Lorelai's "Lost" Baseball Season

My next blog post won't be terribly long, because I don't have a whole lot of insight on this particular topic. In fact, Lorelai's recently completed baseball season felt like an afterthought for our family in many ways, since Nathan and I weren't very involved in the team at all. However, I did want to record for posterity the one (and hopefully only) time our daughter played baseball.

Lest I sound like a horrible, un-supportive parent, let me explain our issues with her latest extracurricular venture. Our eldest daughter is a very active, enthusiastic, "carpe diem" kind of kid...she wants to try everything. As parents, we want to be as supportive as we can (within reason) of her discovering new things and having enriching life experiences...particularly when it's keeping her physically active! We did two seasons of soccer last year, with Nathan as coach. Even though it was very time-consuming, Nathan and Lorelai both had a great time and felt very connected to each other.

However, this year, Lorelai kept insisting she wanted to try baseball, not soccer. This made me kind of nervous (and Nathan even more so). Although she had improved somewhat in soccer during her two seasons, baseball was a different game, with more complicated rules and a whole new skill set. We were concerned she wouldn't have the hand-eye coordination necessary to do well in baseball. We also worried that this would greatly upset her little competitive heart (she burst into tears on multiple occasions after losing soccer games; we shuddered to imagine her reaction when she couldn't even hit a baseball with a bat!).

Lorelai persisted, though, and we finally gave in...we decided that since she was still in the younger ( 5 - 7 year old) age bracket, it would be a good opportunity for her to get in on the "ground floor" of baseball. As it turned out, it was very "ground floor"--possibly even "basement level" instruction.

Here is Lorelai's entire team. Yes, the brilliant USA Youth Sports league created a team with only five kids (there was a sixth on the roster, but we never saw him after orientation day). Every other team we played had at least eight or nine kids, and it was infuriating...really, guys?? You couldn't have distributed the players a little better? Needless to say, that was barely enough kids to populate the infield...thank goodness no one in the league was capable of hitting deep.

Our coach seemed forced into the job against her will (she was in college at the time, and had two small children), but she ended up being a decent coach and a supportive teacher to all the kids. "Coach Rachael" didn't worry about anything beyond teaching the kids the basics (I think out of the team, her daughter was the only kid who had ever played before). Practices were mostly running, hitting, and catching drills.

Game days were a mixed bag. As I've said, the games themselves were very loosely organized and usually only lasted about three innings. Nobody kept score, and every kid at bat had the ball thrown to them over and over and over until they managed to hit it (they pulled out the batting tee when things got especially dire). Fielding was pretty nonexistent most of the time; when a kid did manage to field a ball, they usually threw it straight to first base, without looking around to see if it could be better used elsewhere. Oh well, even if the parents were restless, the kids were happy to get their treat bags after the games!

As you can see, proper baseball rules were not really much of a priority. I'm not too upset about any of that (after all, most of these kids were pretty young), but if you are a particularly competitive person, it might get tiresome to watch the "feel-good" baseball. What frustrated me were the two games we skipped (and never made up!) due to poor weather. This was an unusually cold winter, but the lack of interest in rescheduling just highlighted the fact about how little anyone cared about this season.

Nathan wasn't able to coach (or even assistant coach) Lorelai's team this season, mainly because of the practice schedule...he was never able to get home from work early enough. Besides that, though, he was still reluctant to coach Lorelai in baseball...despite his having several years of Little League experience from his youth. Why the hesitation? Probably because he knew too much about baseball...he worried about being too hard on the kids (and too critical of the league's policies & regulations) to be able to relax and have fun with it (unlike his stint as a soccer coach, where his lack of knowledge of the sport made it more of an "adventure"). It was sometimes hard for him to watch Lorelai's games; he got frustrated at the lack of attention to detail, and at the league's lousy scheduling and team formation. In spite of that, he was still happy to support Lorelai on an individual level; he helped her on the weekends by having batting & catching practice in our backyard!

 Despite our misgivings, it was encouraging to see Lorelai's grasp of those basic elements improve over the course of the season. Her hitting, while never great, got much better as the season progressed, particularly when she switched to using a lighter bat. Her base-running was very good; in fact, she sometimes "lapped" her teammates earlier in the batting order, as they all rounded the same bases together! She also got pretty good at scooping up grounders (too bad she didn't always know what to do with it after that!). We were pleased to see her learn some new skills, and enjoy herself doing it.

By the time the season ended, Lorelai was sad to see it go...she really liked all the kids on her tiny team, and she liked her coach (who, despite her initial hesitation, was always warm, supportive, and encouraging to all the kids). We were happy that Lorelai was happy...plus we were happy she got a sweet trophy out of it all!

Will Lorelai ever want to do baseball again? I honestly don't know. If she does, we may have to look into finding a new league, since USA Youth Sports seemed particularly disorganized when it came to baseball (although we weren't as bothered by their disorganization where the soccer was concerned). Our gut feeling, though, is that Lorelai has mentally checked off baseball from her "to-do" list, and may now want to try out yet another sport.

For example, karate...which she has been talking about a lot lately. We'll see what happens this fall!!