Thursday marked the last team practice for West Raleigh 7U. More practices had been scheduled, but when everyone found out Timmy couldn't be there, they decided not to bother. In honor of the last practice, Coach Sean constructed an elaborate Olympic-style competition, plus concocted an evil ruse (more details on that later).
Opening ceremonies featured Coach Sean explaining the rules to the team. "So, does everyone understand how this works?" he asked.
They responded with an emphatic chorus of, "Uhhh..." Oh wait, that was just Coach Adam. The kids fully understood that the first event would be ground balls.
Each player received three grounders, in increasing order of difficulty, and were judged on their ability to field the ball with two hands, come up into a solid throwing position, and make a good throw to Kid Gooch.
Grounders were followed by fly balls. Each player again went three times--the first was directly to them, they had to move a little for the second one, and the third was a wicked liner down the line.
In addition to making the catch, they also had to come up and fire another solid throw. This was good practice for the next event, which was throwing. I'm not saying this was the hardest event, but, well, look at the targets set up by Coach Sean:
The targets (but not Coach Ken) are shown actual size. The goal was to throw the ball into the targets on no more than two hops from about midway in left-center field. "They have to go in the buckets," Coach Sean said as the throwing round began. After one of the three rotations, he added, "I think hitting the bucket is OK." Yeah, you think? The difficulty of hitting the buckets was proven when the coaches attempted to hit them while standing at the fence.
Players also received five live swings off the pitching machine.Where the ball was hit determined their score. The highest score was given to Coach Bruce for his impressive moves in dodging a line drive.
The next event was running. First, the players were timed going from home to first. Then, they were timed going from second to home. Note here the speed exhibited by Chace, who had taken a wicked bad hop grounder off his kneecap in pre-Olympic warmups but, in true heroic Olympic fashion, came back to post one of the best scores of the day:
With all the events completed, it was time to tally the scores. Coach Sean had devised a scoring system in which the entire 7U roster was divided into two teams, but only he knew who was on which team. It turned out that he had secretly marked the teams on the scoresheet using a code he learned while in Navy SEALS training. The individual scores were added, then combined to make a team score. Then, because one team had six players and the other had seven, the cumulative scores were averaged to get a per-player average for each team. Got all that?
Now, I fully realize no one believes this and thinks the officiating must have been questionable. But as someone who was there when the scores were being tallied, I can vouch for it: the per-player average was a dead tie. This allowed Coach Sean to put his devious plan into motion.
Let's flash back to the beginning of practice. Coach Sean had gathered the team down the left-field line, away from all parents and coaches. After exhaustive interrogation of a person who shall remain nameless, I have learned the following facts: at that gathering, Coach Sean told the players he planned to allow them to peg the coaches with water balloons at the conclusion of practice. HOWEVAH, the coaches were simply told that a water balloon toss would be the tiebreaking event if needed.
Coach Sean carefully lined up the two teams along the third base line. He generously offered to partner up with the odd player, since all 13 players were in attendance, and asked the other coaches to split up and stand near each team's line to "judge if they were cheating."
He explained the rules of the game, and told the players they had to toss the balloons back and forth, and when all of theirs broke, they were out. Then he said, "Go."
Look very carefully at the above picture. Notice that some/most of the players are following the instructions of the game perfectly. But the one big kid, in the yellow shirt, seems to be hunting down coaches with wild abandon. And look who just happens to be the one who picked up the bucket full of water to use as a weapon:
Once the water balloons had been exhausted, some devious pranksters wheeled out the hose, intent on revenge on Coach Sean. However, it turned out the hose had a higher and better use: entertainment for the coaches.
The next team activity is a
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