Cathi Wilson recently reminded me of a video tape mini documentary I made of my son’s and her son’s last Little League year. I made VHS copies and passed them out to all the families at our end of season party in July of 2001.

I’m still learning a product called Topaz Video Enhance AI, which improves the quality of old videos/films, but here is an enhancement of the old VHS recording converted to digital.
The team was called EPS after Ernie’s Pool and Spa. Unlike my LL, and most others, instead of naming teams after pro sports team or animals and such, Campbell LL (due to its blue collar roots) named them after local sponsoring business.
Watching this brings back many memories of coaching youth sports and this was my first stab at it. I even got paid to coach a middle school team for a few years. That’s as good as when I got paid to host an open mic and play music at a local pub. After those ditch digging days I talked about, getting paid to do something I loved doing was always my goal, and for the most part always seemed to achieve. Thank you lord.
Anyway, looking back I wish I was more like my Dad. He always looked at youth sports as nothing but fun and games, even when he was a youth himself (not until high school anyway – link to that story at in followup comment).
I guess when you grew up in the depression era, you had other things to worry about (we would all learn that 2 months later, right?). Even when I was a youth, he never took my sport endeavors seriously. Or a better way to put it, he was a much more mature Dad than I was. Whatever loss of sleep I had over a kid’s error, strikeout, or the team’s 1 run loss was just plain silly.
This video is a reminder that it really is about fun and games.