I would like to take a moment at the start of today’s post to say a quick ‘thank you’ to all of the brave men and women who have fought to keep our country safe and to protect our freedom over the years.
Today, many of us will enjoy back yard barbeques, trips to the beach or a quick dip in the pool and our freedom to do those things and more are protected by the brave service of others.
Another Memorial Day weekend ‘staple,’ of course is baseball. I will enjoy watching some baseball games on tv later today.
I always think of summer in terms of the three major holidays. Memorial Day, for example, is the unofficial beginning of summer. I think of July 4th as the midpoint of summer and Labor Day wraps things up.
During my baseball coaching days, we were always taking our summer break on July 4th and I don’t remember us ever playing fall ball games on Labor Day. But, Memorial Day baseball action plays a big part of the history of the Choppers teams.
There were always a number of Memorial Day tournaments scattered throughout the region. The great thing about entering one of those tournaments is that they usually wrapped up on Sunday so you still had Monday to rest up and also to observe the holiday.
We actually played in our first Memorial Day tournament as a rec league team. The way the calendar fell out in 2006, the Willie Mays league (ages 10-Under) scheduled its post-season tourney that weekend. Because it was the unofficial beginning of summer, we were going to be a little short-handed that weekend. Competing as the Farragut Braves, we gave it our best shot.
We won on Saturday (defeating the Farragut Phils) 6-1 with Paul on the mound. Then, on Monday morning – the only time I remember actually playing on the holiday itself – we came up just short against the Cards, losing 10-8.
A year later, competing as the Choppers, we signed up for a Rocky Hill tourney on Memorial Day Weekend. You could always count on the good folks at Rocky Hill to put together a good tournament and they almost always had one late in May to help their teams get ready for the upcoming city tournament.
We ran into some good teams that weekend. We played pretty well but wound up 1-2 in that tourney.
The schedules didn’t line up for us to play on Memorial Day in 2008 and 2009 – we registered for tournaments the following weekend both years.
But, in 2010 we were back in action on the last weekend in May. This was our championship season and a few weeks later, we’d be hoisting the trophy after winning the Knox County 14-Under tournament. But in late May, we still had a few games to go.
We signed up for a tournament that was being played at one of the fields near downtown. What happened that weekend still strikes me, three years later, as being fairly bizarre.
Pool play (that is to say first round tournament games) began on Saturday morning. We had a game, followed by a one-hour break followed by a second game. It was very hot that weekend, so the team moms scouted out some good shade. This gave a place for us to rest between games and enjoy some water and light snacks of fruit (melons, grapes, pineapples and such).
One of our best pitchers, Will, took the mound in the first game and was dominant as we won over the host team 13-1. That weekend, Paul was really getting his legs back about a bout with mono. I had him sit out during that first game and rest up for the second game. He was the starting pitcher for Game 2 and did reasonably well as we, again, won convincingly (the score of that game was 13-7).
This set us up for a good seeding heading into Sunday.
After the Saturday games, however, the tournament director decided to re-write the rules. He shuffled the brackets to favor his team. When you set up the tournament, I guess you can do that.
Anyway, he created semifinal bracket featuring the two undefeated teams and one semifinal bracket featuring lesser teams (basically the two teams we had whipped the day before). He gave me some sort of rambling explanation that didn’t make any sense at all but it was pretty obvious what he was doing.
I think the unfair nature of this ‘re-shuffling’ was an eye opening experience for our guys. Naturally, we lost our semifinal game and went home empty-handed for the weekend.
Part of the experience about playing in tournaments, though, was the fact that it gave our guys a chance to see how things work in different communities; how things aren’t always fair or certainly not what you are used to. So, even though we lost out in action on the field that steamy Sunday afternoon, we gained another valuable life lesson for the Choppers.
Looking back, as coaches, I hope we did a good job of helping our guys navigate situations like that. And I hope as they look back on their experiences on our ball club that they have fond memories.
I think that’s one of the great things about summer – looking back on pleasant times.
And as we celebrate Memorial Day 2013, I hope you have a good one and a great start to this summer as you make more memories to reflect upon in future days.
JG
Originally posted 5/27/2013
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