childhood Story

One of the better memories that do remember from my childhood would probably have to deal with playing baseball. I started playing when I was only a little guy. My first experience with baseball along with most people’s first experience would have to be tee ball. In the summer for about twelve years that is all I knew baseball, but I loved it and it helped that me and my friends were pretty good at it also.

A lot of my baseball memories are related to all-stars. All-stars was only a select few of kids from each age group that represented the league they were in. We would travel all over Indiana and play. If there was a tournament we were in it especially if there was one in southern Indiana. So all-stars started when you were seven I think and I was lucky enough to make it my first year I was eligible to make it. The league we were in is often called pitching machine because obviously a machine pitched to us not other kids. So thankfully a lot of my friends made the team also or maybe that is how we actually became friends. So our first tournament was at our own field in Tell City. I remember parts here and there but the main thing I remember is one of my buddies Eric also known as “moose” hitting homerun after homerun. He was quite bigger than the rest of us so it came easy to him. One special homerun I remember is the one that broke a kid on our team dad’s window with one of his homeruns. People could not believe he was our age and actually made us give them his birth certificate to verify he was our age, it was pretty comical, but he did stick out. So we ended up winning our own tournament it helped we had a kid named moose on our team who about five homeruns in one tournament.

So the next tournament was across the river in Kentucky in a town called Hancock County. A lot of us played peewee football over there so we were pretty familiar with some people over there already. They all knew moose to. So we had no problem with his birth certificate over there. Believe it or not we ended up winning that tournament also. We thought we were unstoppable nobody could touch us. Then we decided to enter a tournament with both seven year olds and eight year olds somewhere up north not exactly sure were. So we were going up there with lots of momentum our first game was against some other seven years olds so that was no problem and we continued to win and win. Then we ran into this pretty good team of eight-year-olds. We gave them a good game but ended up getting our first lost by a couple runs. So we did not know how to act we were not use to losing. So you could imagine the tears. So we ended up not winning the tournament we didn’t even get trophies we came in fourth place and we were not happy. We ended up playing in a few more tournaments and actually not letting that fourth place finish ruin our season we won the rest of the tournaments we were in.

So I can say that summer when I was seven was what made me the competitor I am today. I feel like it helped me through out my career. It did build a lot of friendships I know that and our friendships carried over into championships I felt like. We won many tournaments after that not only in baseball either but in football and basketball, but to me that is were it all started seven year old all-stars.