much fun coaching our team in the baseball tournament.  We were playing probably the toughest team in our league as our first game of the tournament.  The conclusion was not ideal, but boy they boys sure fought hard.  In Little League baseball rarely do you get a complete game.  Well last night we went the full 6 innings.  We lost 10-8, but with two outs the boys were attacking. The final out came on a bang bang play to first base.  Although our fans were not happy it was the correct call from my angle as third base coach.  The umpires were the best two umpires we have had all season.  They were on top of the game and enthusiastic.

I saw such great effort from these players I was pumped up.  We may have won the game if one ball bounces cleaner or I did not make a coaching error.

I made some errors in the pitching department, but we stayed in the game.  My big error came during our final at bat.  Bases were loaded.  A better rips a single.  Runners from second and third score.  I did not pay attention to our runner coming from first because I was focused on getting the runner from second home.  He got caught to far off second base in a pickle between second and third.  The result was not good, ending in our second out.

We did have a very scary moment when a batter swung the bat around hitting our catcher in the middle of the back.  He was down for awhile.  What a tough kiddo because he stayed in the game.

DBacks! I am very proud of you!  Now if we can just teach a few of you to not cry when things do not quite go your way the season will be a total success.