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for the tennis court, or a rubber ball that we could buy at the confectionery store. There was a ballgame of some kind going on, somewhere in the neighborhood.
As the neighborhood games were played, there was Little League. I got cut by the first team I tried out for. Fortunately, there were still enough kids left in the pool to create another team, so I played and eventually played for the team I wanted. That took me through grade school.
During my freshman year, I tried out for the junior varsity team and made it. I played on the varsity my sophomore year. We won the Missouri High School Baseball Championship during my junior and senior year. We had been playing against one another in Little League for six to eight years so everybody knew one another. That was something for kids that are only 16 years old.
BTS: How would you compare how kids grow up today compared to those years?
JR: Different! It depends on where kids live. You just can’t go to a park and play, much like we did. I imagine there are a few places you could have pick-up games like we did. Neighborhood kids got together and had a game going. We have one field close by here, and I know you can walk on and play. It’s one of the few places I know, that kids can do that! It’s not a very good field, but growing up, we didn’t have very good fields either. We just found a place to play and let that be that!
Today, there are a lot of other things going on. There are digital games that occupy kid’s time, a lot of organized play dates and there many more competing sports. I don’t really know how it is done, but I know there are many travel teams now and they (the travel teams) play an extraordinary number of games during the spring and summer. Some of them, I understand play even in the fall. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing. I can understand where it would help in some ways, in other ways not as much, because if you find a sport where you’re not doing too well, the time could be better spent doing something else. There are more decisions to make, more things to do and more options to choose today.