Spring is finally here, and baseball season has arrived! Not being from Chicago originally, I find baseball here fascinating. Cub fans are anxiously watching the early games to see if their team has any chance of finally beating the 100 year jinx…only to find some way of not getting to the World Series. And White Sox fans are watching to see if their team can recapture the magic of a few years ago.

As a Chicago baseball fan, my other volunteer “job” besides Cub Scouts, is being an assistant coach for a 3rd and 4th grade baseball team. As a coach, I’m always telling the boys to “think” about the positions they are playing, and about the game situation so they can make a good decision if the ball is hit to them. In practice, we try to recreate common situations so that we know what to do in similar real situations. However, as in many sports, a player doesn’t have much time to “think” when the ball is hit to them and they usually are simply “reacting” to the situation. Funny how situations in life can be like this too. Many times we don’t have time to think, we just react. Like the commercial says “life comes at you fast.”

This adds another dimension to the Boy Scout motto “Be Prepared”. As parents, we try to be “ready” for all the things that life and our children throw our way. Luckily, what holds true for our Scouts usually holds true for us, which is “do your best”. In baseball, I try to stress the importance of throwing and catching and performing in drills like it was a real game. This way when they don’t have time to think, they will be able to react. In Scouts, as our boys work through their ranks completing their achievements and electives on the way to the Arrow of Light, they are being prepared to handle and react to the situations that may come their way. I recently sat in on part of the King Cobras training for the Readyman Badge. They were learning basic First Aid, CPR, and what to do in emergencies. This is a great example of how we are training our Scouts to “react,” even without having much time to think. Another great example is Patrick Tucker’s recent Westgate Wire article “Caring is Easy” about the “right” thing to do for his neighbors.

At recruiting night, I had a parent of one of our Scouts make an interesting observation that helped to put into perspective the question of “why join Cub Scouts?” He said that we won’t always be there to help choose who our children become friends with, but we can influence the surroundings where our children will have the opportunity to make friends. Hopefully, your son’s Scouting experience at Westgate can help him out in life, with friends, with “reacting” to some of the curve balls that may come his way…and with some of the home runs he is sure to hit in life.

Yours in scouting