Little League, Yesterday and Today

i have a good friend who started on the national championship team at rice and played a f ew seasons in the minors. he has a degree from rice and his current "job" is giving 20-30 one hour baseball lessons a week at $75 a pop. incredible.
 
I keep it simple and tell my kids "No, go outside and play" and don't let them stay inside. I don't tell them how or what to play, but I do go out and play with them. I also let them choose which sports they want to participate, volunteer to coach when I can and teach them that winning is important with good sportsmanship.

I refuse to buy into putting my kids in the corner of one sport or the other. I also frequently visit their school, interact with teachers, participate in school activities, make them study at home and emphasize academics.

Too many parents think their kid is a superstar instead of understanding that they are just like everyone else. The superstars will rise to the top with parental involvement not parental domination and in the meantime (and more importantly) will be well rounded.

I just hope I don't kill them before they grow up.

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I have to disagree with some of this. I agree with the need for kids to get outside more, play less video games, etc., but the notion that it has to cost so much and you have to have your own stuff isn't true. I'm guessing the OP's kid is playing select ball (as my son does). There are cheaper, simpler options. I live in Round Rock but I'm guessing there are similar options where you live. We can play Sam Bass league ball for $35 a season which includes the uniform. Some leagues are more - RRYB is about $135 - but still way less than select ball costs. With the additional money you get better equipment and coaching. Same as putting your kids in a Tahoe instead of a Yugo - you try to provide them the best when you can, and select is ususally better. If you are looking for simpler and cheaper, league ball is a viable option.
 
KE, LSU and Duke, that explains a lot
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seriously though those of you who limit your kids TV watching do you include watching sports?


btw, I'm a believer in watching the kids face, if i or a coach yell at my boy and the smile dissappears it is getting too intense. That being said my boy plays Basketball, Baseball, and Soccer (and maybe next season his mom might allow him to start pee wee football or may have to wait till he's 9 or 10). He loves basketball so much he expects for his coach, me, and his grandad to yell instructions to him and actually smiles bigger when he understands what he's being told.
 
We used to play pick up baseball at the school all summer long in the early 80s. And we'd play one on one baseball in my backyard with tennis balls. We kicked it old school.

I think all of the select baseball, soccer, basketball, etc. is just another offshoot of the "keepin' up with the Joneses" mentality in the 'burbs. "Well, my son plays for the _______ (insert suburb) ________ (insert select team). We traveled to 5 out of state tourneys and hired _______ (insert spare former minor league ballplayer) as a pitching/hitting coach. It costs $_____ (insert amount to brag about cost of travel and uniforms) but it is worth it."

The odds of any of these kids turning out to be worth a **** are astronomically small. And when I say "worth a ****," I mean worthy of a college scholly or playing professional (i.e. minor league) ball.

But what the **** do I know. I don't have kids.
 
Actually, Jive, it depends on what sport, club and where the kids play. My daughter plays competetively here in Knoxville. She's 10 now. The U-18 girls that just graduated from high school got a combined 12 college scholarships.

That's not to say that that is the reason my daughter plays. She loves it. I think as long as the child loves the sport AND takes care of her other responsibilities, i.e. education, it can't hurt that she practices almost daily. Even if she doesn't have practice, she wants to kick the ball around.

Yes, some of the parents see it as a social scene. And some live, vicareously, through their children. That's going to happen with sports, dance, gymnastics, even educationally.

If Caylin gets a schollie that's cool. If she doesn't but learns about hard work and it keeps her butt off the couch or off the phone with friends, I'm all for it. She makes really good grades and - literally - will only watch the Discovery Channel and History Channel so I'm pretty happy with her accomplishments.
 
I Coach as did my Father before me....

I am prejudiced toward soccer as I think it's the simplist game and for younger children provides the most fitness per time spent practicing. I encourage my kids to participate in anything they are interested in. I see both sides of the Fence relating ot the "select" versus "rec" parental attitude and level of skill play. I have my younger daughter in Select simply as a time saver in all honesty, and I think the competition will make her better. Her older Sister had the best Rec Team around and won everything before we moved up into select. Basically we are still a Rec team simply playing in the Select ranks. My parents like the fact that the team we beat two weeks ago was a year older and their parents probably paid upwards of $700 to get beat by my team where we paid $215 after training and field fees....

It's all about fun to me. From my experience the baseball parents (Dad's) are the most psychotic, but the more I am around select soccer I think they may be a close second. th bottom line for me is keep the kids moving, and never ever buy a game boy or other game time waster. Better to do most anythign rather than play thegames all day long. Get outside and kick a ball, climb a tree, go for a walk, pay with the dog... most anything outsideof termianl TV watching
 
the funny thing that has dawned on me as i have read this thread...it sure seems that there is a lot of affluent people spending a lot of money on their children's leagues and then complaining about it a bit.

this is going to sound judgmental, because it is, but why don't you guys let your kids off the leash?

i mean, from what i'm reading, a lot of these (your) kids live in the suburbs. that's the culture. select ball, your own batting helmet because of LICE (seriously, WTF??) and a ******* PRACTICE UNIFORM? 25 large for a play area for your kids? jesus christ. that's significantly more than half of my entire income. priorities. jesus. just put in a sandbox or some ****.

you can't bemoan what has gone before yet on the other hand support this kind of stupidity.

my guess is that you've given in to societal (locally borne, no doubt) pressure to enroll your kids in what little neighbor boys and girls are in. well, guess what. you can't complain about a culture of "keeping up with the joneses" when you are engaging in the practice.

you want your kids to go outside, move to a neighborhood where you see lots of kids playing outside. odds are, however, this neighborhood will not be as affluent.

middle class is not what it used to be. i didn't grow up in a gated community, and i sure as **** didn't get enrolled in select stuff, though the neighbors sometimes did. some of that was my choice, and some of that was cost/time prohibitive.

i played organized sports and i played pick up games.

but, ultimately, it comes down to you guys. you moved to the suburbs for whatever reason. for some, it is some illusion of safety (gated community), for others, it's to keep up with the joneses.

i'm not saying i'm above this, BTW. i'm just saying that when i live in a neighborhood of soccer mom's someday, and i might, i'm not going to ***** about how they behave like soccer moms. because if i wanted to, i know there are plenty of places where kids roam without 100% parent supervision. and i know that i can afford to live there. and i also know that i most likely won't be put out by my kids playing with the kids in those streets.
 
sounds scarily like my experience growing up. I played lots of select basketball and baseball(over 100 games per year of each). I pretty much hated both in high school, though I kept playing. The sport I played least was football and I still love it to this day. I've even picked up Auto Racing over the two bballs. Too much structure. I used to watch kids running all over playing while I had to go to private lessons or a game or practice. Heck, my team even got together with some other teams and built a damn ballfield for a school and then formed a damned league to play MORE games.
 
Hayden, I don't exactly live in the burbs, and I have to think about schools because we can't afford to go private. We are in a real bind with this stuff. In Houston, if we wanted to go to a less affluent area that also had kids playing outside, we would have to go about 25 or 30 miles out of town. And we can't do that because we only have one car and I work downtown.

I guess our problem is that we are over our head in the neighborhood we live in. An in-law is renting us a house he will be tearing down one of these years at about 2/3 the price it would get on the open market.

Although I am making over 50K, we are probably in the bottom 10% of income in the league we are in. One of the posters in this thread said something like "Yeah, our league is expensive but all our families are affluent so it's no big deal." You might just not be as correct in that assumption as you think.
 
I said that all our families are afluent in our league. Sounds like you might be in our league if you live in Houston...or you live in one very close to our league. I'll amend my comments by saying that 98% of our families are afluent. We do offer scholorships in our league for any family that cannot pay. It's a no questions asked thing, no forms to fill out, etc. You simply click the button on the sign-up form on-line that you need assistance. No one but a few members of the board see the list of people who need assistance and I guarantee they don't look at it twice (I'm on the board and I've never seen the list, nor do I care to see it).

Our league is more expensive than the normal little league for one real reason. We have a shitload of debt service to cover the fields we bought a few years back. We had to buy the land before a developer put up another apartment complex or condo inside the loop. It was either buy the fields or cut the number of kids who could play in our league in half due to a shortage of field space.
 
MAROON is in bellaire, and I agree with him, some of these kids, ages 7 and up, can do things I never saw growing up.

Seriously, there is a little kid in our little league, he plays "up" 2 age levels. now, he isn't a great hitter, but that weasel can throw the ball on a line, shoulder high, from behind 3rd to first base.

He plays little league and also plays on a couple of select teams. out in sugar land, the select teams are more informal at a young age than say the Banditos or the other big clubs up in Klein and Cypress and the Woodlands.
 
In my humble opinion, yeah, it's getting way too structured and I've felt that way for a long time. Practice uniform and your own bat seems kinda crazy. And I've watched a little of these extremely young kids in these various "leagues" and feel they might be better served by just playing without structure or organization.

I realize times have changed (the even use metal bats, for chrissakes), and one other thing that strikes me is the lack of a place to play. In Austin, for example, at Gullett elementary there used to be two "fields" and acres of open fields for anything you wanted. Now I see they are chock full of "official fields" with fences, and the cars pack the streets around there all the time. I don't know where ten kids would get together to play ball at this time.

I believe I learned more baseball skill in the hours-long lob ball with the neighbor kids than I ever did with organized coaching.
 
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