An Ode to Rec Baseball (And All Community Sports)

Included: A video guaranteed to make you smile

At the heart of this newsletter is a quest to provide useful information and new ideas for parents (and kids and coaches) navigating the dizzying world of youth sports. Some are tangible like best nutritional practices and proper conditioning for young athletes. Others like calling for the better treatment of officials are rooted in empathy. But sometimes the biggest eye-openers sneak up on you when you aren’t looking. For me, that was remembering the beauty of community sports.

My husband entered his fifth straight season of coaching rec baseball this past spring with the excitement of a sloth in the starting block of a 100-yard dash. As commissioner of our town’s PONY Mustang division (9–10-year-olds) and one of those “go above and beyond” board member types, he didn’t exactly have an abundance of energy left for coaching. You know, the part that’s supposed to be fun. But he felt an obligation to Mr. Minecraft (our younger son) to coach as he had for our older son. Unlike our older son who couldn’t get enough baseball at age 9, Mr. Minecraft was a mini-Allen Iverson who saw no value in extra practice. We talkin 'bout practice! Not a game!” To be fair, he was also playing soccer, basketball, and flag football and even doing homework on the regular so the kid needed to snag his video game time when he could. Still, it’s hard to be overly pumped when you’re more invested in coaching your kid than your kid is in being there at all.

As much as the husband loves coaching, this was going to be his last season, he told us. His work as commissioner alone was just too time-consuming. There are tons of people eager to coach but zero eager to be the next commissioner. Despite the many perils of the “job,” being an integral part of the local baseball and softball community was still a net positive in his eyes.

Onto the season…

The evaluations (to ensure even teams) and “draft” happened months before the season started. My husband selected a lot of players he knew were nice and had nice families, including one of Mr. Minecraft’s besties. He drafted others he didn’t know well but fingers crossed, their families would also be nice and drama-free. But he was already a happy camper since one of the many beautiful things about community ball is an event like the draft becomes a social outing. Just by virtue of having an actual team locked in and maybe a couple of IPAs, my husband’s coaching juices started flowing that night. But Mr. Minecraft’s blasé-about-baseball attitude was still a liability. That is, until it was time to name the team.

In this division, a team can name itself after any minor league baseball squad. There were some fun names selected like the Lugnuts, Woodpeckers, and Cannonballers. But as Mr. Minecraft scoured the names, he happened upon one minor league squad clearly above the rest, both in name and swagger.

The Savannah Bananas it was. Even if the on-field part of the season was a disaster, at least there would be delightful video clips to watch and banana pudding to eat. I even ordered some dorky banana hats, thinking they’d be part of my fan wear. But the hats would take on a life of their own.

In the weeks leading up to the first practice, Mr. Minecraft would regale us with the ridiuclous debates at school over who had the best name, and yes, who had the best team. It was just the push our son needed to start caring, to start asking my husband to *gasp* practice. As our son’s passion for the season grew, so did my husband’s passion for coaching this particular team.

Now thoroughly engaged, Mr. Minecraft left the first practice with the usual kid-led assessment of most rec teams. Some kids were GOATS, other kids were not. But unlike past years, my kid truly wanted everyone to get better. Maybe it was maturity, maybe it was liking all the kids, but Mr. Minecraft was invested. He looked forward to practice and it rubbed off on my husband who came up with the idea of awarding the banana hats to the player/s who had the best practice or game. And because it’s rec, that could be a kid who went 4-for-4 or a kid who the made contact for the first time or had the guts to stand on the pitchers’ mound.

The team chemistry grew in silliness, community, and a collective desire to improve. It was just plain fun. Not that wins and losses matter but…the Bananas started 1-4. Sure, one or two kids hung their heads low and thought the team, as they would say, sucked. But chatter about the league and who would win the championship and yes, who had the best team name continued outside of practice. Maybe it was the power of an omnipresent community sport, but something clicked. One by one. One kid got his first hit of season, yet another stopped a ball and knew to throw it to the cutoff man, holding the runner to a single. The banana hat was happily spread around (and don’t worry, it was disinfected between uses).

Then came the banana dancing pre-game ritual. Much like the Washington Nationals turned around their 2019 season when Gerardo Parra and Baby Shark showed up, these Savannah Bananas started dancing their way to wins.

The more experienced players became leaders; the more junior players became motivated. This little team took on a new life that can only happen at the community level. Sure, there are still agro parents who treat rec like it’s MLB but the Savannah Bananas avoided that. There was pressure but appropriate pressure. There was mild instructional raising of the voice but no coach or parent yelling “What the fuck are you doing?” like we see on the higher stakes of the travel baseball circuit.

In so many ways community sports are broken. The professionalization of youth sports have depleted rec programs. Parents are shelling out tens of thousands a year on travel sports, and for what? The chance to say their kid is on Elite, Gold, Platinum blah blah blah team? The chance to spend every single weekend trekking to the middle of nowhere? The chance to put your kid under extreme pressure way too early in life?

Of course, club and travel sports are the right fit for a lot of kids. (Our older son has played travel baseball for a while now.) Many communities don’t even offer a recreational level for a number of sports, often because the club model has stripped too many would-be kids. Maybe there’s a better way, a middle ground between rec and travel that is affordable and local. This week, Major League Soccer announced the launch of MLS GO which is designed to be just that, an elevated recreation experience. They are partnering with rec departments throughout the country and providing an infrastructure that will hopefully boost the number of kids playing and continuing to play soccer. The NFL has a similar model with flag football. This is all incredible news but we need more.

We are lucky that our town has a robust baseball and softball league, run by passionate parents and coaches. There is something so sacred about local bragging rights and having a tight-knit community league as a conversation starter for kids. No one cares if my older son hits a homer off a random kid from a random team an hour away played at a field two hours away. But to hit a single off the rec pitcher the kids consider “the best pitcher ever” at the field they all practice at, now that’s saying something.

Mr. Minecraft at bat

The Savannah Bananas went on a roll and made it to the league’s championship game. The kid who had walked off the field in tears a month earlier after dropping a ball, and vowed to never play baseball again, had the highest batting average in the playoffs. Every player contributed in some way. All the kids wanted to be there, and in a shift from the beginning of the season, they all wanted it the most. More than the coaches. More than the parents. It was a coalescing that can only happen in community ball.

The Bananas lost the championship on a walkoff homer to the most powerful power hitter in the league. A couple of kids were teary-eyed but most were proud of their turnaround. They ate pizza and played pickle with the champions.

Earlier that day, our son wrote a simple letter to my husband which I handed him soon after the game. I forgot to include a tissue.

After a long day, my husband tucked in our exhausted son. Before our son could fall asleep, he had a big ask that had been on his brain for several weeks and especially that day.

“Can you please coach again next year, daddy?”

Without hesitation, my husband replied, “Of course. We have a championship to win!”