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Message: [QUOTE="Hoophound, post: 3997613, member: 271"] Funny story to add to this. My dad, now almost 75 years old, is a lot like Clark Griswold. People love him, he’s excited about odd things and always smiling. He’s an extremely intelligent person and he has some McFly tendencies as well. He’s a little nerdy. He’s also a terrible athlete. He always took huge pride in my ability to play sports and actually win tournaments etc. My dad grew up very poor. His parents were farmers and he lived in a small cabin that my grandfather built with logs he dragged out of the VT woods himself. He went to UConn on full scholarship after being Valedictorian of his high school class. To him, UConn was the promised land. It was beautiful and thriving. It was by no means a rural campus to him. The weather was milder and there was always something to do. As time went on, he met my mother at UConn, graduated, got married and made a success of himself. He bought a nice house and he shed some of his insecurities from being a poor, nerdy outsider. One insecurity he didn’t shed was his panic when forced to throw a ball or catch a pass. He just had no exposure to sports growing up. As I grew up, he would toss a ball with me or pitch to me and he was learning along with me. One day, my brother and I were hitting baseballs in our front yard and trying to hit the ball out of the yard into the street. A couple of other kids were with us and their dads came to pick them up. Before you knew it, it was a home run derby of boys and dads. My dad, who was inside, had no idea what we were doing. He walked out the front door and one of the other dads handed him the bat and said “you’re up”. My brother immediately grabbed a ball and was sure to give dad a perfect, easy pitch. All I said to my dad was, “watch the ball hit the bat”. My brother tossed it and dad took a huge and somewhat awkward cut at it. He blasted the ball out of the yard, over the street and deep into the woods on the other side. It was a monster shot that would have cleared any high school baseball field fence. He was the hero of the day and I was so happy for him. This was 35 or something years ago. I saw him last week and we were talking with some of my friends at a wedding. My buddy said, “what was the best day of your life?”. This of course was prompted by the wedding being a big day for the couple. We all mentioned our big moments. When it was my dad’s turn he said, “The day I met my wife, the day my sons were born and the day I hit a baseball so far out of the yard it was never found”. I slapped him on the back, my eyes welled up and I had to take a walk. I had no idea it meant as much to him as it did, but I’ll never forget it or how proud I was of him in that moment. Sports play big roles not only in the lives of people that play them, but also of people that are awful at them. Fortunately, my dad got his moment to shine. Tell your kids to encourage and be kind to the kid picked last. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach

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