[Backyard Sports] With My Son

With the summer weather in full blast (until I wake up at 5am for work and there's frost on the ground), the Dekearoon and I have been outside playing any sport you can imagine. Not that we really stop for the winter, which you will see in the pictures of the boy with a heavy coat on his back and a basketball in his hands, but the spring and summer is when we really get into our groove.

I wasn't lying.

Before we go any further, please be forewarned that this post will include a multitude of pictures. I love showing off pictures of my cute little dude. It's my thing. Live with it. That said, let's move on.

With a picture!

The miniature and I went down to the cafeteria of my old high school on a Saturday morning a few weeks back to sign up for the fall soccer club sponsored by AYSO. It will be his first organized sport and while I'm very excited about it and confident that he'll do just fine it still worries me sick. I just don't want him to mess up and feel bad about it. The look on his little face would break my heart. Of course I understand that it's a learning experience and that's the kind of thing that helps a kid grow, but he's still my baby, darn it.

I mean come on, look at those baby blues!

Enough with the fatherly worrying. We play soccer all the time out behind the house and it's generally our outside playtime starting point. From there we transition flawlessly into basketball with Deacon dunking like Air Jordan and Daddy shooting the three pointers from alllllll the way down town.

He even sticks out his tongue. Not pictured, sadly.

I'm a baseball guy and I was very glad to find that he picked up on it like he was a seasoned pro. I was even more excited when he decided that he felt more comfortable batting left-handed instead of on the right side of the plate, since that's just like Daddy. He liked hearing that too. Kid's got a heck of an arm on him (right arm, sadly) and he tosses it right to me, accurately, even from a decent distance away. When he first started doing that (before his 3rd birthday at that!) I was on cloud nine. It was honestly shocking to me that he could throw a ball that far.

HA! HA! HA! HA! I'm so clever.

Pictured: Future superstar. His words, not mine. Cocky brat.


That tee has gone further than the ball in the past.

We don't play football a lot, which makes the wife very happy. We do occasionally toss the ball around and he likes to play what my friends and I used to call "kill the carrier". There was an awesome pool version too, which involved dunking heads under the water and occasionally losing somebody right over the edge of our above-ground pool. Those tales can be told at a different time in a different blog.

We used this picture as part of a birthday present for my father last year. I swear I saw a tear.

Frisbee is one that needs work. We've played it before, but he's a bit afraid of the flying disc hurdling towards him through the air, so he generally turns around and it hits him in the back of the leg. My wife and I are going to have to come up with a plan to get his mind off the fear and back in the game. He throws it pretty darn well though.

I don't have too many bruises from errant throws.

The area he really needs to work on overall is the catching part of sports. He can throw a baseball, toss a football, fling a frisbee and put up a decent jump shot (that does need some work) but if he finds himself on the receiving end of a projectile he acts like he's the dodgeball team captain. His hand-eye coordination has certainly improved and he can catch a ball that's tossed to him, but if it isn't right into his hands he's not likely to make a reception. Kid's got no range.

Not even a fraction of the collection we've built.

Outside playtime with my Dekey is always a blast. Sweat flies, faces turn red, breathing gets heavy and baseballs hit Daddy in uncomfortable places.* I can't think of a better way to spend an afternoon with my son than seeing him laughing as I chase soccer balls around the yard and feign being faked out before he slams his basketball so hard that the whole set up falls on top of him.

I really, really, REALLY love being a daddy.


*Yeah, yeah. It's a wiffle ball. A hard one though. Look at the pictures! No holes to slow it down!


- Nicholas A. Marsico