BMA Uptown Kitchen

Hello, Team!

My name is Mike Harvey and I am the Head Coach for our team, Uptown Kitchen. I apologize for the late communication and I'm looking forward to getting started, it looks like our first practice will be this Thursday the 17th, at 6:45 pm.

It appears that I am the only coach on the staff at this point but we'll make it work. I've been told that they have someone who will help out but I haven't heard anything yet. I'm sorry I don't have more friends with travel ball players for sons! lol That's just a little joke that I'm sure some of you get. Anyway, if it comes to it, I may ask for a little help especially on game days with someone to help 'keep book'. Please let me know if you know a little bit about keeping the scorebook for baseball and if you would be willing to help out on game days, it would be greatly appreciated and can be kind of fun actually. For practices, if anyone would be able to step in at times and maybe run a station here and there that would be great too. It's tough to teach everything I want to teach in an hour and half practices so extra help would benefit the boys by keeping them "hoppin'". To that point, if possible I plan on scheduling some additional practices that don't appear on the schedule to get in as much work as we can. Also, if anyone would like to be an assistant, let me know as soon as possible so that we can get you a shirt.

I see some familiar names on the roster but for those of you that don't know me, my philosophy is to develop good young ballplayers but more importantly, good young humans! Baseball has been a part of the majority of my life, (arm troubles and bad decisions in my early years kept me from playing longer...but mostly bad decisions! :) ), and there are many parallels between the game and the game of life. Learning and understanding something new, developing yourself, knowing how to win and lose, dealing with adversity, being a good teammate and many other similarities that I find that there are between the two. It is always more fun to "win" but the goal is to have fun and get better and everything else will fall in to place. Don' t get me wrong, I would love to go 'undefeated' but I would only want to the right way so, everyone will play, everyone will sit at some point and we will go through this as a team.

I am definitely more old school when it comes to teaching the game. I do not teach the "30° launch angle" to hit more homeruns, I want to see line drives up the middle or to the opposite field even. These are the fundamentals that have been taught for over 100 years and it still should be the foundation taught to young players at this point in their career, in my opinion. Our pitchers will NOT throw curveballs, at least not called by the coaches, (boys will be boys!), but one can get the ball to move plenty with different grips on the baseball while still using a 'fastball' motion and we will teach that. Again, we are building sound ballplayers, not winning at all costs at the sake of a young man's arm.

I always seem to forget about the snack thing so we will put together a sign up sheet to take turns bringing a snack bag for the boys on game days. In fact, I'm not very technically savvy so if anyone out there has the means to put together a Google Doc or whatever and it's easy, please let me know, also would be greatly appreciated.

I'm sure I'm forgetting something but I will communicate (much better!) through the Crossbar app as I think of things. Also, please please feel free to reach out to me at any time for any reason if you ever have any questions or concerns. You can use the Crossbar app or contact me directly, if you feel more comfortable doing that, through any of my contacts listed here, call, text, email, whatever you prefer.

Okay, that's all for now, sorry so long winded and again for the late communication, we appreciate you all and none of this works without dedicated parents who care, so thank you. We'll see you Thursday and I can't wait to get this ball rollin'!! Go Uptown!!!