Hi all!
Time to explain my prolonged absence where from about the end of June to the present I've been largely absent from the boards and the site.
One...er...two words: Travel Ball.
When I started writing for BellaOnline, I'd been a rec-league softball coach for quite a few years, and I felt that Idefinitely had more than enough knowledge to share for the rec-level coach and/or rec-level parent. I'll acknowledge that I have a small group of readers who are college coaches and umpires, and of course other travel ball coaches. That said, I never saw them as my primary audience.
This summer, after much soul-searching, much prodding from my circle of fastpitch friends, and much trepidation, I made the jump to a travel ball coach/manager, and have started a travel ball program from scratch.
How did this impact my writing, you may be asking? Well, in a couple of areas. First and foremost, I went from a writer who felt that he had a bunch to offer to a small community in the softball world to a writer who felt that he had nothing to offer on a wider stage. I mean, I
thought what worked at the rec-league level could work at the travel ball level as far as practice organization, game strategy, etc; but I didn't
know.
I'm sure that there was much I could have still written to keep my rec-league audience tuned in, but like my coaching, I was ready to take my writing to the next level. Unfortunately, I had no material. I was like a popular kid in middle school who is now a freshman in high school and clueless as to the adjustments needed to survive.
The second reason travel ball effected my writing is T-I-M-E. Starting a travel ball program for scratch is a time hog. Picture starting a brand new business except one where you'll never be compensated financially, and you'll get an idea of the additional time load I took on. In addition to my regular day-job and my part-time job coaching, I now had another 20 or 30 hours on my plate each week to manage the San Diego Blaze. A labor of love to be sure, but still a chore. It became harder and harder to find the hour or two a day I typically spend on this web site.
Speaking of time hogs and plate-full, I also started taking some certification classes in Visual Basic and Web Design. Visual Basic because there are various softball-related research projects that I've been dying to undertake, but needed to build programs to capture the data to do so (believe me, I've tried Excel, Access, and MatLab and they just didn't cut the mustard).
Web Design because I want to start my own softball web site (you can see it under construction
here). I'll always write for BellaOnline (well, when I'm not taking extended breaks :-) ), but I feel my own site will allow me to spread my wings a bit more and explore topics in a bit more depth. My goal is to have the web site up and operational by about this time next year (consequently when I finish my Web Design certification). A small reason I haven't been writing here is that I'm not sure where I'll focus on here and where I'll focus my attention in articles on my new site. I don't want to just regurgitate and repost everything -- that would be boring!!
And one final reason writing has been extremely light: fear of failure...well, at least fear of failing and having my failure documented in grisly detail on this site. In my lows, I kept seeing the "Check out my San Diego Blaze" forum thread having entries like "Only 3 girls showed up for practice today. Parents are burning me in effigy, but at least the physical threats have stopped (for now...)". Fortunately, things never got that bad, and in fact, all things considered things are going very well.
So why restart writing now, you may be asking? Well, I'm no longer a newbie on the travel ball scene, and though I'm still an inexperienced travel ball manager, I'm not a wannabe travel ball manager. At this point, I feel like I can speak from experience to at least coaches who are considering making the jump to travel ball, as well as to travel ball coaches who are thinking about starting their own teams or programs.
In addition, as I alluded above, we're doing way better than most folks outside our little cadre of can-doers thought we would. Our 14U team (managed by my good friend Mike Simone) is kicking butt and taking names, and they're already playing in 16U friendlies and competing well. My extremely green, extremely young 12U team is currently playing about .500 ball against older year groups, and the girls are having a blast. It appears that we can compete and the voodoo we do does tend to work at the travel ball level.
My apologies to my readers, both for my absence and a rather long first post. Though, those of you who know me well know I can't not write long posts most of the time anyway, so you probably expected it.
