Youth Sports (i.e. the thing we all loved which parents have now ruined)

Opened the season with a 14-0 win. I don't think it was as close as the score indicated - we ran for 208 yards on 23 carries.

How 'bout a little Single Wing Spin Series ...

 

We still like these people so much we want to try to get on the same hockey team with them.

Because hockey parents- that's where it gets stupid.

 

Hey Justin
what's the ages on these kids and what school's stadium is that?

 

11u, and it's at Liberty Bealton.

 

Thanks. Have you been to Wanner Stadium in Williamsburg? Extremely nice facility that is used by 3 high schools. Got my first look at it Friday night!

 

Question for my American friends. How much do you figure it costs each year to have a kid in a good travel baseball program? One that, talent permitting of course, provides a decent path to an NCAA/NJCAA program?

For example, the Ontario Blue Jays (which produced the Naylor brothers) is one of the premier programs up here and probably costs about $15K a year, all things considered. I’ve always wondered what a good program would cost in the US.

 

Yeah in my previous life I've covered a good number of playoff games there. In Division 4, the Fredericksburg area teams frequently would play the Newport News area teams in postseason games.

It's a pretty nice spot. The abundance of turf fields in Virginia is a god send.

I'll say this, though: Liberty-Bealeton was one of the first turf schools in the greater Fredericksburg area. They badly need to do some maintenance on it. The field sinks down a bit. There's a noticeable depression at all the yard lines. It's not unsafe yet, but it'll get there if they don't put some money into it.

 

At the mid-major where I used to be an SID, the outfield was grass and the infield was turf, but it was turf that had been re-used after being taken out of a football stadium. Some of the yard lines and numbers were still visible, and it was in bad, bad shape. But the school's AD gave a scholarship to a player who might have been a walk-on at any other school and then talked the kid's really rich dad into donating enough money to re-do the facility, and named part of it after the kid, who barely saw the field during his time at the school. It was an awkward situation.

 

I thought this is a funny thing to add here. My youngest who is in first grade decided to play soccer this year. We've never made our kids do a sport or activity. But if they've said they want to do something, we almost 100 percent have let them try. This is our first go with soccer.

Anyway, we have friends who are super competitive. Their oldest is the same age as my 10-year-old sports kid and they played on the same teams across sports for a few years until he got too "good" to be with his friends any more. So I have dealt with their competitiveness for a while. It's not how I want to handle youth sports, but I know I might be sort of alone in that thought.

Their youngest is in kindergarten and is also playing soccer. Here in rec they usually put kids on teams by grade and school so they are with their friends more or less. So both our kids are on the "school" teams for their grades.

I asked the mom after school the other day how soccer was going and she went, not bad. I don't think they'll be very good. That was her first thought. I had to double take at that. I mean, kindergarten rec soccer. Huh? If my kid has fun running around for an hour on Saturdays sort of kicking a ball, then I call it a success. And we wonder why we have a thread like this!

 

Moved our daughter into college in NY this weekend. She's there for musical theatre, and starts classes tomorrow. Three rounds of auditions last year to get in, she's in an MT class of about 35 (the college has about 3K liberal arts undergrads), and the word is that about 1,200 initially applied there for MT (most upper musical theatre programs have this kind of math, and some, obviously, are even tougher).

This is a long (loooooooong) way of saying...finally, it's the kids, their talent and work ethic, and no stage parents.

Let's go.

 

Our nephew plays for the Toronto Mets, which is a program nowhere near the level of the OBJ, and I bet it's easily cost his parents 15K a year or probably more. They had to buy a second car to make sure both of their kids got where they needed to go during the season (the youngest, who is 13, plays AAA in East York). The Mets were always heading to the US when that was possible, they couldn't beat teams here, never understood why you'd have to go to the States to get embarrassed.

 

Gotcha. So if the Mets are $15K I assume every CPBL team is going to come in around at least that much.

We thought about going that route for 2022 but decided to stay in the EBLO (just not in Burlington).

What do you think kids pay to play for the Marlies?