Welp, I am sure many of you read about my Friday Fishing trip. Tough day. Even tougher when you loose 25 pounds of fish due to brakes and throws. Oh well. It's just fishing. The weekend didn't slow down for long!
Friday night we had softball practice for the 8U Killa Kupcakes. Practice time has been very hard to come by because of the weather and limited field time. I guess MPRA has millionbillionz (thats a Metalocalpyse joke) teams needing to practice.
After getting DRILLED Thursday, we needed to practice somehow. Luckily one of the parents volunteered their home for practice. My assistant coach worked 1-on-1 batting...which we desperately needed after averaging 11 strikeouts a game. Meanwhile, me and the other coaches worked on situational fielding. The bulk of the other teams scores have been due to "aggressive" baserunning. What that REALLY means is, if the pitcher doesn't have the ball inside the circle and the Ump hasn't called time, the opposing coaches are sending their base runners. Against the rules? Not at all. But not sporting, in my opinion. Especially when you are winning 10-0 in the bottom of the 2nd. So, we were teaching these girls to get the ball to the pitcher and forget trying to make plays. Which I think is counter productive...but so is getting hammered. But, I digress....
As soon as practice was over, the buyer for our old Stratos was on his way to pick it up. Naturally, he arrived after 8pm and promptly got stuck in the yard. But, the sell went through and the Stratos went to a new home.
Up and at them early Saturday...mostly due to an 11 month old who decided it was time to bang on my head. Alyse ran the "Lead Me to the Cross" 5K at Mount Zion Church. She met her goal and did a great job! All before 10am!
She took this picture because she thought it was speaking to her.
When she got home, I stepped outside for about 3 seconds before I realized how GORGEOUS it was. Time to get some yard work done! I cut our 1.5 acres of grass, did some weeding, played with our infant garden.
Also, managed to burn one of the 3 piles of limbs and leaves....and it doesn't matter HOW many times I do it, I am ALWAYS nervous about big fires. Of course, it may be mostly because I used gasoline to start them and my dad nearly killed himself when I was about 13 doing the same thing!
Work Work Work. Even had Aubs and Griffy out working. Man, is THAT nice!
After a short nap, it was ball game time. Boy, was it OBVIOUS that the work had paid off. Aside from a big first inning by the other team and a 1-2-3 out inning for us, we played AWESOME! In fact, I think they scored 2 runs in the last 3 innings! That's awesome! But, in the end, we came up short 9-8 despite a 2 run rally in the bottom of the 5th.
What's awesome about little girls is that they RARELY know who won and who lost. And those that know don't really care as long as they had fun. Thanks to great article I was sent last week due to my frustrations with opposing coaches, I approached losing a little different. So, I will pass along some info: tell them how much fun it was to watch them play. Only talk about things that were done right, then move I completely away from talking about the game. Go back to being a fun parent.
Some of the improvements I saw were so vast that I can't really even explain it. Explaining situational awareness in the field sounds easy until you try and explain it. When I left practice Friday, I really questioned if I had done any good or if I had just confused the girls. But, a few plays aside, they all knew what to do. More importantly, everyone on our team has now hit a coach pitched ball, which was a goal I had.
We were DEAD by 9pm and hit the hay.
Sunday, we were right back at it! Off to Sunday School and Church services. We are using a new thing at Church called "connect groups" where you are put in classes with only people in your stage in life. So, ours is the "primary" group, which is for families with kids in primary school.
Alyse and I have really struggled with being active in our Church. Don't get us wrong, we have lots of friends and we go to Church every Sunday. But, it' tough to find people in our situation to hang with. In fact, on our class, we only have 2-3 other families with more than 2 kids. And we are the youngest in the room. But age is just a number, as we are learning. So, the class has literally been a Godsend for us. It's really paying dividends for us as well as the other families. I can't wait until the weekend cookouts between our families begin! In fact, its hard to believe that the 45 minute class goes by SO FAST! I am literally heart broken when the bell rings!
Service was excellent...at least I hear...since Griffin had to go to Bible Hour and Gavin had decided to be social and let everyone know what he thought. It wasn't until after I smelled the poop in the cry room that I realized that I had no diaper bag. I had to text Alyse to bring it to me. By then, we might as well leave. the sermon was over and 4/5 family members were out of the auditorium and the 5th wasn't even going home with us!
On to lunch!
We had BIG plans for this afternoon. Something we have all dreamed about. You might have guessed it with all the talk of selling boats.
Yep, my REALLY AWESOME Unkie Jeff is selling us his Skeeter ZX202C. Me, my wife, and my dad that is. I am some fortunate to have both a wife and a dad that share my hobby! Sure makes life easier on all of us! We just had to test drive it and make sure everything was ready! But before that, we had a few errands to run, most notably, buying balls for for Sunday Night Softball league. Turned out, buying the girl size balls were harder than we thought. It took several stores to located them.
Anyway, off to Ditto we went! Dad and Jeff met us there. After a quick ride, show and tell, they left me, Alyse, and Griffy to fish. Josh and Emily brought the Bullet out to hang with us!
Griffin was Chunkin' and Windin' a Crank!
Well, we only got to fish for a few minutes before we had to dump the kids off to play softball....at 9pm. Whew! Some of us are in bed asleep by then!
We met up with our team, mostly made of our NASA League team. We watched a game before ours and it looked like the competition was a little lower than we were.....
Boy were we wrong! The opposing team put up 12 runs in the first and we really never had a play. In fact, the first pitch of the game was a homer! They were absolutely KILLING the ball. I had one hit to me at short that actually scared me. It was too fast for me to get a glove on. Next batter crushed another that I had to dive at. I did make the play on it, but couldn't make a throw. Next batter hit a 3rd that I did snag and made a play on. But, the throw was terrible. My really awesome and talented wife was playing 1st and she made a FANTASTIC play. .But, we got out of the inning and got up to bat. I was the lead off. First pitch I saw, I CRUSHED. First step out of the box....fell flat on my face. I turned it into a double. As I was standing there, one of the players said:
"Why yall using cheap balls?"
That took my by surprise. We bought them from Dick's. I just filed it away. It wasn't the first time I had heard something like that said. I just assumed that other people used hot balls while we used legal ones. Wrong. Check out the flat spot. Just crappy balls.
And, that was the way it went. When we DID put a bat on the ball, it didn't go anywhere. In the last inning, they pitched Josh one of their balls, which he hit into a homerun. Then, the game was over. After the game, the other team went into depth on the balls. While I seriously doubted that I could have scored the 27 + runs to catch up, we could have made it look close. Fact is, they hit the balls low and flat and we never had plays. <Shrug> I HEAR they are a travel ball team and they are just THAT GOOD. I sure hope so. We have a very good team and we got CRUSHED! So, don't buy the Dick' Sporting Goods Softballs..here are the SKU's:
| ||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||
Terrible. Seriously. I don't hit THAT hard and I flat spotted them. We could get ZERO power. If you bounce these, then bounce a GOOD ball, you can hear all you need to hear.
But, hey. Fun times with great friends and my wonderful wife.......
And we spent $120 on new balls today.....
No comments:
Post a Comment