Football Epilogue

Image by Cheryl Holt from Pixabay The reset, Ctrl+Alt+Delete for those Windows and Linux users out there, Open Apple+Ctrl+Reset for the Apple Macintosh afficionados (well what it used to be, I haven't used a Mac in well over a decade). The circle-y arrow inside a circle for most everything else. It's what you do when your system becomes frozen or experiences some other form of discombobulation. Often it fixes whatever problem the device was having, although it's not really an ideal solution if you have to do it multiple times a day; or a week for that matter. I spent some time this weekend thinking about hitting reset in a different context: human behavior and response. My pondering came about while watching my daughter's team play fastpitch softball. Sports tend to have a preponderance of "reset" activities. In the case of fastpitch you have the at-bat, the pitch, the play, the base running, the call, the start of the game, the start of the inning. That...

From  http://glovesonline.net Given my quasi-rant from a couple of days ago, you would think I'd have minimal time to waste on baseball. That's simply not true. The game itself has an elegance to it and I see my son hustling and trying his best. He says practices are boring and it's hard, but that also means he's learning to handle himself somewhere besides on the couch. One thing I noticed was the number of balls that bounced in and out of his glove. Essentially, he caught most of what was thrown to him only to have it fall out of his glove. I can imagine this being tiring and frustrating. Then the thought occurred to me that his glove was advertised as "pre-softened", but that it was only "half-fast" pre-softened. The softening makes the glove, well, softer. It allows the hand to squeeze the glove easier to catch, but also there's a little physics to something being softer as well. When a ball strikes a hard surface, the collision coul...

It's amazing at times to see the number of sporting activities available to kids. I recall baseball in the spring/summer, football in the fall, basketball and hockey in the winter. Now there's a plethora of sports to chose from. Baseball now competes with LaCrosse as the spring sport of choice. I have some opinions as this might be a good thing as baseball quickly becomes an "elitist" sport shortly after middle school. You can only put nine people on the field at a time and only bat nine. Substitution rules are cumbersome and result in a total of, 30ish kids making up a varsity/jv squad. It's a lot of standing around as well. Lacrosse places 11 players on a field with ample substitutions, etc. to get lots of kids involved. There are also roles for everyone. There's a lot less standing around on a given day as well. ...digressing, I didn't intend for this post to be a diatribe on why baseball will (rightfully) soon be a lesser youth sport. Instead, th...