Reply to "At what age should daddy ball stop?"

I think I’ve posted this in the past, but the year before it was time for my son to start playing LL another dad and I went to the field and saw a lot of chaos from almost every team. No offense to the other “daddy ball” coaches, as they were doing the best they knew how, but we looked at each other and said we couldn’t leave our kids to this and became “daddy ball” coaches. We were determined to teach them the game as best we knew and to make it fun for the whole team.

League rules stipulated that each player must play a minimum of three defensive outs and have at least one at bat. Although sometimes it was a logistical nightmare, we rotated kids every inning (to many different positions) and batted the whole lineup which was allowed in our league. We kept our roster to 11 or 12 players. Also if the #9 hitter made the last out of the game, the #10 hitter led off the next game which made for some interesting lineups (slowest kid hitting leadoff, weakest hitter hitting cleanup, etc…). Needless to say we didn’t have any parent problems. Fortunately most of the kids were equal in talent so it wasn’t too traumatic. We took our lumps in the early years by playing up, but their last year together as 14 yo; we won the league by going 24-0. Unfortunately we had to alter things for tournaments as we couldn’t hit everyone and rotate defensively, but still won a couple tourneys and ended up 2nd in CABA state tourney losing to a select travel team from Denver in extra innings.

The next year as freshmen their coach correctly guessed who we had previously coached and thanked us for teaching them the game.

So, while I don’t really care for the phrase “daddy ball”, I’m glad I was one and agree with the other posters who say without us types; a lot of kids would be out of luck and out of baseball.

JMO

Also to answer the initial question; when they became freshmen and could play legion ball was the time for me to quit “officially” coaching my son.