Coaching

I love baseball. I love watching it, I love playing it, and I'm sure with a little more time and experience, I'll love coaching it.

Right now the "coaching it" part is kind of frustrating. I'm an assistant coach of a 15-16 year old rec league team. Most of the kids on our team do NOT seem like they've played much baseball before. Some of them don't have a clue about the most basic rules (didn't realize I needed to teach some of them what it means to "tag up"). Also, we were allotted about 4 1-hour practices prior to the start of the season. And now that games have started, we no longer practice at all (so even though we see more things to work on each game, we have no time to actually work on them). Evidently, rec league baseball isn't a very serious affair around here.

It would also be easier if I were the head coach. My head coach is great (he's an assistant pastor at the church where I work). We get along fabulously, and I think he's doing a good job of trying to impart some baseball knowledge while not taking the thing too seriously. But being an assistant coach means I feel uncomfortable being very assertive about things. It would just be easier to be in a position where I could command the team a little more (and I'm not at all suggesting that I would make us any better... I'm just saying that for myself I would probably feel better about the job I'm doing if I were in charge).

My dad was the only baseball coach I had until high school, and he was very good at it. He also had a slight advantage though, in my opinion: He started coaching us at 5 years old and continued with pretty much the same group of kids for about ten years. He helped us from the ground up. When we were 15-16 we knew baseball because we'd grown up with it and had been coached well. Now I'm trying to coach 15-16 year olds who have the baseball experience and knowledge of probably 7-8 year olds (with a few exceptions, of course).

Anyway, my points here, to sum up, are: I love baseball. My current coaching gig is a little frustrating. My dad's a great coach, and I want to coach like him someday.

P.S. We've played one game. We lost 10-7. Found out that this level of ball is determined solely by the quality of the pitchers. We had a great pitcher for 4 innings, and we were winning. Then we put in a not-so-great pitcher, and we were suddenly down 10-2. Fortunately, they put in a not-so-great pitcher in the 7th inning and we scored five runs to make it moderately close. Interesting.