Lessons from a successful youth baseball career

As a "sports" dad, I want to see my children active and involved in things. I'm sure at some point I'll have to address any projection issues related to my own athletic inadequacies. But irrespective of the degree by which projection colors my thinking, the fact remains that participation in youth sports strikes me as mostly a good thing. And if not youth sports, then find something else to be passionate about.

The motto of our childrens' day care center was "Play Is Work" meaning that there is a developmental good to the seemingly randomness of gaming that goes on as kids play. To my mind, youth sports are an extension of preschool play. Particularly when a kid is truly passionate and self-motivated about his or her sporting activity, a sport can keep him grounded and away from trouble. At least that's the hope as Sean enters adolescence, as we hope the golf bug helps to smooth out his metamorphosis from adolescence into adulthood?

Sean has always loved sports, playing one or another since preschool, when he first rambled with the scrum up and down the field in a community "Lil' Kickers" soccer league. Sean also played basketball with his school classmates for the past 5 years and also played rec and middle school football in his 5th and 6th grades. I can honestly say that all of his sporting activities are through is own choices, and that today as a 14 year old, athletics are a central feature of his self-image.

Sean has always had the final say about whether he will participate in a sport. After his first experience in soccer, he didn't want to play it again. It appears that two seasons of youth football are enough for him. He is also now pretty clear that this will be his last baseball season. We're grateful that golf will be there to fill the vacuum.

He is a good athlete, but not so good that anybody would accuse him of being tremendously athletic. Throughout grade school, he has tended bigger and stronger than than most of his peers, but also somewhat less coordinated and certainly slower.

His main sport from the age of 5 has not been golf, but baseball, which he played enthusiastically in a recreational league. He played baseball well enough to be chosen for the all star team each year from the ages of 9 through 12, which mostly served to extend his spring baseball season well into the summer.

As a 12 year old, he had a very strong spring season, leading his league in home runs. But after being chosen to play on the summer all star team, he struggled to get any playing time under some fairly petty and vindictive coaches who appeared to be directing gripes with me at Sean. It was a classic "daddy-ball" situation, and was very unsettling for most everyone involved on the team. As anybody involved in youth baseball would recognize, the 12Usummer season is the pinnacle of the kids career, after which kids slide into school athletic programs. The greatest harm of the summer was that it destroyed stole the idyllic sense of innocence and fun that Sean and several of the other boys held for baseball in their hearts. After this experience Sean's enthusiasm for baseball was dramatically redirected to golf, and he seemed to start thinking as less as a sideline activity and more as a viable sporting alternative.

To his great credit, as the following school year approached, after considerable indecision, Sean decided to play another fall baseball season in the rec league. He wavered mightily before finally deciding to play, but it seemed like what he eventually settled on was that he was not about to let someone run him out of the league. It would have been far easier for him to just walk away, wounded, from baseball. And I was prepared for that to happen, because it was Sean's decision alone to make. I was never more proud of him, and I think it says a great deal about his character as a young man, that he could dust off the tremendous disappointment and bruise to his ego.

In the spring of his 13th year, as a 7th grader, Sean wanted to try out for a middle school baseball team run by one of the private high schools that draws kids from throughout the metro area. It is a good program and a team he tried out for but failed to make the previous spring. Sean got to work to get ready for the tryouts, and began working with one of my students, who had played catcher in college. Sean made the team and played very well as their starting catcher, batting in the clean up and five hole at near .500, and was the teams RBI leader by a wide margin. Altogether, it was a tremendous bounce back from the disappointments he experienced the summer before. Still, baseball had lost some luster

After that season ended, for the first time he decided not to play summer baseball so that he could play more golf. He is playing on the same middle school baseball team this spring as a catcher, and doing well, but it seems almost assured he won't play baseball with them this summer or beyond. This is likely to be his last season playing organized baseball.

Irrespective of the sport, Sean has always approached athletics with what I would characterize as a balanced seriousness of purpose. What I mean by that is that he had fun on the field with friends during practices and games, but also seemed to see some value in the need to work at his skills. For example, he would want to throw the ball with me when I'd get home from work, or stay at the fields after games and practices to get some extra hitting and throwing. Before his spring 12U season, the season he was home run leader, he asked me to bring him to the fields for extra hitting practice, almost daily. The extra work paid off.

From this, he seems to have developed a work ethic applied to sports. He knows, intuitively, that if he works at a sport he can get better at it. Which is not to say he has killer practice habits. Far from it. But there is a base there, a base of having experienced how success is coupled to effort, which is something that he can grow with as he takes on the lonelier challenge of building a solid competitive golf game.

Finally, Sean not only learned how to compete in these other sports, but saw fun in it. When a game started, he could turn on a deeper focus then he might have in practice. He thrives in competition and, again, that seems like something that will serve him well in golf.