Little League in Modiin

Life is becoming more routine so I haven't had much to post about lately. Also, my computer is broken so I've been using Shira's so she hasn't had much time to blog. She's off to the shuk in Ramle and all the kids are at school/gan so I have some quiet time to myself. There are a few more general things that I've wanted to put in here so here is one of them ...

I'm a coach in Little League this year and it's been pretty good so far. The good thing about Little League here compared to Baltimore is that it lasts for 9 months or so instead of 3. The bad thing is that it's only once a week and not 3. It's also very different in that we practice for the first half of the year and then play games the second half. So far we've only had practices every Friday and then we have a month vacation and then we start the real season. Zvi is on a "team" with about 35 8-10 year olds. We have six coaches and we've been doing various drills with them for 90 minutes every Friday. The kids seem to enjoy it and they're actually improving also. We will break the kids into three teams for the real season but for now we've been practicing with everyone together. It won't be easy to break the kids into teams because it's hard to tell without games who are the best players but we'll have some idea. Then during the season we play games against Gezer, Beit Shemesh, Chashmonaim and maybe another city or two.

We have an exhibition game next Friday in what is called the Chanuka Tournament. It's actually just two games against other teams and for that we'll probably be only one or two teams representing Modiin since many kids won't play. It will be fun to play our first game. The teams won't be the final teams for the regular season and won't "count." You can look forward to a post by Zvi or me about how the games go.

Also, this week they started eight weeks of bonus practices with two special coaches, including a Modiin Miracle player/coach, (I'm off the hook for these) on Tuesday afternoons. The practices start at 2:30 and Zvi only finishes school at 3:15 but we told Zvi that we can pick him up early from school and bring him to baseball every Tuesday as long as it lasts if he's good. He went yesterday and had a good time.