Got the practice schedule for Logan's basketball team. 4 practices a week. He really needs it. Basketball is a hard game to master and you can only do it by constant practice. At the moment, football is his favorite sport, followed by basketball and with baseball a distant third.
Some of the other kids in the Mavs organization are doing private instruction right now. We did that all through last year. I think this year, we may skip it. If Logan drops a sport, it's going to be baseball. I don't believe in pushing him in sports. At their core, they're supposed to be fun. Challenging? Yes, but fun, primarily.
I also still have a bit of a bad taste in my mouth from last season, but I need to get over it. Logan spent the entire off-season working his butt off and when the season started, the coach had him batting 11th. He started off badly, and I think part of it was due to being stuffed into the bottom of the order. After a couple weeks, he shook the rust off and was essentially the team's best hitter until the last two weeks of the season where he went back into a slump. Overall, he ended up 5th in batting, out of 12 kids on the team. Not much difference between him and #3 and 4, either.
Unfortunately, I think the coach had his mind made up about who was going to play where, and what he saw didn't have any influence on his decision. Logan deserved a much better place in the batting order and a lot more infield time and he didn't get them. (The coach did begrudgingly move him to 7th in the batting order after Logan went through a 2 week streak where he hit .700.)
This year, it's a different team and a different coach, but like I said, I feel a little let down by his experience last year. Baseball is a sport where perception plays a much bigger role than in other sports, in my opinion.
It dawned on me that part of the reason is that baseball doesn't really give you a way to have one player play directly against another.
In football, every practice, Logan is running drills against other players. A common drill is an angle-tackling drill where players take turns running the ball (playing RB), then switching and playing LB to try and tackle the RB. You get a pretty clear picture of where the kids fall after watching that for a few weeks.
Logan got his starting FB job because during tackling drills, he made a habit of dragging his tacklers for a few extra yards per touch.
In basketball, you can have players match up, one-on-one and see how they do. You can watch them on their man in scrimmages. You can have them play one-on-one. It's really easy to see where they stack up.
In baseball? Not so much. You can see who does better in fielding drills, but a lot of that is subjective. Hitting? You can get a good idea of how kids hit by watching them in BP, but you can also ignore that if you want, too.
Anyway, I'm still hacked off that he played the entire season in the outfield last year. There were better infielders on the team, and they all deserved the bulk of the playing time. Near as I can figure, there were 4 of them. However, there were also kids who were clearly not as good and they all got more infield time, too. Part of it is that Logan was a very good CF, but part of it, frankly, is just that I don't think enough effort was being made to develop players. Overall, I wasn't impressed with what I saw last year. The year before? It was very, very good. Last year? It went very, very badly, I think.
I'm ready to support Logan in any way, in any sport, if he shows the drive. I'm not going to nag him to practice, though. I'm not going to set up private instruction in sports he doesn't care that much about. Baseball may be the first sport he drops.
Personally, I think he shows a lot more talent in baseball than in basketball, but if he wants to play High School basketball, he might need to crowd out baseball. Another kid on the basketball team found a summer league to play in, and I will try to get details on that so Logan can play that next Summer if he wants.
In the final analysis, his success in sports is going to depend on a few things. One is his physical development. If he continues to grow to be big and strong, he'll have an advantage in sports. The other is his desire. If he wants to be a great baseball player and wants to put in the work, I'll support it. If he doesn't, I won't push it.
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