All Stars

We just finished Tanner's 09/10 All Star season. Jake played All Stars at this age as well. Just like with Jake's team I helped coach and just like with Jake's team we got a pretty quick beat down. 

The Outlaw team in a prior post, the Roadrunners, was a 9U team that was pretty good against other 9U teams. Most of the best players in this age group are 9 years old. For All Stars they combine with the 10 year olds to form the 09/10 team. The 10U players weren't as good as the 9U ones across the board AND now we're playing the 10U's from every other team as well. 

We played in a couple of outlaw tournaments with the AS team; Diary Days in Meridian and the East Boise Classic. We lost our first game in Dairy Days to the Mustard Seeds (a really good outlaw team, with a lot of NBLL 10 year old All Stars from the prior year, who weren't playing All Stars this year on it). We figured we would lose that one. Then we won our next game against the North West Ada Royals pretty easily. We then went on to lose every other game we played. 

We were out by Saturday morning in Dairy Days. Didn't win a game (didn't even get close) in the East Boise classic (and were also done by Saturday) and went 0-3 in the District All Star tournament to end our season. 

The tournament stuff is kind of to be expected. The competition is Cal Ripken teams, who are just generally more talented than Little League teams and play together, in tournament format, all year long. These two tournaments are in the heart of summer. It was 110 degrees for a couple of these games and the Little League kids just aren't used to playing double headers in this heat everyday of the tournament. The Ripken kids are. So by the second game of the weekend our kids are toast and start playing like it, making physical and mental mistakes that we just couldn't overcome. But, like I said, that's kind of expected. Some of the teams in these tournaments are Little League teams in disguise (like we were) and a couple of them were really good, so that didn't bode well for our future either. 

The first Little League All Star game was a disaster. We were playing the South West Ada All Stars. This was their "B" team. The more powerful leagues generally field two All Star teams; an older one (mostly 10's) and a younger one (mostly 9's), to make a really good team and a team that is getting experience for the next year. As we were a combination team, we should have been able to handle this team pretty easily. But the All Star tournament is a different beast. Everyone lines up, they play the Star Spangled Banner over the PA system, they play the Little League pledge, each kid gets introduced over the PA system, they shake hands with the opposing player and exchange commemorative pins....it's a big deal. So it made all of the kids a little nervous and threw them all a little off their game. Tanner was supposed to start that first game on the bench, but the starting catcher was so nervous he threw up in the dugout heading out to warm ups, so Tanner was the starting catcher. The other kids were such a mess that we made seven errors in the first inning and were down 8-0 when we came back into the dugout. 

They tried to fight back, Tanner's friend Evan hit a grand slam out to straight away center field to pull us even, but we couldn't hold it. Next we played a Nampa team, more errors, more of the same. Infield defense was one of the strongest parts of this team, but we just lost it at some point. For the last game we played the South West Ada 'A' team that we played in the tournament and they just beat up on us 18-1. 

Tanner really enjoyed the experience. He struggled to hit a little, but played really good at catcher and did such a good job defensively that he ended up being our starting first baseman, even though he had barely played any first base previously. He also was one our most consistent pitchers, throwing a ton of strikes, some of which got hit, allowing our defense to make some plays and some of them didn't. He did really really well overall and came out of the experience loving baseball more than ever. 

I have already signed him up to play Fall Baseball as he doesn't want to play football anymore, so he is looking forward to getting back out there and putting his new experience to use.