Our girls were playing in Little League at a park in our community when we heard about Kids In Sports. The main reason we switched them was the KIS fees were so much better. I started coaching the girls in T-ball and our involvement kind of grew from there…We were just coaches and then we started helping the board members. We did field maintenance, recruited more board members, kids, coaches. And then, before we knew it, we became board members. Then Teri became President and I became the Sports Coordinator.

I don’t do much coaching anymore. I’m too busy doing uniforms, coordinating teams, getting the registration done, so on average, I’m probably doing two to three hours of work a night, six days a week. And then I have a full time job as an electronics engineer with the GM Advanced Technology Center.

I work from 6 AM to 2:30 and usually I’m the one who cooks dinner. I experiment a lot with chicken dishes, for health reasons we mostly eat chicken. Sometimes Teri and the girls will look at what I’ve cooked and say “What IS that?” and I tell them it’s something new. They usually like it. After we have some dinner, we all head off to the park or gym, whatever the sport is that we’re doing. We pretty much do this every day of the week and all day Saturday.

I love it. The kids are great, although sometimes their parents can be tough to deal with. Actually, the most complaints we deal with come from the parents, but it’s only a few folks. For the most part, this is thoroughly enjoyable, even though it can wear you out. When the season ends, I’m usually ready for it to end. We usually get a month off, although I’m still doing KIS stuff. Mostly, I’m dealing with uniforms. I feel the more I get back, the less money KIS has to spend on uniforms, so the more money they can put towards making things better.

I love watching the kids play. Like tonight, we’re going to the gym at 6 o’clock and watch our girls. Then we’ll watch the other kids play. I help keep score or I monitor the games. I get such a joy out of physically helping these kids get on the teams, assigning them practices and helping them practice, giving them nice uniforms and helping them improve. Then I see them improve. It’s wonderful seeing a team that starts out kind of slowly, they’re not great and at the end of the season, they are so much better. There is such an improvement in how they play. I get such joy out of it.

And I love watching my own girls play and improve, especially when it comes to sportsmanship. I won’t tell you which daughter I’m talking about, but a couple of years ago, I saw that her sportsmanship wasn’t what I thought it should be. But now, when she’s playing, it’s different. You know it’s all physical contact and they bang into each other and they fall down. But now she gets up, she makes sure she stays where she is and asks the girl she knocked down if she’s okay and then helps her get up. She puts out her hand and helps her to stand. To watch her grow like that…I feel so good that I’m kind of teaching her values for later in life because the world today, everyone is for themselves and I think we need to go back to helping each other a bit more. That’s another reason I do this.