College Camping

Jeremy Jacob, Harbinger
Thursday, Aug. 20, 2015

It’s summertime. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping and people are eating as much ice cream as they can to stay cool.  Children are even going to camp to engage in fun activities such as swimming, cycling and learning valuable baseball skills.

The latter is actually unique to a specific camp that occurs every summer on the Illinois Central College campus.  If you’re wondering what type of summer camp happens every year at a college campus, then get into a good position to field information.  

For the past ten years, the ICC baseball coaches and players have been hosting a camp for children between the ages of 8 and 14.  These children typically come from around the Peoria area as well as Morton, Washington and Chillicothe.  One camper even traveled from Texas to attend the camp while he was visiting relatives.  

Age and hometown are some of the differences between these players, however there is similar that all of them share: love for the game of baseball and a desire to improve their skills.

“We don’t teach it to teach it, we teach it so you can use it in a game,” Assistant coach Ben Diggle reminds the children during pitcher fielding drills.  

Repetition and hard work are necessary to become great at something; that is the reality of learning baseball or anything that isn’t a part of human instinct.  Professional baseball players, past and present, that strive to be great, do the same drills that happen at this camp.  Hall of Fame shortstop, Ozzie Smith, is an example.  During his career, Smith won an astonishing 13 Gold Gloves consecutively.  The Gold Glove is awarded every year to the best fielder at his position and is usually won because the fielder worked hard to improve his craft.  

According to head coach Brett Kelley, “Ozzie did these drills to be great.”  

Some of the “Ozzie Smith Drills” are just as simple as fielding the ball on your knees while a partner gently bounces a baseball to you.  These drills increase in difficulty, but working on them every day, along with other drills, eventually leads to skills becoming second nature in a game scenario.  Of course, a little instruction from experts never hurts either.  Sometimes, to become better at something, help from outside sources is necessary to make the learning process easier, as is giving encouragement to provide confidence.  

“Baseball is a confidence sport. It’s hard to play. It’s a game of failures, so it’s important to instill confidence in players,” explained Kelley. “…they see that improvement, it happens for them, and it makes the game easier for them and they have a lot more confidence when they play.”  

On the first day, Diggle was watching a player hitting off a tee in the batting cage, a drill that is used to establish a more level swing, the boy kept hitting weak grounders and became frustrated.  Diggle stepped in and pointed out that the boy’s shoulder wasn’t tucked in enough and his swing was crooked as a result of it.  After instruction, the boy started hitting line drives, while the smile on his face tried to keep up with the speed of the ball off his bat

Through the course of four days, some improvement could be seen from all the children.

“You can kinda see it from day one to day four the improvement that they make, especially in throwing and catching the ball,” observed Kelley.  

After the coaches and players run the children through their drills, they lighten the mood by introducing friendly competition in the form of games.  Groundball Knockout, specifically, is a camp favorite where an instructor hits ground-balls on the infield dirt to the campers, one at a time.  They had to field the ball cleanly or they were out; this is similar to a real game in the sense that if you bobble it at all, the runner is probably going to be safe at first base while you are charged with the error.  

Many were knocked out of the first round on the first day because they either weren’t in a good fielding position or they misjudged the path of the ball.  On the last day, the game seemed to last longer as more of them were making clean plays.  

Summer baseball camps not only give children something to do between baseball seasons, but they also teach them valuable skills and lessons to use on and off the field. Kelley likes to preach to always hustle and to take a little time every day to work on the fundamentals.

Investing all your physical and mental energy into something is another way to word this sentence.  Wording it this way, however, helps the advice fit better to any task in life and the children gobble it down like ice cream in the summertime.

In other words, it is important to invest all your physical and mental energy into any task in life; the children take these words and gobble them down like ice cream in the summertime