Adventures in Youth Sports Teams

If you say the words "Youth Sports" I cringe.  I know this has to do with teaching middle school and working with (notice I said "working with") parents of students who were on teams.  The parents of the kids on my cheerleading team were pretty awesome actually.  It was the parents of the boys teams who were the worse and I didn't even coach them.  I just heard/saw the stories.  It was bad.  So, you see I have good reason to be hesitant when it is/was time to sign my oldest up for some sort of team.  Along with the fact that I see many things wrong with the way young youth sports leagues are run.  More then anything I want my kids to enjoy playing sports and to learn how to be good winners and more importantly good losers.  First though, they need to learn skills and I think that is left out of so many youth programs......anyhow I digress.

We have did Soccer Shots last Spring.  This is an awesome program where the kids actually just work on skills and drills.  They also include team work, but they only scrimmage each other and there is no "game" commitment.  I liked it a lot.  My oldest really liked the intimate atmosphere where he learned some fundamentals.  He also went to a soccer camp last summer.  Again, good instruction no crazy game schedule and no kids on a field with no clue what is going on and parents and coaches yelling to "score a goal," and the kids looking back asking "which is their goal."

We also did tennis lessons.  He did them both one on one and with a class.  Good learning experiences.  He learned a lot of good skills and I was pretty happy with the progress he made.  He played tennis last Spring and Fall.  We may pick it back up, but right now his teacher is playing on his high school team.

So this is the year.  He is 5 and it is time for dun dun dun, T-BALL............  Last night was our first T-ball practice.  It was interesting.  I will say that I am pleasantly surprised by the fact that they have started practices a full month before games start.  I was also very surprised that the coach asked, well practically begged all the parents to be involved.  There was pretty much a 1 to 1 parent (or big sister/big brother/ uncle, aunt, older friend) to kid ratio.  They also worked on hitting, catching and base running.  All things that need to be learned before turning them out on the field.  J came home exhausted and oh so happy.  He loved every single minute of it!!

The other part of youth sports I have been dreading, is the giving up of Saturdays and the juggling of practices.  One doesn't really get to pick out what day you practice like you do with dance or gymnastics.  You are kind of just given the day and expected to make it work.  So, we are now trying to juggle practice around some other things and we already found out that in May, I am running a race and Child 2 has a dance performance in the morning and we have a t-ball game at about the same time.  So, I spent time this afternoon choosing and ordering a couple of extra car seats because it looks like we are going to have two kids needing to be in two different places at the same time.  Oh how fun!!!

All in all, our first day of team sports was not horrible.  Talk to me in 5 weeks when games start.  Until then I will need to search ebay for some Cubs gear!!