Mine is 8 too. I didn't I found that to start off with but it could have been deducted. A lot of people don't understand the serious softball these girls play at this age. My DD plays in advanced 8U travel rec league with part kid pitch. I coached her team in the fall and every time those girls played they amazed me. When you include all star seasons she plays in about 45 games a year.
Glasses
- Thread starter BrianTx01
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My DD had to get glasses at 8 as well. She hated the feel of all glasses under her catchers helmet so refused to wear them when she played. After about 6 months she switched to contacts and has been happy as can be ever since. The first time she wore her contacts catching she said it freaked her out because she could actually see the laces on the ball as it came towards her.
- Nov 18, 2013
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These statements are a little over the top. The enthusiasm is great, but I’d suggest taking a few deep breaths, putting away the stat book and just enjoy watching her play. She’s got thousands of games ahead of her and you’re headed to the funny farm at this rate.
DD wore regular glasses the first few years that she played without any issues. She did end up having to get sports glasses to play club soccer (they were a requirement) a couple of years ago, so wore them to softball too. They were the Liberty Sports glasses from Wal-Mart. Now she's 13 and is wearing contacts. It took two years of trying to get her into contacts, but now that she's worn them for a while she loves them. It can get pricey having to buy regular glasses, sports glasses, and prescription sunglasses, especially if their vision changes 2 or 3 steps every year like DD's does.
How would I set the batting order without stats? We keep them to track the progress of players to see if they are developing. My only purpose for including them her is to tell the story that her eye sight seemed to go bad quickly. I was wondering if anyone else had experienced the same thing.
I know many people don't play very serious ball at 8U and that is great for a lot of players. My DD loves to play so I moved her to a more competitive league. She is having fun we just got to figure out how to address this vision issue.
- Nov 18, 2013
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There’s no such thing as a competitive 8U league. Batting averages off of coach pitch mean absolutely nothing as far as gauging their development. If they make contact chances are it’s goping to be a “hit” because most of the kids can’t field or throw consistently. You’ve accomplished your purpose if you can keep them from playing in the dirt and pickling dandelions.
As far as batting order, go from lowest number to highest one game and highest to lowest the next. You want to give all the kids a chance and hope they all come back next season. Going all out to win, keeping stats, running up the score and fierce rivals are ridiculous at that age.
My girls just play a different style of ball then what your used to seeing. My girls are not concerned with dandelions. With that in mind I didn't make this post to debate the merits of how competitive 8U softball should or should not be.
I am interested in finding out how parents handled their daughters vision problems.
I would have to disagree with that there are no competitive 8u teams or leagues out there, that may be the case in some states but not in this part of Illinois. If you want to do something more than a rec league it is available in this area. My daughter played her first year of part time travel this year as a 7u player, in a 8u travel ball league, which consisted of 3 local tournaments and about 14 Sunday games. These tournaments were all kid pitch, no coach pitch at all, and two of the three tournaments you were allowed to steal bases. About the only thing different with these tournaments were that you could not steal home and you could only steal 1 base per pitch. All the girls on the team were capable of taking signs from the third base coach while batting or on base. The catcher was also giving signs for what pitch to throw, we had one pitcher that threw a occasional change up.
Our team had two pretty decent pitchers that both get pitching lessons on a relatively regular basis. These two girls threw a good amount of strikes and averaged about 1.5 walks per inning, that is pretty good at the 8u level. Our team also had a catcher that could throw girls out, stealing second base usually pretty easy but she threw out a bunch of runners trying to steal third.
We were not the best 8u team in this area either, we finished in third place in all 3 tournaments, every tournament had 12-16 teams. There was two other teams that both had two very good 8u pitchers that rarely walked a batter ( less than 1 batter walked per inning). Our rec league in this area for 8u is also kid pitch but after 4 balls the coach comes in and finishes the at bat, no stealing in the rec league. When you get to hand pick the best players on 16 different teams from a couple of decent sized towns you can put together a pretty competitive team. Including the rec league we played about 35 games.
I have seen some pretty decent 8U ball, but I think what MnDad was probably really getting at was that you should keep it as fun as possible for as long as possible and not get too competitive at a young age. Some of us who have had DDs go all the way up through 18U to college have seen some burn-out along the way (from our own DDs or others) and would probably turn things down a notch if we could do it all over again. I KNOW that I would. I probably burned out DD1 a little bit and was very careful with DD2 not to do the same. I love the enthusiasm! I hope all your little DDs keep the passion and we get to follow their stories on this board all the way up to college.
