Ethnography Rough Draft

The subculture that I’ve been recently observed is my son’s baseball team. He recently joined the pinto league which is for boy’s ages seven to eight years old. So it is something completely new for him as well as me. I don’t have any siblings that played baseball so I have never been around dugouts and baseball fields, and didn’t know much about the different leagues.

The league is basically for learning, it’s not yet little league, so the observations I made was. Basic baseball skills being taught, the coach’s really worked on building teamwork and friendship, especially the head coach of his team. He had a talk with the parents before one of the games, he said it’s about the kids, we should always encourage the children whether they win or lose! This made him different from the other coaches in the league. The other coaches yelled while my son’s coach used a different approach.

There was a situation when one of the boys was putting down another team member. It was not tolerated, I was extremely surprised to see an otherwise very calm quiet coach really lose his temper that was the first and last time I saw any of the kids try that. All they wanted to hear is the teammates encouraging each other. Whether it’s with a pat on the back after a strike out, or with there songs and team cheers each team has. They also have nicknames they would give each other. The nicknames are after sodas which has a story behind it. Well the team would have really slow starts so the parents, yes including me, are all guilty of it. We would give our little boys so soda at nine in the morning as soon as the sugar would hit there systems they were ready to play. The kids thought to themselves this is awesome soda at nine in the morning so they each have their favorite soda and that’s how they got their nicknames, and a sugar rush. I had to draw the line with the giant pixie sticks that some of the kids had along with their soda.

Another part of the team, is the parents who all started of as strangers and by sitting on metal bleachers and sharing in our children’s victories and defeats have made us fast acquaintances. Even though we all received the coaches talk about the parents having good sportsmanship as well as the children there was still a couple in the bunch who got a little too passionate and at times where not as good examples as they should have been. But who can blame them we do tend to get passionate when our children are involved. So along the folding chairs, blankets and concession stand goodies we go there to cheer on our little boys.