OK, quick stop back home, before heading on the 2nd trip of the week. Technically, it wasn’t a vacation; it was a business trip. OK, that’s probably a bit much… haha. It is only an 11U travel baseball tournament for my 10 year old son. Yeah, we headed to Milwaukee for the weekend for our first tournament experience.
Watching my son play baseball brings me back; I’ve already checked off an item on my bucket list that I never even knew existed, watching him play on the field that I grew up playing on. For that moment alone, this summer has been a success in my eyes… haha. But wait, there’s more. Getting on the road, heading out to another state to play baseball…. that brings back memories too. Travel baseball wasn’t a big thing like it is today, back when I was growing up. We played at our home park, and that was that. Maybe it was going on, but it just didn’t really come our way in the inner city, although my brother did play for RBI baseball, which became a thing as we got a bit older. Yeah, it was walking to and from the park a few days a week to play our games. I do remember hitting another park or two over the years, but for the most part, we stood put. There was the one tournament in Iowa though…
I don’t know about all this 10u, 11u, and 12u stuff… or however these leagues are broken out by age group today. It seems like there are a couple different ways to do it. Back then, we had pee wee, little, and pony league. We sent those 3 teams out to Iowa to compete in a tourney. Funny enough, one of the things I remember from that trip was one of the kids ordering 7 hash browns at McDonalds… hilarious. The other thing I remember from that trip, is that we kicked the crap out of those Iowa teams. Supposedly, the team we played was like top 5 in the state. Well, they were zero competition for us. As I mentioned previously, we were stacked at that park. I thought I was a really good player, and I was… maybe top 10 in our league? I would say I was a top 5 pitcher for sure, but yeah, each team in our league was good; every team had good players. And when you hand pick the best of each team and send them in a van to Iowa, well, that’s bad news for those Iowa teams.
It was so fun. That was my one and only out of state baseball experience; I’ll never forget it. Of course, I was hoping for more of the same this weekend for my son during our up north trip. I think it was mission accomplished on that front, although the details of the trip were a bit different. OK, let’s talk through this tourney next.
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