Chalk up a win!

My wife refers to our little league team as the Bad News Bears.  We were put together at the last second because the 5 teams had too many kids.  So the park funded our team and the other coach’s selected 2 kids each to come to our team.  So naturally, I got most of the kids with little experience.  Because they try to keep the ages of the kids the same per team, I did get 2 kids that are good hitters.  The team didn’t even have a coach, which is where they begged me to do it because I had already helped out with a couple of practices.  So rookie coach’s and a bunch of rookie kids.

Due to the late start of our team, we only had 4 scheduled practices on diamonds.  2 of them got rained out and 1 had a scheduling conflict with the diamond.  So we ended up only having 1 practice before we started games.  Our first few games were horrible.  We had one kid who could hit, nobody else could.  So we would basically go 3 up, 3 down, almost every inning.  Loss after loss.  We signed up for batting cage time for a couple of weeks and gradually a couple of the other kids starting to hit the ball.  Not all the time, but they got hits here and there.  We had a few games where we hit the ball well but couldn’t quite get over the hump to get our first win.  We ended up going 0’fer for the season.

Tonight was our first game of the end of season tourney.  We came out early and scored 2 in the first inning.  I was hoping we could get on a roll for the game.  We ended up giving up a few runs and were down.  Then we had a 5 run 4th inning that put us on top for good.  That’s right, for good.  My boys came through for their first win.  And in the tournament at that.  I was so proud of them and they were all so excited.  I bought them all slushies in celebration.  Trevor was so excited.  A couple of the kids that don’t get very many hits had a couple.  And we actually had a kid with his first Grand Slam in our 5 run inning.

I don’t know how many games we have to win to take the tournament and I don’t even care.  They won a game, and when it mattered the most.  They came out and hit the ball and played some defense in the heat.  And pulled out a win.  I was proud of the boys tonight.  Even if it’s our only win this year, I’m still proud of this team.  Every one of the boys have improved throughout the year, and that’s what I told them that I wanted.  To get better every game.

Our band of misfits

We got pictures back tonight as well.  Apparently all the Coach’s got a copy of the team photo with the inscription above.  I thought that was pretty cool.