Make a Game Out of It!

My son is 8 years old. He is participating in fall baseball and I think he has a lot of potential. But we have our issues.

He is a modern boy who likes his GameBoy, his TV shows and laying around in his underwear. So when it comes time to go outside for some unorganized baseball practice, he well... resists. Sometimes he and I fight over this and it gets things off to a rocky start.

Well an interesting thing happened this weekend. We went out to the field that is next to his school. We played a little catch, but his heart wasn't in it. He started to focus on the storm clouds off in the distance and asked if we could go home.

I said no.

So we switched to batting. We did the thing where I kneel a little in front of him and off to the side and I underhand toss baseballs to him. This is a good drill that teaches eye-hand coordination and you can work on his batting mechanics as well. What 8 year old boy wouldn't love that?

He still wasn't happy. He still didn't want to be there, but he hit well. There is something irresistable to a boy about hitting a baseball. So we were just getting going and I noticed 5 other kids, ranging in age from probably 7 to 12. 2 girls and 3 boys and one of them was carrying a baseball bag with gloves and bats. They were watching with great admiration my boy hitting the ball.

What to do? I remembered something my father-in-law said to me one time. He was a star athlete in his youth and even a coach for a little while. When describing the trouble I was having getting my son to practice, he said, "Sometimes you have to make a game out of it." Well even I could tell that what we were doing wasn't working. So I yelled to the kids, "Ya'll want to play?" And lickety-split, they came over. And now we had 6, two teams of 3. So I designated the oldest two as captains and had them pick teams. My job was to underhand toss to both teams and umpire.

My son went to round up balls and he was still not happy. He told me that he wasn't going to play, he was afraid it was going to rain, etc. I gently tried to push him. I told him that he was picked first, that we needed him to even out the teams. Well, the other kids were ready to go and the game was starting so he didn't have much of a choice but to participate.

And guess what happened? An old-fashioned, pick up baseball game broke out! These kids hit, fielded, ran, trash-talked, kept score, argued over whether they were safe or out. They ran and ran and ran. For my son, his complaints about the weather and how he wanted to go home were replaced by bold claims of his hitting prowess, keeping score, cheering on his teammates and jeering the opposition. We finished the day with him on an absolute high. I can still hear him relaying the events to his mother. No negative anything, just fast-talking, animated narration of the fun he had.

So for us, for this one time, we made a game out of it and it paid off for both of us.

Papa Dan