Raising my sports-minded boy is really a time-consuming thing. I can already see that I'm going to have way too much time on my hands when he graduates High School and heads off to college.
Last night, I put him and a friend through a basketball workout. They're both pretty athletic, but there are some fundamentals in basketball that aren't that intuitive. For instance, doing a proper layup. I can teach a person how to do it, but I can't actually do one, myself.
With basketball, it's truly a case of those who can't do, teach, at least with me. His friend's dad watched the workout and complimented me by saying I could coach one of the youth basketball teams based on what he saw me having the kids do. I think I could, but with the Navy, I'm gone one weekend a month. So, it's hard to make that committment.
Logan really seems to like the workouts. Like most kids his age, he really needs to learn ball handling. His shooting is actually pretty good, but that's what kids like to do. They don't do dribbling drills unless somebody is guiding and encouraging them.
As I mentioned in another post, Logan didn't make the Junior Cats, which is the best city team he can play for. He'll play rec this year. Another parent of a kid who didn't make the team thought there were some politics involved in the selection process, but I disagree with that.
I have several thoughts on this:
1. Some folks say they like track and field and swimming because those events are not political in any way. It's just the athlete and a stopwatch and that's it. That's pretty true. There are other sports like this. For instance, golf comes to mind. These are individual sports where the score is based entirely on a person's individual effort.
2. I saw the basketball tryouts and personally I would not have put Logan on the team. He was not out of the question. I figured that he and about 8 other kids were in the running for the last 4 spots on the team. However, I would have put him towards the bottom of those 8 kids. Although it went against my boy, I think the coaches made the right call.
3. I also hear a lot of the same griping about the way the Mavericks are selected. (Logan's travel baseball team.) Now, with the Mavs, they select two teams. The A team, which my son plays on, is the heavy travel team and plays a longer schedule, with more out of town tournaments. It consists, at least in theory, of the top 12 kids in the tryout.
The B team consists of the next 12 kids. So, in theory, our worst player should be better than their best player.
I remember the first time our team scrimmaged the B team. I and a few other dads were a bit nervous. What if some poor kid who really belonged on the A team got shafted and put on the B team by mistake? What if our boys really weren't better than the B team kids?
Well, any doubts as far as this sort of thing goes were put to rest in the scrimmage. I think we beat them by about 25 runs. We played them a handful of times throughout the season (twice in the regular season and twice in tournaments.) Our average margin of victory was about 25 to 1.
This was the team where, in order to get out of the inning, our coach told all our kids to bat left-handed. When the kids then had 6 straight hits and scored another 5 runs, the coach told them to not only bat left-handed, but that they had to swing at every pitch.
The difference in ability between the teams was astounding. This is not to say that we might not have a player or two who could be on the B team, or that they don't have a player or two who could play for us. However, generally speaking, the selection process was fair and the better kids made the A team.
I don't know if I'm just more objective about this, or that I'm better at ego-divorcing myself from what I'm seeing, but when I see the kids in the baseball tryout, it's pretty easy to see who is a little better than the other kids.
It works in Logan's favor in baseball. In basketball, I saw the same thing, but again, I didn't think Logan was in that tier that was a cut above. So, it didn't work in his favor there.
The bottom line is that team sports are frequently subjective. The example I like to use is a kid is fielding a line-drive. He doesn't make a clean play on the ball. He gets a glove on it, though, keeps it in front of him and makes a throw that gets the runner out, but it's not a strong throw.
How do you judge that? Do you say he should have made a clean play and a sharp throw? Or do you say he did a great job getting into position, keeping the ball in front of him and made the throw in time? Was the ball a hard one to handle cleanly? Did it take a bad hop? All of those things are things that are subjective judgements that an experienced coach will usually, but not always, make correctly.
Just like bad calls by the umps, I tell Logan all the time that the officials are part of the game, just like the ball and your shoes. If you can't live with the occassional call that doesn't go your way, you can't play team sports.
In the same vein, if you can't deal with the fact that coaches are making decisions and that occassionally, they don't see things the way you do, you can't play team sports.
In any event, I am still kicking myself for not-preparing Logan better for tryouts in basketball. In my defense, I only heard about them a week or two before they happened. Still, I could have done a better job of prepping him.
If my judgement is correct, Logan was in a group of 8 kids who were duking it out for 4 spots. He did pretty well considering I didn't really prepare him. I spoke with Logan and told him the truth: that he has the potential to be a basketball player, but that things are way more competitive now than when I was a kid. If he wants to play basketball, he'll have to start preparing himself and doing a little bit of work pretty much year-round. (The only exception would be during the travel baseball season, where the schedule is so intense, I really don't want him to be trying to squeeze in another activity.)
If we work on it, I see no reason why he wouldn't make the Junior Cats next year. If we don't work on it, he won't. Simple as that. He's on board and as long as he shows an interest, I'll do what I can to help him.
Unlike baseball, where my ability to coach him pretty much ended the day he stopped playing rec, I can probably coach him in basketball at least up to the middle school level.
Also, not to make excuses, but because of his birthday, he will be pretty much the youngest kid at any tryout based on his grade. He's going to have to work to overcome that.
In baseball, it wasn't a factor so much, but literally, the kid worked at baseball almost every night from the time he was 3 or 4 years old. Basketball? Not so much.
On the baseball front, there is a series of pitching clinics I'll have Logan do here soon as well. We'll miss one of them, but the guy putting on the clinics says we can substitute a general skills session for any missed pitching sessions. I like this coach. He's doing a great job on drilling the kids on skills.
As I mentioned in another post, Logan is still one of the better baseball players in his grade. I'd like to introduce him to pitching this year. His hitting technique is very, very good and I just have one more tweak to make in the off-season.
(The same tweak his hitting coach has him working on. He's transferring too much weight to his front foot during his swing.)
We'll try to do some skiing this year if I can afford it. I also want him to pick up golf one of these days. I think that'll be a good thing to have him into once he's older and staying home by himself in the Summer. If business improves, I'd like to re-join the country club and then he can golf pretty much every day.
However, this is the phase of his life where sports will probably never end. As I've said before, basketball was the first sport where it got hard to even make the team, when I was a kid. Looks like it's tougher than ever, now.
No comments:
Post a Comment