Little League, Big Egos

My alma mater, Trinity's, winning team!

My husband disagrees with me, but I think men have issues with aging just as much as women, they just handle it differently. While we go out and buy beauty creams, color our hair, avoid mirrors, maybe get botox, or if not, just blog about getting old (like me), men give up and seek to control something else in their lives, like Little League (or insert other sport here, like hockey).

These guys see themselves literally slipping, as we women do, but instead of focusing on the abdominal fat, the grey hairs, the decreased flexibility, they focus not on changing themselves or accepting the reality that it is out of their control (something we women refuse to accept either), but instead on controlling something else in their lives. Then along comes Little League. Perfect, somewhere to reign supreme again, memorize the big book of rules and boss around players and umpires and of course, the opposing team.

From what I have witnessed, most of these coaches run their teams like little kingdoms where they reign supreme. My son's coach is a fine example of this himself. Wanting total control, he begrudingly let my husband help out and allowed another dad to be the first base coach for games only. Most of the other coaches I have seen in the league have not seemed much better, though they did have more assistant coaches, which says something.

I give Little League as an example because I have just spent part of the morning writing a protest letter in response to a protest letter lodged by the coaches from the team which lost to my son's team yesterday. You see, their coaches, who were similar in number to the Bush Recount Team, approached the umpire after the game and explained that there were various infractions committed by my son's coach in terms of player positions. The key word in that last sentence is 'after.'

As I mentioned above, my son's coach is no angel, and I have problems with the way he often coached, from being too controlling of the team but not controlling enough of his emotions, to saying things to the children which were frankly inappropriate. However, I do think it becomes down right pathetic when at the end of the game both teams know who clearly won and who clearly lost, and yet we have to explain to our kids that because of some technicalities which weren't brought up in the game, the other team may end up winning and my son's team end up losing.

What it boils down to is that the other team doesn't like the way my son's coach coached. Well, neither did I, but who was I to complain? As my husband points out, we women have the opportunity to help out too. I don't know why more women don't help out. I saw one woman helping during warm up by catching the ball. I think that more women probably don't help out because it is like trying to get the TV remote control in a room of men. After a while, you give up and read a book or a magazine instead. It is just not that important. But not for these Little League coaches.

We as women should get more involved but are probably frankly intimidated by some of the encyclopedic knowledge of the rules by some of these guys. Though there was always softball growing up, the rules are different (as I understand it) and baseball has always been a pretty male bastion.

For my part, I don't actually like the sport very much and never did. It is way too slow and takes too long. That's not even counting the time spent writing the protest letters.