You all know we are a baseball family. I love it. The boys love it (the biggest one especially). It is the most fun. It is exhausting at times but still, it is a wonderful experience for us all.
Last night I sat and watched 3 teams play a practice game. It is spring break so a lot of our kids were on vacation with their families, so three of the coaches got together and decided to play a game. Which, by the way, is the best way for the kids to practice in my opinion. As I sat and watched each of the players arrive, I saw kids who had been in class together and played on past teams together greeting each other with smiles. They warmed up together. The coaches would chat with the kids and rough up their hair as they passed. It was a good feeling to be back amongst so many of our friends.
Let me back up a bit. When we first started playing baseball, I had no idea what to expect. As a matter of fact, I was dreading the schedule that would turn me into a "soccer mom" for the following months. The first year was exactly as I thought. A lot of work, a lot of competition. No relationships. We left to go to a game and we came back home. I did not like it, the boys did.
So we signed up again. The next year, an amazing thing happened. We got on a team that understood that competition and friendship can cooincide. Very well at that. We had the most wonderful year. What we observed and learned is that the coaches that were on these teams not only wanted their team to do well and succeed. They wanted the other team to do well and succeed. They wanted every kid out there to feel they had done their best and played with their heart. The parents sitting in the stands would be rooting for a friends child on the other team every bit as much as they did their own child.
This seems like a conflict of interest. To be honest it took me a while to understand what was going on. These parents understood that competition is not just about winning. Winning is not the most important thing. Don't get me wrong, these coaches wanted their own team to win. They wanted it badly. They had simply come to a place where they understood as much as they wanted to win, it was not the end all be all of the day. What did give satisfaction is that the two teams played their best. They wanted each one of these kids to understand that their success was not in whether they won or lost, but whether they did their best, treated their team mates and opponents with respect, and enjoyed playing the game. Though winning is great and it is not a game without competition, more important is the child learning the little life lessons that come in abundance in competitive play.
I loved seeing the coaches from the other teams squatting down in front of another teams player and coaching them as well. I loved laughing at them as they joked around with each other and how when one got tagged as he slid into third, the third baseman reached out, helped him up and checked on him, helping him dust off.
I think the attitude can be summed up in a conversation between father and son as the boy walked up to the plate to bat. "Be a hitter", dad said. The little boy replied, "Be a winner". The dad corrected and said, "No, be a hitter".
Yep...I love little league. So much.
