The 'Kids First' Philosophy: Building a Foundation of Love for the Game

We haven’t always been about kids first, it’s been a process, not an experiment, in figuring out what Batter Up Baseball was going to morph into. I guess we can say it started out with what parents want, which is to see their player get better in the least amount of time, while spending the least amount of money. We thought we would accomplish that goal by running kids through skills and drills all day, and then giving them a chance to play a short game at the end of the day. This approach, we learned, was wrong. Eventually, we started having tournaments in the middle of the week and made sure that we played a baseball scrimmage game for at least an hour and a half every afternoon. This brought a ton of joy to the players and we began to see a shift, not only in their attitudes and overall demeanour throughout the week, but in the number of players they wanted to bring on “bring a friend” day on Friday’s. We did away with trying to teach everything we knew about the game to these kids, and we just let them compete and have fun! We encouraged the players to be the best teammates that they could be each day.

After having such success with this, we changed the philosophy of our camp to a kids first approach. This is what they wanted and soon enough we had about 100 players showing up everyday to play baseball games with their friends. Friday’s “bring-a-friend” days became crazy tournament days with about 150-175 players showing up for tournament day and free pizza lunch.

We’ve been accused of being that baseball camp where the kids go just to have fun…not to take baseball seriously. The kids first approach has taken on a different path of baseball success for the players; a place where they can build a foundation of friendships in a laid back environment where baseball doesn’t come first…they do, and we now know where the love of the game comes from.