About a year ago, my six-year-old son decided he was ready to play baseball. He had been watching his two older brothers for years and was dying to get out there and play like them. I signed him up for a Single A coach-pitch league, and he was assigned to a new team that hadn’t played together before. When I met the head coach of the team, I learned that he had never coached baseball before and was a little unsure of how to get things started. Since I had been working in youth baseball for several years and had some coaching experience, we decided that I would take over the training of the team as an assistant coach, and the head coach would handle all of the administrative tasks and duties. It seemed like a perfect plan.
But you know what they say about best laid plans. At the end of our first practice, I was really down and frustrated. It had been six years since my older boys began playing, and I had forgotten so quickly what it was like to enter a sport as a total neophyte. The team only had three kids who had played before, and the rest of the boys had very little, if any, knowledge of baseball. I tried to teach this group of beginners how to “stride and load” and “squash the bug” to get more power when hitting. I showed them how to squat down in “baseball ready” position on defense and how to get their gloves down to properly field grounders. But what made so much sense to me didn’t to them.
They struggled to get it, and I struggled to find a way to teach proper mechanics to a bunch of six-year-olds. As you can imagine, we didn’t do very well. We lost game after game, barely turning an out on defense and averaging only about seven hits per game, most of which never actually yielded a run. Despite my frustration, I could tell we were improving as a team. I could see each week that light bulbs were going off and that there were little nuggets of baseball wisdom they were picking up.
Our final game of the regular season was against the only other team in our division that hadn’t won a game. Who planned that, I wondered. Did the league somehow foresee our less-than-stellar fates and set up this showdown of strikeouts, this match of misfits? Regardless, it was going to be a battle to avoid being officially declared the bottom of the barrel of 7U baseball.
Game day came and the boys looked pretty good. We were getting more hits than normal, and in the middle of the final inning, I stared out at the scoreboard and somehow we were up 5-3. Our dugout was filled with an aura of excitement that had been sadly missing all season, and even overcautious me was sporting a pretty big grin. The boys were jumping up and down and already celebrating a victory when I huddled them up to remind them that the other team still had to bat since they were the home team. I told them all we needed were three outs and to get out there and play some good hard defense.
And that’s when everything fell apart.
Balls were hit to us and we either missed or bobbled most of them. When we did field a ball, we made a bad throw to 1st. The other team loaded up the bases and then hit a bomb that left that aluminum bat with a deafening ping. Three runs scored and we lost 6-5. We ended the season with a 0-8 record, and I was about as low as a daddy coach can get.
As I gathered up my clipboard and bag to head out of the dugout for our usual end-of-game team meeting, I was startled out of a bout of pensive self-abuse by something rather odd. We had just lost, but several of the boys were still celebrating. I began to question whether they realized what had just happened when I heard some of them talking about how well we had played and how we had “almost won.”
I stopped and listened to this wonderfully illuminating exchange. They were right. What was wrong with me? Sometimes our children can be our biggest teachers, educating us with their innocent, honest perspective that hasn’t had time to become bitter or jaded with our wealth of experience. Why was I down? I had completely missed the point. We had eleven hits in the game and a lead going into the final inning. That was a win.
The Playoffs
The regular season had ended and it was time for the playoffs. We had an odd number of teams in the division, so the lowest two teams had a game to determine the final spot. That, of course, meant we had to play the team we had just lost to . . . again.
Much like the first game, the boys on these two teams battled each other with everything they had. We were neck in neck going into the final inning; but this time, however, we were down by a run. Our lead-off hitter came up to bat and quickly got two strikes on him. I asked him to step out of the batter’s box and take a practice swing. Then, he stepped back in and then fouled off at least six more pitches (l lost count) before he finally made good contact and drove the ball down the 3rd base line. He reached 1st safely.
The intense battle and determination of that at-bat sparked something in everyone and a rally like we had never seen. We had nine hits in that one inning and scored the maximum seven runs allowed in 7U coach-pitch baseball. It was a truly magical inning. One of the last boys to get a hit was probably the most adorable kid on the team. He had the kindest disposition with an endearing timidity. He was not a natural baseball player and was, for the most part, terrified of the ball. But you couldn’t fault him for it. He faced his fears and tried, and in the end, that’s all a coach really hopes for. The poor kid hadn’t gotten a hit all season and rarely even made contact with a pitch. He got his first hit that inning, and we had a blowout record of 21 hits in that game. It was all coming together.
Although we did give up a few runs in the bottom of the inning, we held on to earn our first victory and got to advance to the regular playoff bracket where we would play the #1 seed. Looking at their stats, one would safely assume that we were going to have a very short and very painful game against the #1 team. But that didn’t happen. This group of boys who had quickly learned to play baseball with no fear and an unshakable confidence stayed with them all the way through the 3rd inning where we were tied 5-5. No team all season had held them to five runs in three innings – until us.
Eventually they pulled away from us in the 4th inning and went on to win, but our boys put up a fight and set themselves up for a lot of great things to follow.
Losing against the #1 seed put us in the playoff loser’s bracket where we would do the unbelievable. We went on to win three consecutive games, all against teams that had beaten us during the regular season, and take the loser’s bracket championship. This put us in 3rd place overall for the playoffs, and after a 0-8 start, we finished the postseason 4-1.
Finding Fun
I learned a lot about perspective from that one season coaching 6-year-olds in baseball. I also eventually realized that this wasn’t the first time I’d had such an experience. In some sort of delayed déjà vu, it took a while for me to see the amazing parallel. That season was, in a nutshell, the entire story of learning to manage my diabetes. I started off knowing nothing and was fully dependent on others to tell me what to do. I had a lot of ups and downs – mostly downs – and didn’t see a very positive future ahead. But I kept working; I kept listening; I kept practicing, and I kept learning (knowledge is the true key and the one core principle I will preach ad nauseam on this blog).
Then one day all of the work I’d put in began to pay off. I came to understand what diabetes was and the various ways in which it was impacting my life—on an emotional and a biological level. Then little successes turned into bigger successes, and how I viewed myself transformed completely. I no longer saw myself as some partial person, something fragmented. I was me, just with some extra challenges. Yes, I may have been stuck with diabetes, but I was still a winner.
The boys on that baseball team kept working until they won. Why don’t we? Why do we fall so easily into self-doubt, anger, fear and frustration that we can’t see success in our futures? We expect our children to emulate us, but we have to start learning from our children. Those boys saw themselves as winners before I did. And that was a confidence borne of only the tiniest speck of a positive outcome. From it came hope.
You might be thinking that one can’t compare learning baseball to learning to manage diabetes. Diabetes, after all, is much harder and far more complex. Despite varying degrees of complexity, the desired ultimate end is the same–fun. The boys work hard in baseball practice, and their reward is the fun of playing games and, hopefully, winning. For us, if we work hard becoming educated and learning to manage our diabetes, we get more than just stable blood sugar levels and low A1Cs. What we get that is so often missed in our assessment is the restoration of a part of our lives. We have won back our freedom, and that lasts far longer than just one baseball game. By reaching that point, we get to engage in the game of life and all of the fun it has to offer. When we’re in control, fun is right there at our often-poked fingertips.
Learning to master our diabetes self-management may not be as fun as learning baseball, but the victory when we win is far greater. I know as diabetics we tend to believe that we got the short end of the proverbial stick. However, if we can tweak our perspective just a bit and end up as champions of this loser’s bracket, that’s a win we can all live with.
-Tad