Zack's Journey - Baseball

In our effort to find extracurricular activities for Zack, we tried tee-ball. Debbie's nephews all played and I remember having fun playing baseball in the Y league so it seemed a natural fit. There are some problems that come with baseball, however.

The Leander baseball league for kids is really competitive. Some of the older teams regularly compete in statewide competitions and win. It's a program known for producing college scholarships for baseball.

Sadly, even at the five and six year old level, some of the coaches were incredibly competitive. They played vicariously through their sons and any mistakes were met with harsh criticism. I'll have to say I was proud of the coaches on Zack's team. They didn't suffer from this but others in the league did and I found it disturbing. These over-competitive folks stressed out all the kids during a game.

Another problem with baseball is that the kids wind up standing out in the field for a long time with nothing to do but wait. This really wasn't and isn't the sort of activity Zack enjoys. He and others wound up squatting down and looking at ants or flowers or looking off in the distance at something they found interesting.

We lasted one year and were glad for the experience but, in the end, decided this wasn't the right path for Zack. I will say his coach was amazing and never gave up on Zack. He asked me to bring him back the following year but it didn't work out. Zack was his fastest runner and a good hitter. It was the field work that was problematic and Zack began suffering what can only be described as panic attacks before taking to the field much like he did with soccer.

It was later we learned that Zack had something called Sensory Integration Dysfunction. Basically it's like hearing dyslexia. It made it hard for Zack to react to coaching yells while he was in play. Once we discovered that, we began looking for other sorts of activities that would naturally limit the effects of this issues.

The good news is that we found several things that worked. Those posts will be coming shortly but first, something that came close to working: swimming.