Monday, Mar. 08, 2004
Baseball meeting today, posted at 6:22 a.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com The weekend was alright. My old friend Mike did end up showing on Saturday night, and we ended up travelling the Federal Hill Circuit - Thirsty Dog, Rope Walk, a friend's party, and McGerk's. I felt oddly dirty about it all the next morning; I feel a little like I'm outgrowing the bar crawl thing. Or it might just have been because my body is a little soft right now and my self-confidence is wavering. While it's cool to be in the sardine packed meat market aura of McGerk's (being so physically close to so many girls is pretty much the only good thing about that place), I was feeling like my game wasn't on or that I wasn't interested in playing it that night. I think it's the workout thing. When I'm regularly working out, I exude confidence. Not right now.Anyhow, I felt dissatisfied with myself the next morning and will think twice about doing a bar crawl the next time I decide to. I'm not in college any more.
I made it my goal to make it to the gym on Monday morning to get a good start to the week, but I overslept just enough so that the gym trip would have been too truncated to be effective. This sort of sucks, but I didn't go to bed until after midnight so I have a good excuse. I'll make it a point to go today after school. It'll be nice to get into school a little early and do some work.
I was up so late because today is a big day for me. Final cuts have been made on the baseball team, and tomorrow is the first real practice. I had dinner with a friend of mine - a colleague who has coached baseball in the past - last night to brainstorm ideas about how to set up practices. I think I've decided that since I have such a big team, that I'm going to divide them up into two different squads - the top 14 kids who will get playing time this year will be on Squad A, and the bottom 13 kids will be on Squad B. Squad A will practice every day, but Squad B will practice only on Mondays and Thursdays. That way, they still develop, but I can focus much of the coaching and instruction on my regulars.
I'm also going to go over expectations today for the team - the dress code for game days (shirt & tie, dress pants and shoes), what I will do about missed practices (gotta decide on strict policy there) and latenesses (ditto). This is the day I establish myself as the new regime, which will be a lot less laid back than the previous one. My goal is not only to win the city championship this year, but to establish the baseball program here so that it competes with basketball and football as a favored major sport. I want swarms of people out there. I've got all these ideas; it will be exciting to see which ones gel and which ones don't. That being said, today will be a somewhat tough day, since I'll be dividing kids into the two different teams and have to make some tough decisions for the kids in the middle. I figure I'll take my starting nine and five others on the A squad, but I'm such a softy that it will be tough to limit those "five others" to 5. I have to press back my softy tendencies.
I have to admit, I'm already getting a little cocky about the season. I really do think we can win the city championship. Our chief rival school lost its two best players to graduation, and its coach to a promotion, so this might be the year. Very, very excited.