John Miller, player/coach of the Brussels Kangaroos and a reporter for a major American newspaper, is back chronicling his team’s 2009 season in his weekly column that will appear every Monday on mister-baseball.com.
Nine years ago, I took a week off my job as a magazine writer and ran a baseball camp.
It was like taking a heaven vacation. Gone were neurotic intellectuals fretting over their theatre reviews and rehashing failed romances over lunch breaks. In their place were kids running about in bright red dirt and grass, shrieking, smiling at baseball. And I got a tan.
Since then, I’ve ran camps almost every summer. It’s an easy sell in Brussels. Expat families love giving their kids a chance to play baseball. Belgians love sending their kids away to scout, swim or play tennis. Why not baseball?
It’s a great way to raise money for the club. Forty kids times 160 euros is 6,400 euros. Pay coaches generously, and you still have plenty left over for the greater glory of athletic administration.
We follow a camp schedule from the Old Testament of coaching: Drills in the morning, games in the afternoon. Right after lunch, we play Dodge Ball on the infield and Capture the Flag in a wooded park next to the field.
Sometimes the days go fast, and sometimes every second ticks loudly off your watch, like when you’ve just exhausted yourself teaching groundballs to 19 kids and its only 9:46 a.m.
We staff the camps with our American ringers and Belgian teenagers who get a chance to develop hands-on coaching experience.
Only once, in 2003, did adult temper rise to meet the temptation of punishing passing pre-teen petulance. A nine-year-old named Jacob was misbehaving, probably doing something like pouring dirt down a teammate’s shirt.
Our 50-year-old NCAA Div. 3 coach bellowed, “Cut that out, or I’m gonna paddle your ass.” We all chuckled. Then I saw Coach grabbing Jacob and carrying him behind our shipping container equipment shed.
“Hey, come back here, “I yelled.
“But John, that’s just the way I was brought up. Punishment with the belt, you know.”
Last week, I repeated my initial experiment, taking a week off journalism to run a camp. We gave a 50% discount to kids in Belgian schools. It worked. We drew 54 kids, a record. Many were Belgian, and many were talented athletes. (The best were field hockey or tennis players.) Frank Pericolosi, a Kangaroo alumn, and now the whiz-kid (a 37-7 record this year) head coach at Div. 3 Pomona College, returned to run ops with me. The kids loved him, and the camp. It sunned all week. I got a tan.
Orioles great Eddie Murray once credited his falling in love with baseball to a summer camp. “It was an experience that touched my heart, and I wish others could be touched the way I was,” he said.
Do you run camps? Any great ideas for schedules? I’m always at oldworldpastime@gmail.com