You know what they say… After an ugly loss, or a string of them… after a team’s performance bottoms out… there’s only one way to go. The win loss results weren’t what we wanted this weekend in my son’s tournament. Two blow out losses on Saturday lead to an early game on Sunday, which resulted in another blowout. 0-3, and headed back to Chicago earlier than desired on Sunday. Mama said there’d be days like this…
My son had an equally tough time during these games; I should have expected as much. The teams that we played were really good. Some of these kids, that qualified for 11U, are probably already 12 years old, which would make them 2 full years older than my son, which is everything at this age. My son, who just turned 10 in April, should really be on a 10U team. By playing up, I knew he could run into some older kids pitching that he may not be able to handle; I think that was part of it. The other part is his confidence was fading after every out he made; he’s in a slump. All he needs is to crack one, and I think he’d be fine; ready to see that soon. Just like the last full year we played, when he was 8 years old, in the 8-10 league, and we lost every game, I have to keep him encouraged. Playing with these older kids will help him in the long run; gaining this tournament experience will pay off as well. Hard to explain that to him right this second though…
I was rocking my Cubs shirt the first day; it rained on and off most of the day. I got a lot of “Go Cubs”. I think the baseball fans are pretty split up there; it’s not only people from Chicago who fill Wrigley North during the Cubs Brewers series. Lots of Cubs fans in Wisconsin. We were thinking about going to the Brewers Blue Jays game on Friday night before the tourney started; we ended up in the pool instead. That was fun; the games on Saturday were not as fun. Like I said, we ran into some juggernauts, although a lot of the damage was self inflicted. Bad defense combined with poor hitting is a lethal combo. Still, we had a pizza party that evening, before we jumped back in the pool. There had to be 50 kids in there; my son had a ball… that made me happy. In general, I think he’s having fun playing baseball, which is really important.
The last day, as the lowest seed in our bracket, we played an 8am game. My son and I were up at 630am having breakfast in the hotel lobby; they had these pancake apple wraps that he loved. I decided to wear a Bears shirt on this day; not the same reactions I got the previous day. I might as well have been wearing a swastika on my chest… lots of dirty looks; F them, and their precious Packers. Their decades long run of Hall of Fame QBs will soon be over. Anyways, we played better on Sunday morning, but the result was the same. First tourney in the books, still waiting for our first tourney win.
Time to keep it moving. We’ll have our 2nd tournament next weekend in Northbrook, a Chicago suburb; we’ll have one more towards the end of July. Certainly can’t do any worse; only up from here on out. Looking forward to that upswing… keep your head up boy…
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