Home Run Derby, Wiffle Ball and Unstructured Play

Rediscovering Play in Youth Sports

Summer 1980. Washburn, North Dakota (population 1800).

It’s the dog days of summer. It’s hot, a little humid. Perfect conditions for an evening thunderstorm on the majestic Plains of western North Dakota.

Like any typical summer morning, I grabbed my ball glove and walked across the street to the Little League field for either practice or a game. (Note: no team-issued bag, no eye black painted on my face, no batting or sliding gloves, and not even a real uniform - just sweatpants and whatever t-shirt you wanted to wear. And P.S. we were a “travel team” … we all packed into a few parent’s cars and drove 15 mile to either Underwood, Wilton or Turtle Lake to play those community teams.)

After lunch, which usually consisted of an Oscar Meyer bologna and Velveeta cheese sandwich on white Wonder bread (remember the one with Snoopy on the packaging?), the neighborhood gang would usually ride bike down the hill to the swimming pool.

After swimming, we would count up our pennies, dimes and nickels to see if we had enough for an ice cream cone at the Tastee Freeze.

It was then back up the hill to my friend Troy‘s house, where often times we would play some unstructured game of baseball or dice baseball or trade baseball cards.

One favorite game was Home Run Derby.

The property line between Troy‘s house and the neighbor was a hedge that reminded us of the Wrigley Field outfield wall. Using the “Big Red Bat”, we would take turns walloping plastic balls over the hedge.

After about an hour we probably got bored, and if the wind was blowing just right, we could throw some nasty pitches with those plastic wiffle balls. I can guarantee you the combination of Home Run Derby and the challenge of tracking and hitting some of those pitches certainly helped my launch angle, pitch selection, and overall performance as a hitter.

Years later, as a youth baseball coach, I incorporated small-sided ball games and Home Run Derby into practice. These games rarely failed at producing the key performance metric in youth sports: smiles per hour.

These days of my childhood are long gone….but hopefully we can begin to re-engineer some unstructured (or semi-structured) play back into youth sports.

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