Why MiniBall?

MiniBall is an activity designed especially for very young kids, including those who might be playing their first season of an organised team sport. It's suitable for both boys and girls, aged from 4 to 7.

It's a team sport. As kids move from the family environment to a school environment, peer-interaction becomes critical to their personal development. Team sports promote the idea of a group of children working toward a common goal:- a concept that they will rarely have seen before now.

It's exercise. We all should have seen the explosion in community attention of late to issues such as youth obesity, the risk of Type 2 Diabeties, the increasingly sedentary lifestyle of teenagers and so forth.

Apart from actually being exercise, the idea of a weekly runaround activity is a good grounding for the future. Kids get used to the idea of spending at least some scheduled time in outdoor exercise. It forms good habits.

The basic techniques that we teach include throwing, catching, hitting and running. Those skills are universal and will benefit every child later on, regardless of whether they choose to move on to baseball, or to go and do something completely different. MiniBall teaches good basic mechanics that can be used in many other ball sports.

The activity is short and intense. We find that even TeeBall can become boring for young kids when a game takes 100+ minutes, uses team sizes of 10 or more, and often involves a second session each week for training. The TeeBall format is better suited to kids aged 8-11. By keeping the MiniBall team size small, limiting the game itself to 45 minutes, and making the whole thing informal, we find we keep the children's interest throughout the season.

It's an outdoor sport. Although there's nothing wrong with getting exercise indoors (eg:- indoor cricket, basketball etc), there are still some of us that think running around outdoors and getting grass-stains and grazed elbows is somehow more fun than the clinical environment that exists under a roof. Sure, there's always the risk of getting washed out, but it's a small price to pay.

By aligning the programme to school terms instead of the traditional "summer v winter" split in most sports, we give families more choices...

• 10-week terms mean that the schedule that finishes before the kids get bored,
• Kids can play just one term in summer instead of two, and combine this with soccer (or something else) in winter.
• Kids can play one or two terms in winter, leaving them free to play cricket (or something else) in summer.
• We've heard complaints from parents involved in both summer and winter sports that "we never have any family time". This is because most summer and winter sports dovetail so tightly that the only weekends left free each year are those in the school holidays. The MiniBall structure allows a family to opt out of organised sport for an entire school term, which equates to "half a season" in traditional Sydney terms.

Want more? Check out the "About MiniBall" page.

If you want to explore the concepts behind the activity, see the "Programme Structure" page.