| There are a number of reasons
why we think MiniBall is an ideal
activity.
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.
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