Opening Day

Well, it's official; I'm now 0-2 to start my career as a baseball coach. I take comfort in the fact that I've got some good kids, and there's talent to work with. We played two games against the two Summerside teams. The first one was rough, as we lost 16-6. The second was quite the crazy game, a back-and-forth affair that ended up at 20-16.

Tanner started the first game and pitched pretty well, although he's got some work to do on throwing strikes. That was the theme today for all six kids who pitched, though; accuracy is the challenge. Still, there was some hitting, some excellent defense, and some smart baserunning on our part. And now I've got a better handle on what these kids can do, and how I'm going to teach them.

This is level 'A' ball, so these are more of the beginning kids; a couple of them haven't played before, and some didn't play at all last year, since they lived in Ontario and everything was shut down. But they acquitted themselves very well today, and I'm looking forward to more success this year.

Seeing as I'm a teacher by nature, I want the kids to learn the fundamentals and improve their play throughout the season. We've got a special coaching clinic coming up on Thursday, with some of the players from the provincial 22U team. College-aged kids, basically. And I'm going to use a 'goal-oriented' approach to the games for the kids. Tanner's goal today was to strike out three batters. He got two, which is a great start. Others wanted to do something on defense; most of them, of course, wanted to hit the ball. And they did hit the ball. They hit the ball very well. Not everyone did, but almost everyone did get on base today at least once.

So, it was a great start to the season. I had some fears that this would start out like the Mighty Ducks' movie, where we got wiped out by the teams that have been practicing for a couple of months. But that wasn't the case; we didn't win, but we played pretty well. I'm looking forward to the rest of the season. Our next game is on Friday, so everyone will be rested up and ready to go. In the meantime, practice tomorrow and the clinic on Thursday. It's going to be a fun season.