Kids Are Crazyy Monsters

      Saturday marked the start of the 3 day baseball camp that I had to work from 8-5 everyday. It was definitely an unique experience to see how a camp, something I am very familiar with, was run in a different country. There were a lot of things done differently, both better and worse than in the U.S. For starters, the name of the camp, Uncle Tom's, is probably not something that would go over too well in America. But hey, the words politically incorrect have no meaning here.
      The camp was unique compared to ones in the U.S. because some of kids stayed overnight for two nights. Here, baseball is not nearly as popular as it is in the States and I can see how some parents used this camp to get rid of their kids for a couple of days.
     The kids, mostly boys because it was a baseball camp, ranged from 5-14. Personally, I think 5-7 is a little young for baseball. Even the simplest form of the game is still to complex for this age group.  Also, another thing that was different from  America was the fact that safety was not top priority. If kids got hurt, it was really not a big deal they just patched them up and sent them back out for more. It's not something I enjoyed watching especially because it was hard for me to do anything about it due to the language barriers.
        The typical day started off with breakfast at 8 am. I had bread with nutella (which they love here), some meat, and coffee. Then we started with stations (20 minutes x 6 groups). The first day I taught fielding, the second day I taught bunting, and the third day I ran the fielding competition. After the stations we had a two hour break for lunch. Not going to lie, they had some pretty good German food! After lunch was the start of the games. The 6 groups had enough players to fill 2 teams so the kids got to play actual games. This is something that I had never seen before but I thought it was great. They played three one hour games. My job was to ump  for the little little ones. This group was the 5-7 year olds so the coaches softtossed to them. It was really fun to watch but after awhile a little boring too! After, the games they had the player of the day awards followed by dinner. I loved all this food!
       It was a long three days but overall not bad at all. One of the most difficult things was the communication. I felt bad for the little ones because they would come up to me and ask me questions and I had no clue what they were saying. Also, whenever I explained how to do something it had to be translated and sometimes I don't think the translators could understand exactly what I wanted. On a lighter note, I worked the camp with Mandy, Maike (a girl on my team), Nils, and Ryan (the American on the baseball team). We all got along well  and I had a good time getting to know them better.

I'm going to the mountains tomorrow for some hiking :-)  Gut Nacht!