Area youngsters introduced to baseball at EHS camp

EDWARDSVILLE – There’s never been a shortage of youngsters who want to learn how to play baseball.

Camps all over the nation introduce kids to the game and teach them the basic skills of pitching, hitting and fielding that make up the game. Edwardsville High School’s baseball team conducted a three-day camp this week to introduce kids as young as second grade to the basics of baseball.

“This is a fun time of year,” said Tiger coach Tim Funkhouser. “We get to bring some more guys into our baseball family; we tell them right from the very beginning that they’re part of the Tiger program this week and we’re glad to have them.

“We’re doing our Complete Skills camp; we have our pitching and catching afterwards (of the main morning session) and we have the Little Tigers down on (the JV field across from Tom Pile Field, where the sessions were held) for the kids who are entering second grade – it’s a fun week.”

Instruction for the camp sessions were provided by the EHS coaching staff and by current Tiger players and alumni. “We have our players who just graduated, players who are currently in our program and our coaches,” Funkhouser said. “The weather’s worked out great and it’s a fun time.

“I remember I was at the very first Edwardsville baseball camp as a participant, then I worked it for coach Pile when I was at Triad one year (Tim Funkhouser coached for the Knights for a few years before taking over at EHS) and now we’ve been running it – this is the 20^th year for it. I’ve seen it full circles.”

The camp has seen participants evolve to joining the Tigers when they reached high school; this year’s camp had approximately 100 participants. “We have right around 100 for our complete skills and we have several at the Little Tigers,” Funkhouser said. “Next week, we’ll have our academy, which is a more specific camp for the older guys (for seventh- through ninth-graders); they go through defense and hitting for a full hour and a half in a small ratio – it’s like a 3:1 ratio, so it’s really small and more specialized.”

There will also be an advanced hitting camp that focuses on the skills and mechanics of hitting. “We get some kids who do both camps,” Funkhouser said. “We’re still accepting enrollment for those camps and some of those sessions max out, but right now, I think we have all hours.”

The camps are a good way to introduce participants into the Tiger way of playing baseball. “It really folds in and they get a lot ot practice in,” Funkhouser said. “The kids enjoy it and they’ve handled themselves great; they take on a good team atmosphere and developing all skills.”

Various skills were worked on at various stations around the Tom Pile Field facility – there were stations where participants worked on batting skills, bunting skills, fielding skills and other skills of the game. “We have a game-play station on the turf today and there’s a lot of infield and outfield defensive work,” Funkhouser said. “It’s pretty comprehensive in the time they’re out here.”

While the skills work is emphasized, the fun aspect of the game isn’t ignored. “We want to have fun and we want to emphasize to the kids about being good teammates and want them to be continued learners and good listeners,” Funkhouser said. “We talk about listening skills, we talk about them being able to have their eyes on the person they’re talking to and taking in the information as much as possible and understand there’s always things they need to be working on.

“We talk about competing; we talk about failure in the game (citing how Florida defeated Auburn when a ball popped out of a fielder’s glove and went over the wall to send the Gators to the College World Series in Omaha, Neb., last week). We talked about how there’s failure in the game and that guy is in the arena competing and how his team embraced him and that he didn’t lose the game; it was just unfortunate how that happened there.”

For more information on the upcoming camps, contact Funkhouser at tfunkhouser@ecusd7.org.

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