Moving On Up

My oldest son is 8 years old, so he falls into what our Youth Baseball system calls AA. This is one step up from T-Ball, so the coaches pitch to the kids. There is no stealing bases, walking of batters (although this is not always the case, you can only pitch so many without holding up the game), or keeping of official scores. The kids like to keep score in their heads, but it's not all that accurate. You play three outs, but if you bat through your whole line-up, that's it. There are more rules, but you get the gist of it. It's not hard core baseball yet. Nor should it be (more on that later).

Again, it’s the next level up from T-Ball, which is also known as follow the bouncing ball. In T-Ball, you tend to see a herd of kids going after the ball. So AA is really about kids learning the game. What is an out? What is a hit? How do you run the bases? You can over run first base. AA is where kids should be learning the basic fundamentals of baseball. So this year, is night and day from last year. Last year, all the kids played were games. You can only teach the kids so much during the games. There were a lot of kids too, so a coach ended up taking 6-8 kids each inning in the field, way out in the outfield to work on stuff. But the kids had a short attention span and wanted to see what was happening in the game.

This year, the teams are holding actual practices. The first two weeks are actually all practices. A coach can actually run some drills and specifically target areas of improvement. I think this is a much better format for what is really kids first foray into organized baseball. Now you can only practice so much at this age too, before the kids get bored. So of 90 minutes, 45-60 are drills, and the remaining time is a scrimmage against another team. Something they did get right last year is a skills clinic every Saturday. That is happening again this year.

Again, balance comes into play. At what age do you start getting competitive? What skills do you teach kids? How much of the game can a 7 or 8 year old absorb. I am glad that someone took notice from last year to make improvements for this year. You want the kids to have fun, but they do need to work a bit to get some of the fundamentals under their belt.