Dan Edelman tries his hand at coaching little league the CrossFit Kids way.
My son has been playing organized ball since he was 5—he’s 9 now. Five seasons. Most of that time, I’ve been a spectator.
I’ve seen aimless practices painfully rote and void of any genuine preparation for actual game play. I’ve seen kids not make plays simply because they didn’t believe they could. I’ve seen coaches and dads humiliate their sons with no apparent awareness of their cruelty. And I’ve seen kids having all kinds of fun during the game, but not having fun playing the game.
So even while I had no intention of ever taking a team, a coaching philosophy gradually began to coalesce.
During the 2010 tournament season, I found myself engaging in running commentaries about the ball games with another dad I knew from a couple of seasons, and I learned he shared my perspective. We both wanted to help our boys develop their baseball so they could go as far as they wanted to go. The short of it was we decided to play “Daddy Ball”: we would take a team, protect our kids from certain self-deluded frauds and, if all went well, provide a good environment in which to sharpen our boys’ skills with an eye toward long-term development.
What I needed was a teaching methodology with which to frame my fledgling philosophy, so I turned to CrossFit Kids.