OT: It's that Time

jethreauxdawg

Heisman
Dec 20, 2010
10,751
14,044
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This blows my mind.

I'm early 40's, have toddler and a step-teen.

The teen, got back into baseball at 12 after I came into his life. Last time he played was 5 or 6. He couldn't understand why he wasn't good anymore. That was also 2020 Covid year, so all that got screwed up. He was also afraid of the ball. The most fun he, and I, ever had with rec baseball was when the coach offered a practice for any who wanted to attend. Unsanctioned, I suppose.

Only 5-6 kids showed up. I pitched, shagged flies, we played pickle & went over rundowns.

Long story longer, I played rec ball, Dixie Youth not LL, & we could turn double plays in pitching machine. Not many, of course. For High School tryouts being his first experience with basic ability teammates, well, blows my mind.

IF he WANTS to I hope tries out again next year.
My story is basically the same as you. Played rec ball but we were good enough to have fun. My son tried out for the middle school team, not high school.
 

TrueMaroonGrind

All-Conference
Jan 6, 2017
3,987
1,451
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Related question. Do yall have any advice for competitive gymnastics? My youngest(5) is very talented and built to be a gymnast. The girl that runs the gym asked me so many times this year to get her in competitive. It was to the point I told them to stop asking.

My main concern is the time commitment for her plus the travel. They get them up to 8-12 hours of practice per week. Then they can have quite a few meets on top of that. Church is a priority and so is a balance of life for her and us.

I’ve seen my brother chase his kids every weekend for over 10 years for travel baseball. I don’t want that for us, but I also want her to chase a passion if she wants. Any advice is appreciated.
 
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Jan 9, 2016
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I'm in what will almost certainly be our last year of Rec. 13/14 metro-Birmingham league with 11 teams from Gardendale over to Trussville and down to Chelsea. We had a blast last year and expect the same this spring. 12 games from mid-March to end of April (spring break always throws in a huge pause) and a single-elimination tournament the first week of May.
Interestingly, I found out Vestavia Hills has their own 10-team league for this age group that had evals, drafts, etc, so there's definitely a hunger out there for non-travel-ball baseball.
My son came up through VH Rec. 5yr - 10yr the leagues was strong both Spring & Fall. Travel ball started to hit the 10yr league a little (10-12 teams) but the following year, the 11-12yr league, only had 6 teams I believe. That carried on through the 13-14 league (4 teams). Glad to hear Vestavia making a comeback back with this age group. We have some good memories from our time up there.
 

jethreauxdawg

Heisman
Dec 20, 2010
10,751
14,044
113
Related question. Do yall have any advice for competitive gymnastics? My youngest(5) is very talented and built to be a gymnast. The girl that runs the gym asked me so many times this year to get her in competitive. It was to the point I told them to stop asking.

My main concern is the time commitment for her plus the travel. They get them up to 8-12 hours of practice per week. Then they can have quite a few meets on top of that. Church is a priority and so is a balance of life for her and us.

I’ve seen my brother chase his kids every weekend for over 10 years for travel baseball. I don’t want that for us, but I also want her to chase a passion if she wants. Any advice is appreciated.
I have an irresponsible number of kids. Some are girls. We’ve done about every sport. Gymnastics is the worst from a competitive standpoint. We didn’t do the full on go to school at the gym version, but we did the 3 days a week, 6-10 meets a year version (we told the “team” we weren’t traveling to out of town meets due to cost, they loved that lost revenue). It’s the most expensive of anything we’ve done. It’s the most outrageous participation trophy experience, every kid gets a medal for every thing they do. Daughter gets 5 medal per competition. 12th place medal is the same as the 1st place. On top of that, you think a ref making a bad call sucks? Wait until you have a judge that just gets to throw out a number with no explanation for how they got there. It might help if I understand how the scoring works, but that adds to the frustration. We’ve been at three different gyms based on where we’ve lived. I think they all treat it like babysitting and don’t really worry about coaching unless you make the commitment to do it full time. In short, gymnastics sucks.
 
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