T-Ball

Jack just wrapped up his first season of t-ball.  He had a really good time.  We signed up through the City of O'Fallon and joined a random team with kids and a coach we didn't know.  Jack was fine with that, but Jason and I had a hard time with the coach.  He was intense.  Not mean, per se (except to his own daughter, to whom he was pretty rotten), but just trying to teach these 4 and 5 year-old kids things that most boys learn in middle school baseball.

Here are some videos from Jack's first game.  Each child gets a single no matter where they hit the ball and no matter if an out is made or not.  The last child of the lineup gets a home run to clear the bases, again no matter where they hit it.  Jack's first game, he was the cleanup batter, so he got home runs at each at bat.

Our other complaint was all the parents in the field.  For some reason at each game, there was about one parent for each kid on the field, plus the base coaches at each base for the batting team.  You couldn't even hardly see the players!  AND several of these parents made a habit of stopping the ball if it came to them, instead of letting their child chase after the ball (which is the point of t-ball, right??) as demonstrated in video #2 above - a parent stopped Jack's hit.  Luckily Jack didn't really notice but Jason and I were pretty ticked off.  They aren't exactly robbing the kids of hits, since each child gets a single no matter where they hit it, but still!!  We were pretty appalled.  Luckily, we saw eye-to-eye with our coach on that issue, as he asked all the parents to stay in the stands about midway through the season.  Unfortunately the other teams did not follow our lead, so there were still adults everywhere.

Regardless, Jack had a fun time playing!!  And the good news is, we're starting a new session next week which Jason is going to coach and we know about 1/2 of the players on the team.  Can't wait!