Delaware Dave responds

My brother David responded to my prevous post about his Holy Rosary coaching duties.

“Thanks for the great press on the blog. It may be worthy of the Delaware paper. Coach Recognized in China. I actually enjoy the coaching, CYM league aside. It’s been fun and coaching girls is a whole lot different than coaching boys. You also can’t believe the shit I had to go through to prove I’m not a child molester in order to coach in the catholic league. I’ll be sure to tease you about bike riding with a bunch of women when I start my Delaware Dave Blog.”

Fair enough. I’m glad Emma and her friends are benefiting from your coaching prowess. They deserve it as much as the boys, But she should really be in singing or acting classes. That child can sing like a bird – it is shocking to me that someone with such a close blood relation to me could sound like that. I think the church is screening the wrong people. Also, I am curious to hear HOW coaching girls is different from boys. I will discover for myself one of these years.

Jacob and eli’s soccer is going well. I am t e head coach for eli, along with another guy. he is kind of lame, but organized, so I gladly let him run the practices. They are at 8:30 Saturday morning and I am pretty happy just to get E there in his uni. I am an assistant coach on Jacob’s team. Head coach is a nice guy but a total nut. I do all the subbing because he forgets about it and is constantly running on the field, sprinting up and down and giving instructions. Jacob is pretty good. very solidly in the second tier of players, beneath the one kid who really gets it and scores all the goals. He is also really setting an identity as an athlete and carries himself like a jock on the field, the way he runs in between plays, with his head held high, upper arms sort of stiff, elbows bent and barely swinging, looking cool.

Ingrid, a very nice Austrian woman who is the mother of Eli’s best friend Maurits said to me, “Jacob is very sportif!” And she’s right. It is an interesting development over the past year, which I would not have predicted. He just loves being a part of a team.

In other sports news, my brief fall softball season ended Saturday when the mighty Papa Johns lost to an Chinese team with a 14-year-old girl shortstop by about 10-4. I was about 3-4, even after pulling my quadriceps on my first run out of the batter’s box (the girl threw me out that play). But they were all up-the-middle singles. Solid, but no power. We were missing four of our best players, including the two organizers, who are on holiday in Malaysia. They put Krishna in charge. Worried we wouldn’t field a team, everyone brought someone and we ended up with 15 players and no one in charge. People were coming and going at will, with each inning a confusing mess and the batting order an unwritten disaster. Krishna was too soft-spoken and too interested in his Marlboro Lights while in the dugout to take control.

It was interesting playing the Chinese guys, who bowed to the ump before each at bat. Apparently they picked that up from Japanese baseball. And just before the first pitch of each inning, the pitcher tuned around and raised his hands in the air. The whole team did the same. Then he threw them down and shouted “AAYYYY!” and the team did the same. Then the same procedure one more time and “OOOOOHHHHH!” then he would slam the ball in his mitt and commence pitching – lobbing them about 15-20 feet in the air, illegal in any league, I think. I asked a Chinese speaker n our team what they were saying and he shrugged and said, “Ay-Oh!”

We went to Tiananmen Square today. I will post pictures and a full report tomorrow.