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The Launch of KBI, Part 6: The Natural

On our last full day in Kosovo we were able to meet up with the group of kids who have been playing ball for the last couple of years...this is the same group who we met up with on our first trip.

Pete and I got to the field a bit early so we just started playing some catch and waited a bit for the kids to shop up. Unfortunately it has been a while since they've played and it was the middle of Ramazan, so the turn out wasn't so great.








But the kids who were there were excited to play.

The thing is that none of them have their own gear as they share a couple bags of team gear...which of course they were unable to bring along on this day. Fortunately, we had a bag of gloves that we were looking forward to leaving with them. We handed out the gloves and got started.





As we were working on the mechanics of throwing, there was a little guy just sitting on one of the steps nearby who really seemed to want to get involved.

I walked over to him and asked if he wanted to try...so I gave him a glove and he jumped down and ran to the field.


He was much younger than the others and it seems like maybe he had spent many days watching from the periphery...turns out the kid is a natural. This kid immediately demonstrated that he could pick up the basics of what we were teaching.  He was flawless during the ground ball instruction and he was on point with the hitting mechanics.

But those were all just "drills"...the real magic happened when we had them face some live hitting. All the kids seemed to be able to hit the ball quite well so when our little rookie came up (he was one of the last to hit) we didn't really know what to expect.



I threw the pitch.

He hit a line drive right back up the middle so hard that I didn't have time to duck or get my glove up.

And then he did that three more times; right back at me

On his fifth and final pitch he took me deep.




Hopefully the bigger kids will let him play from time to time...




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