Well, somewhere around fourteen weeks and a thousand pictures the youth football season for 2008 is finally over. This season was - without a doubt - Alex’s best season ever. He managed to make great strides on both sides of the ball, and seems to have settled in well on both the offensive and defensive line positions he has been playing.

The cynical side of me notes that if Alex had…..ummm, maybe been given the opportunity to PLAY MORE as opposed to sitting on the bench the last several years he probably would have matured at the game quite a lot sooner.

It’s all water under the bridge now, but it does grind my gears a bit. Somewhat frustrating when your son sits on the bench while his team limps to a one win season.

<sigh>

On a more positive note, I’ve attached a few slideshows from this year’s pictures for your enjoyment.

2008 Manchester B-Team: Alex Schmidt from Jason Schmidt on Vimeo.

2008 Manchester B-Team Slideshow One from Jay Schmidt on Vimeo.

2008 Manchester B-Team Slideshow Two from Jay Schmidt on Vimeo.

I’ve been having a hard time of late getting time to write; August was a whirlwind of weddings, trips, and the MS 150 Charity Ride. It seemed like September would go a bit easier on us, but we’ve managed to maintain the same level of insanity around the house this month as well.

Football has been occupying quite a bit of time, as it always does. One of us - usually both of us - is down at the field with Alex Monday through Friday from 6pm to almost 8pm each night. Friday nights we have an hour worth of piano and drum lessons, which takes us to the four or so hours we spend at the football field each Saturday for the two games (varsity and junior varsity) that our B-Team boys play in.

Since Alex has the primo camera - Canon EOS 20D - I’ve started taking pictures of the games and posting them online at Jason-Schmidt.SmugMug.com. It’s been fun, but it definitely is quite a bit of work. Each gameday I take somewhere around 1,500 pictures which I then pull into Aperture and cull down to 200 or so pictures that get posted to the web.

I get lots of compliments on these pictures, but honestly it’s not been that hard. It’s mostly been point and shoot….then crop. I don’t do any color correction or any special adjustments on the computer. Primarily becuase I really wouldn’t have any idea as to what I was doing. Maybe someday I’ll actualy figure it out - or, more likely, I’ll wait until my dad teaches Alex then have him show me.

The other self-appointed task I’ve taken on is to get the game video online for the boys to watch. Vimeo is a free site that gives you 500MB of video upload weekly. I’ve managed to put together a little workflow that enables me to take the video, rip it to mp4 via Handbrake on the macintosh, then upload to vimeo so people can watch it in flash video. Those videos are available here.

Football finishes up in mid-October. I’m wondering what I’ll do with my newly found freetime…of course, something will probably expand to fill it.

The Manchester Youth Program is now part of the Buckeye Football Conference. Nobody is really sure why they did this (although there is some speculation that the fact that the program was always near the bottom of the Suburban Youth League in wins was a contributing factor), but I’m not privy to the information on that one. The official reason given is that the BFC is “just a better fit for our community and our players”. Of course, if you go by the glowing reviews of the people associated with the program you’re left with the feeling that the BFC is just one step away from curing cancer and discovering free energy…..which they’ll have to finish up after the football season.

In this league, the 5th and 6th graders are grouped on to what they call “B Division”. If Alex plays in this organization next year (the middle school is an alternative option), he will be in “A Division”. The 3rd and 4th graders play in “C Division”.

Big difference between the leagues is that there is no weight limit in the BFC. So Alex may find himself lined up across from a 180lb Defensive End. But wait, they say! Anyone over 120lbs isn’t allowed to play in the backfield. So I guess that the upside of this is that when our kids get flattened the person flattening them will have a stripe on his helmet and will most likely not be holding on to a football when he does it.

The other difference is that there will be two games on Saturdays - there will be a Varsity game first, and a Junior Varsity game second. I have no idea where Alex will be playing, but given the fact that these are the same coaches who grudgingly put him in for a play here and a play there two years back, I would guess JV. There is also a possibility that Alex will play in both games - there are rules that limit the playing time in this league; for example, if you play a skill position in the Varsity game you cannot play a skill position in the JV game. They are all supposed to play for at least 3 quarters, but that can be spread between both games. At this point I’m mildly optimistic, but still skeptical. Rules are great on paper, but following them is a whole different matter.

Sorry for the cynicism, but it’s hard to not think that we’re going to simply see a continuation of the problems we have experienced over the last five years again this year. The one plus I see is that Alex is virtually guaranteed to get more playing time than he ever has before; in fact, I would wager that he tops his 2006 playing time in the first half of the first game.

That being said, Alex would love for you to come down and see him play. We have 6 home games and 2 away games this year; home games are at Lockhart field off Nimisila. Away games are as marked.

As always, please let me know if you need directions or if you have questions.

All games begin at noon, unless otherwise noted.

• 23-Aug-2008 Green Black (Scrimmage / 11:30 AM Start)
• 30-Aug-2008 Tallmadge White
• 06-Sep-2008 Northwest Gray
• 13-Sep-2008 Ellet Orange
• 20-Sep-2008 @Springfield Red
• 27-Sep-2008 @Ellet Black
• 04-Oct-2008 Green Black
• 11-Oct-2008 Tallmadge Gold

I followed professional cycling, especially the Tour de France from 2000 through 2006. For almost all of those years I watched every single stage in real time from my basement couch - one of the few benefits to the work-from-home job I had at the time. I watched Armstrong win a record sixth and seventh time. I watched sprinters miraculously thread their way through a press of bodies and machines to take a stage. I watched climbers leave everything on the side of a mountain as they forced the pedals around to a upward finish in the Pyrenees and Alps, and I watched teams pick themselves up off the ground paceline themselves into a victory in the team time trials.

Since then I’ve watched scandal after scandal hammer the sport. Rider after rider disqualified. Boonen. Vinokurov. Hamilton. Landis. Rasmussen. Basso. Contador. The names go on and on. The shame goes on and on.

It’s funny, because I used to tell friends that I believed that Floyd and Tyler were innocent, that there was enough doubt out there to prove their innocence. I followed Hamilton’s attempt to rejoin the sport, checking his blog every few weeks to see the status of his legal fight. I did the same thing with Landis.

These days I just don’t care anymore, because it seems that cycling doesn’t care. The various organizations invovled all seem more interested in furthering their own ends rather than cleaning up the sport. Want an example? Look up some of the statements made by Dick Pound from WADA in his Captain Ahab-esque mulityear crusade against Lance Armstrong. This is the same WADA that an investigative report in the LA Times referred to as “a closed, quasi-judicial system without American-style checks and balances”.

Cycling needs an image makeover and the biggest part of that is figuring out a way to handle their drug testing that swings the pendulum away from the current status quo and into something that works. There is no incentive to cooperate if you are doping; the penalties are too harsh for even a first offense. Many times the accused are just that - accused, without any proof, but being accused is enough to be banned from a race. Or being involved with a team that has a member that is accused of doping.

The penalties are crushing; a two year suspension on the first offense (which can take many a rider out of the sport altogether depending on his age) and a lifetime ban on the second. If it’s a false positive or you are wrongly convicted you are pretty well screwed. It may just be me, but especially in the Tour de France the zero tolerance policy seems to be causing more issues than it clears up.

It’s frustrating, because I loved watching cycling. There is something about the pagentry, the scenery, the teamwork; the suffering of the individual riders, the suffering of the peloton. Most of all I loved watching the stages in the Alps and the Pyrenees. It’s a cliche widely abused by everyone who remembers ABC’s Wide World of Sports, but to me the mountain stages were always the Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat all rolled up into one.

Maybe someday cycling will come around and put aside all the turf wars and come up with a solid plan for moving the sport forward. I’d like to see it, but I’m not holding my breath.

Coaching baseball is something that I’ve done before, but to be honest it’s nothing that I ever felt all that qualified to do. I know the rules and the fundamentals and I can explain them; I can even demonstrate many of them. However, I’m not a great athlete (I know, big shock there) - there are certain things I can explain but can’t do myself. I have a hard time with this, mostly because of my irrational perfectionism; I don’t like to do - or in many cases try and do - something unless I can do it right. The other side of that coin is that I don’t like to look foolish or stupid, which decreases the likelihood of me trying something new or difficult. It’s only within the last two to three years that I’ve finally been able to work myself out of this rut. That’s not to say that it’s become easy; it’s just that I’m able to force myself through the initial discomfort to the point where it becomes worthwhile.

I coached for two years back in what we called “Farm Ball”; this was coach pitch baseball with kids that ranged in age from 6 years old through 8 years old. Although not unexpected, the difference was still a bit of a shock. Coaching boys aged 11-12 year old level is worlds apart from the 6-8 year olds I was used to. For starters, the kids are more aware of their successes and failures, and many of them put a great deal of pressure on themselves and on each other. The competition is more fierce, especially in the highly competitive Hot Stove League. Finally, the parents are more involved, which is a double edged sword. On the one hand, it’s great to have the support. On the other, it can be a distraction; the parent is usually focused on their child nearly exclusively while as a coach you need to focus on the team as a whole in addition to the individual child.

Another - and this is something I full expected - difficulty is coaching your own son. I vowed early on to not give Alex any preferential treatment because of my position. I’ve seen this done (and, in many cases, resented this) year in and year out in the other sports we participate in; either conciously or subconciously the best positions and most playing time were reserved for the kids who shared the same last name as a member of the coaching staff. So I’ve not provided any special treatment for my son; I treat him as I would treat any other member of the team; his effort and ability determine his position. This means that he’s not playing in the infield. He’s not playing the whole game. He’s not batting lead-off. He may be capable of some, all, or none of those things; maybe as we go along he’ll be able to accomplish some of these goals, maybe not. If he has fun, learns some baseball, works hard, and interacts well with his team - including giving and receiving criticism in a constructive way - then I will consider myself to have succeeded.

That’s not only my goal for Alex, it’s my goal for everyone on the team, including (on a different level) myself and the other coaches. We’ve had some bumps in the road already - league issues with the schedules and equipment, player issues with injuries - but that hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm.

I’ll admit that there have been some issues - league, player injuries, and parent - that have bothered me; Beth can more than attest to this; sometimes our room sounds like “Baseball Tonight” until she wearily asks me if we could stop talking about the team, or Hot Stove, or about Manchester Youth Baseball. Despite this, and I know this sounds cliche, all those issues melt away when I get down to the field and start working with the team; there’s something to the game and something to being part of the team that - at least for a little while - makes everything just fine.