The Academy

The academy during the winter months consisted of practices in the weight room and indoor baseball practices in two different gyms. When the weather would suffice, we would have some outdoor baseball activities, like long toss and defense-work on the running track of a stadium.

There were two groups of kids to coach: The Young Guns which consisted of about 20 kids of the age of 10-14 and The Old Boys, consisting of about 10 kids between the ages of 14 to 18. 

With the introduction it was a lot of showing how things worked around. What the scheduling was with different groups and where the practices would be held. I needed to know what equipment we would need in any given practice and there was a lot to choose from. They also showed me and talked about the coaching ideas and philosophies they had on coaching baseball and a lot of the areas of baseball, like their hitting and throwing philosophies and how to work those into practices. One thing was to learn how to setup the batting cage indoors in the gym.

It was quite easy to fit in to the baseball community in Haar in terms of language, as two of the coaches were Canadian and some of the players from other english speaking countries like USA and the rest knew how to speak english really well. So as the game of baseball is english and the coaches from english speaking countries, english was used as the primary language of communication.