Activity-full 6-yr son
Our 6-yr old HG has been trying out various sports by now. Just for the past 1 year he tried paid lessons for golf, martial arts (Taekwondo), soccer, swimming. He also enjoys rock climbing with his one of the best friends. That variety was largely realized thanks to my wife m challenging him explore new activities during her maternity leave. Once that ended we obviously had to pick only some of them to continue although he seemed to have enjoyed all of those. Also swimming was seasonal at least we thought at the place (later we found the aquatic center offered indoor lesson though). After all, we narrowed down to Taekwondo and soccer.
Then this year around, we noticed we forgot signing up for the soccer for the Spring and the class is already full (there's a well-managed private club in the city that owns multiple full soccer courts, where his age of class is well over a few dozens of kids. Yet the class is still full). So we decided to try joining a baseball league in a town next to our city. We registered in a rush as it was 1 day before the deadline to sign up when a neighbor told us about this league. But HG had tried baseball before when he was 4 back in Sacramento. After moving to GA, m's former boss generously gave us a set of kids baseball equipment. So we were ready to be back to the diamond again.
Baseball season
At the beginning there was a selection where coaches evaluated each players and later "draft" players. Purpose of forming teams like this instead of rather randomly assigning players is that I assume we want the level of all the teams equally distributed as much as possible.
Cultural difference with baseball team formation
I found this nice, a little more involvement from coaches and league's side though. Back in Japan I grew up in a country side town and only kids baseball opportunity was town-hosted league where each team was formed based on a geographic section of town automatically. Because in the section I lived there were not enough kids, I had to wait until I hit 6th grade where we barely made a team (and it was joint multi-sections). Then, it's an automatic process based on region, not the skills, so there was a huge advantage for the populated sections of town where there were many more kids playing, as there was higher chance that kids with skills are in the team.
Dad being a coach
Ok, enough derailing. Aside from HG enjoying baseball so far the first few practices, I am volunteering to coach his 6 or under team. I've never coached any sports, nor I played baseball in the US, meaning I need to learn a lot of languages specific to playing baseball. To be quite frank, I regretted the decision to apply for the assistant coach initially, as we're still very busy with 8-month old LL, my wife m is getting up with her new job and figuring out how to deal with the level of stress from it, and I really like to get back up to speed with my career this year as well (haven't written this down yet anywhere else, but I became part-time temporarily to deal with family life)...But, teaching my kids the activities I love has been on my note, it's just the question is whether it works with my life or not. Since I already decided to slow down my career just for a little bit to allow myself dedicate more on our kids, I might as well just start it now. Coaching is one next level, I could've taught HG baseball without doing a coach. Knowing myself, however, I should better engage in a responsibility that I can't slack off when I'm busy.
So far coaching has been a bit rough but stimulative and enjoyable enough experience. Other than 60+ mins practices, twice a week in the evening, there's some planning behind the scene. Before starting to coach, the county (or the city the league belongs to?) required getting online certificate, which provided great coverage about many things to keep in mind about organizing youth activities. Also as a very new coach in a new culture, I need some research I need to squeeze in to my schedule. The team is 6 or under, meaning our son HG is on the most mature side. I found the kids are amazingly short attention. Wonder how the teachers at school/daycare/after school lessons can keep them focused. It's also both 2 coaches incl. myself are new in coaching, so there's A LOT to improve in organizing the practice.
Who knows in a few months if I will more enjoy coaching the baseball or not. It'll be a great experience for our son regardless.
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HG doesn't seem to dislike the clearly oversized 2021 world series champion T-shirt we finally got (at Target lol)
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