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| The 2013 AALL All-Star Travel Team |
Little League baseball in Arabia is a journey, a long and difficult journey.
To get to the pinnacle (the travel team), every single player and parent, especially parent (?), must endure innumerable, seemingly endless, hopeless-feeling, and painful baseball experiences... I don't want to discount the positives, and there are plenty, but let's face it--it hasn't been easy!
Let me summarize the years very quickly:
The journey begins with a map to "the shed" written on the back of a piece of scrap paper while your head is still spinning about having landed in Arabia of all places. Your kid did not initiate this trip, by the way. You pick up an outdated helmet and a bat that's too short, and before you know it you find yourself, experienced or not, suddenly sucked into coaching.
Despite your own seriousness, outfielders prefer to sit "criss cross apple sauce" between innings, and all of your players are mostly interested in the jets soaring overhead with tails of fire. It seems unfair that brand-new pitchers with Little League arms are pitching to brand-new umpires with Major League strike zones, but that's all we've got.
You figure it will get better soon, but there are opposing coaches encouraging their players to steal bases no matter the score. So many third strikes are called on your son that it hurts. Weekend night after weekend night is blown in order to subject your work-worn self to these woebegone tortures.
Yet you spring for that $300 bat.
Back home, meals and homework are compacted into the stressful witching hour between the end of work and baseball practice. You occasionally must drag your son to the field; he's wearing the wrong color jersey; coaches holler (guilty as charged); gossip rides the warm breezes that ripple through the aluminum bleachers where rivalries are imagined and real... There are unhappy and happy car rides home from the field, and later, you're still worked up about your experience at the game, but he's fast asleep on the couch in his uniform without a worry in his head.
Games begin at dinnertime, yet the snack bar is inexplicably boarded up. There are the end-of-game stories after triumphs, post-game sleepovers, and friendships forged.
The travel is memorable: Meeting at the pub at the airport in Bahrain before the flight to another tournament; so many taxi rides in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Dubai in baseball uniforms--fun, yeah, but your savings account is stagnate.
Streams of baseball emails interrupt and enliven your work hours, and did you have the foresight to buy two pairs of cleats and an extra pair of baseball pants while on repat in order to get through the coming year or did you have to expensively Aramex new things in??
Etc. etc. etc.
And hats off to those parents who endured all of the above PLUS four to five nights of commuting 45 minutes each way to Dhahran every week. No Purgatory for you, I hope.
But also, we saw our boys grow up right before our eyes, taller, stronger, and richer, and the travel team punches the gas pedal to the floor on this maturity process in so many ways...
That's how growing up happens.
Can you believe how talented they've become? Was it, is it all worth it?
Yep, every second.
hi trace!
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