My Last Game as a Youth Sports Coach

I was checking around G's baseball team to see who could make it to a playoff game, when the mom of one of my best players, said what can only be described as fitting words.  Her son had stopped playing baseball and was hanging up his spikes.  After 250 baseball games, 120 basketball games, 50 football games and 10 soccer games, JMR has stopped coaching and is mercifully hanging up his spikes.

One of the few games where I coached C and G together.

C was just 7 years old when I started to get the coaching bug.  Soccer of all sports was my first foray into coaching after LC thought that I should get into it.  Everyone will agree that I am a terrible parent when watching my children play sports.  I tend to bitch and moan a lot - sometimes at the coaching and some times at the umpiring.  I talk trash to opposing teams - the "wooing soccer mom syndrome" rattles me every time.  And I have a vicious competitive streak, to such an extent that LC will slowly move away from me as the game goes on.  She thinks that I don't notice when she does it, but I do. 

The thing is is that a lot of that generally went away when I coached.  I was still very competitive - A referee once told me to get my nitro out as I was screaming after a play ended in 3RD GRADE FOOTBALL - but the screaming wasn't vicious.  G would get mad at me because I would bat everyone everywhere in the order and wanted everyone to pitch. A basketball referee actually asked ME to calm my head coach down after a terrible call.  Coaching had a soothing effect on my vicariousness.

These basketballs sure look lonely

And the amount of coaching that I did tended to be on the ridiculous side.  There were some years where coached C and G in baseball, coached G in travel and Rec basketball and coached G in football. Coaching in 2012 and 2013 was like another full time job.  And just when I started dialing it back with the boys, I started coaching DLG in Summer, AAU and travel basketball.  Why did I do this to myself?  These were the best of times because I loved spending the time, but it was also the worst of times because it affected my work and I was always exhausted.  I would lay awake thinking mostly about football.  Saturdays and Sundays in the Fall were all about watching film, drawing up game plans and thinking about how to get an edge.  Yeah, LC doesn't miss those days.

But sometimes, I do.

The last coaching I did was for G's Junior Baseball league.  Once the kids were done with the Cooperstown team as 12 year olds, interest started to wane.  It was always a struggle to field 9 kids, even though I had 15 kids on my team.  But there I was trying to win games and make the kids a little bit better.  It was sometimes a drag because of the weather or because I was busy at work, but once I got out into the field, all the juices came back.  We were like the Celtics because two of our best players never showed up tot he games and we still went 8-2.  (That tie was a win in my books).  Because C was young enough to play in Juniors himself, I tried to talk him into playing with us.  Except for some Summer League games, I never got the chance to coach them together...they were probably fine with it.

Yeah, I'll be back next year.