Lesson from a Remarkable Afternoon Unnoticed

On February 23, 2008 I had an afternoon practicing baseball with my oldest son, Andrew, that I don’t think I will ever forget. It was also an afternoon that he probably didn’t notice.  With the temperature in the high 50s, we were taking the opportunity for a last minute session of ground balls at a local turf football field before freshman baseball tryouts began the next day.

He attends a competitive high school with an all-male enrollment of 1500 students.  In addition to being academically strong, the school has a national reputation for football and swimming, but is exceptional in most sports, including baseball, so making the team was going to be a challenge.

Andrew had playing organized baseball since he was four or five years old, starting with t-ball and progressing to the select Knothole team he had played on the previous summer.  When he was in second or third grade, he started doing group camps and clinics.  About the time he was fourth or fifth grade, he jettisoned soccer, his other serious sport, to focus on baseball, and began doing some private hitting and pitching lessons.  In about seventh grade, he further escalated his commitment, playing “fall ball”, and doing a couple of speed and strength programs.  Throughout all this time we would squeeze in practices with just the two of us (or the three of us when his younger brother, joined us) of soft-toss, pop-ups, infield, throwing drills, and other activities to fine tune a particular aspect of his game.  Finally, starting in November of his freshman year, he began doing weekly pitching lessons at the local baseball training facility in hopes that his pitching skills would be good enough to tip the scales in his favor at the tryouts.

All this preparation brought us to this unusually warm afternoon in February.

Something about the combination of the weather, the bright overcast sky,  and our collective mood–joy at being outside after a long winter, the trepidation regarding the tryouts, and what I think was a mutual appreciation of what we have meant to each other–combined to make one of the most enjoyable afternoons of baseball that I have ever had.  I was truly “in the moment”.   The preparation was over.  The work was done.  All that was left was to hit grounders, and enjoy the warm afternoon with my son.

Thinking of that day, though, also gives me a nagging feeling of regret for the way I approached baseball for the previous dozen years. My approach was the result of my “type A” personality; focused on goals,tasks, continually improving, and being in control of the process.  From the time Andrew was in t-ball, I thought that if he was going to play a team sport in high school, baseball was the most likely avenue, given genetics which left him with just average size and speed.  There was a lot of work to do to make sure we met “our” goal.

From when he was just starting to play, I tried to make practices fun, creating games to work on the skill du jour, but I fear that my focus on tasks, schedule, and the highest and best use of each minute overshadowed my attempts to make things fun.  As the number of games in his seasons increased, and his free time became less and less, and the the requests from him for me to toss with him, to pitch to him, or to hit grounders to him slowly dwindled. Fearing that he might fall behind, or that a flaw in his game might cause him to loose out on the next opportunity to move to the next level, our practice sessions increasingly were initiated by me.  Although I don’t think that I was an ogre about it, I am afraid that our practices moved from being fun to being work.  (A microcosm of sports in America.)

So now, here we were on that warm Sunday afternoon in February, a dad and his son, enjoying each others company, practicing grounders.  As the sun peeks through the clouds, I look across the field to the young man fluidly picking grounders, and think of the little boy 12 years ago that was standing across the back yard with a  smile on his face and his first baseball glove, catching underhand tosses from his dad.

Andrew ended up not making the final cut to 17 players after surving cuts from 65 players down to 24.  Although he is still playing in his summer league, he decided not to go out for the team high school his sophomore year.  As his disappointment has faded, he has grown in ways, including academically, that I suspect would not have happened had he landed on the comfortable path of that freshman baseball team.

I am not sure yet of all the many lessons I am to learn from this experience, but there is an important one that I want to pass on to all the parents and coaches of aspiring t-ballers an little leaguers.  One moment you will be breaking-in his first glove in the back yard, then you will blink, and your son will be looking at colleges and driving off to be with his friends.  Whether he plays until he is 14 or 44, some day his playing days will end and you will realize that the important thing was the journey, not the destination.

Do not get so caught up in the working to your goals, doing the drills, driving to lessons, to practices and to games, and looking down the road to the next tryout that you forget to truly enjoy the time spent together with your son.

Savor the journey.  Be in the moment!

(Any advice from coaches or parents who’s kids are a bit older?  Please share by adding a comment!)