There was really no break for me between the regular baseball season and summer baseball at the high school. We started playing summer games before the boys got out of school for the summer. I was able to be the head coach of the varsity summer team with the help from other coaches. It was tough to organize at times with some of the boys playing football, basketball and on other travel baseball teams but we managed to have a pretty successful summer. The summer is a little bit different than the regular season. Coaches do not exchange line-ups, allowing free substitution. We usually play 9 innings instead of 7. Summer is mainly for instruction and development of the players instead of focusing on competition. The varsity team ended up 11-4 at the end of summer. As a coaching staff, we saw a lot of good things from a lot of different players. This is very encouraging since we had 13 seniors graduate from our program. It will be difficult to fill their spots but I am sure some of the young guys will fill in and take on the challenge. We saw a lot of things that need to be worked on as a program and I am excited to get back to work this fall in preparation for next season. We will be very young, but I think we will be a scrappy team that needs to rely on offense execution with solid defense. We have plenty on young pitchers that will have to be aggressive, throw a lot of strikes and trust their defense.
At the end of the summer, I had all the boys up for a BBQ and swim party. It was a lot of fun.
