What a fun night. We were replaying a league game at the other team's home field. Nice kids. Weather was beautiful, not too hot, not too cold. My young kids running around with ice cream smeared on thier faces. The oldest playing the game that he loves. Each player on the team had an RBI and all but one had at least one hit. And the cherry on top--Mike Bibby from the Sacramento Kings came out to watch (friends with the other coach) and came by to meet each one of our boys. What a cool thing!

I have one very fond "kids will be kids" memory from last year...

Our team had a great gel with some of the best and funniest coaches I have seen in young kids baseball. At six weeks into the season they had won all of their games and their first tournament. It was not that they had an overpowering team - they just seemed to always "pull it out of the fire" when they needed to. My son learned more about "It's not over until it's over" that summer than in all of his previous baseball combined.

Anyways... on this steamy night the team suffered their first loss by a large margin - and fittingly to a spirited team they had beat on the previous weekend tournament finals. Our "little invincibles" were pretty low about the loss. The Coach had our team run around the field after shaking hands. About halfway through the run the big automatic sprinklers came on. Suddenly one or two kids break off and start running through the sprinklers (these are the kind that shoot about 40 feet). Of course, all of the kids join in. The coaches and parents start yelling to no avail (noone wants to go out and get soaked). My son, a heavy set guys, runs up to the sprinkler head and squats just above it - water firing off in all directions - and taunts the coach "Hey, Irv" waving his arms. Finally the coaches gave up and about twenty minutes later everyone went home.

The team would win more than lose for the rest of the season but, that was a great and spontaneous "team" moment. The loss was forgotten, the squabbles amongst themselves were forgotten, as a group they stood alone from parents and coaches and took their fun.

One of the parents from my son's '06 team was surprised when I said that it would be hard to beat my son's '05 experience. We have highly credentialed coaching, it is AAA Rep level, the team looks like it will contend well, and it is both good fun and disciplined. I had an old tape in my handycam (I was adding some of this years pitching to the end of it). I played a sequence of the '05 coach chatting up a kid going to bat - encouraging and hilarious stuff. "Yeah, it looks like a lot of fun" the other parent said.

Any other great moments to post?

D