World Champions

Grant's high school baseball team played their conference tournament at ASH last month.  They had almost 10 of his Junior classmates returning from last season so that gave them some good experience.  They lost their first game of the tournament, then won three in a row to come out as champions.  Both of the last two games were come from behind victories; those are always tough on parents.  It was a great season; the only downside is that with the championship they now move up to the first division.  Hopefully all those juniors will come back next year.

Grant taking a cut

Grant throws it in after the catch.  

Baseball is a little different over here.  The teams come from a wide area.  His tournament consisted of Frankfurt, Cairo, Israel, Vienna and one of the London schools.  To keep the travel costs down the kids stay with host families in our area.  We had two boys from London staying with us, which is one of the teams that we came from behind to beat.  Luckily it's not too competitive so it wasn't awkward eating dinner with them that night at our house.  

Another thing that would never happen in America.  One of the London boys said their coach had made a mistake and bought a batting cage for cricket instead of baseball.  Evidently it's narrower so the balls ricochet back at the batter and konk them in the head.  Oops  

At the end of the tournament all the teams sit around the infield for the awards.  

It was rainy and cold on Friday, but on Saturday the weather turned out great.  I thought it would be nice to capture the beautiful Dutch sky.  Actually, this is just another example of me hitting the wrong button on the camera.  

One of the boys was using a radar gun to clock the speed of our pitchers ( I assume he stole it from the physics lab because ASH is not serious enough to have a radar gun for athletics).  One of the parents asked him how fast our pitcher was throwing.  "90" he replied.   We were all very impressed since 90 miles per hour is major league fast.  Then the kid came back "kilometers".  (which is about 55 mph -- still fast, but not major league).

 Other Spring activities include Grant's voice concert.  His quartet sang two numbers.  You can watch/listen at   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ILx6pHFzRQ

Somehow Graber cut his paw and had to wear a sock for a week.  

Grant's class visited the Shell Technology Center in Amsterdam.  Here the two future engineers are geared up and ready for work.