I’m writing from my son’s 6-year-old baseball practice.

This is the first year he didn’t play in the city league. Instead, we opted for “travel ball.” I know that’s a loaded term, one that my wife and I worried about for weeks before we finally pulled the trigger and signed our son up for the Russellville Nukes.

I really liked the name. I thought it was clever (Russ-Vegas is home to a massive nuclear cooling tower). Maybe the name was why I finally decided to let my son join the travel ball team.

Or maybe it’s because a dear friend of mine, a man by the name of Drew Van Es, is the coach. Or maybe it’s because I want my son to play for the Saint Louis Cardinals one day. Maybe that’s why I did exactly what I used to warn parents not to do back when I wrote a sports-themed advice column called “Athletic Support.”

Youth sports are a marathon, not a sprint. You don’t want your kid to tucker out before he reaches high school. And playing tournaments every weekend in towns all across the state can wear a 6-year-old down quick.

We had our first tournament last Saturday. It was some sort of preseason invitational thing. There weren’t any other teams our age, so we had to play up a division.

It was rough.

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My kindergartener was going up against second and third graders. The other teams had walk out music. They had batting gloves and eye black. They could hit the ball all the way to the fence. Some of the Nukes parents were worried about what would happen if one of those line drives hit their kid.

I was one of those parents, but that wasn’t my biggest worry.

I feared that after enduring such a beating, my son would put his bat, his glove, on the shelf, and never play with them again. I was afraid my son’s baseball career was over long before he’d had the chance to burn out.

The tournament ended after two brutal losses.

Days passed. Then it was Tuesday night. Time for practice.

My son was not excited to go. He even asked his mom if he could stay home with her.

On the drive to Hickey Park, he sat with his arms crossed in the back of my truck. He stared out the window. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how Coach Drew would handle such a dismal performance. I wondered what drills he’d run, which skills he’d try to improve.

When we arrived at the field, I stayed in the truck. I watched my son stomp across the parking lot, his bat bag (which is nearly as big as he is) strung over one shoulder.

The other boys were out there already, huddled around Coach Drew. Drew had his hands behind his back, saying words I couldn’t hear, but I could see his hands, the surprise he was hiding.

It was a ball.

Not a baseball.

A big, red, rubber kickball.

The boys’ cheers pierced my truck’s cab. When I stepped out, they were shirtless and howling. They’d gone feral. They’d gone mad. It was beautiful, just how happy they were to be out there playing a game instead of practicing a game they’d yet to master.

For the next hour, I stood behind the chain-link fence, marveling over those boys, basking in their joy. When the game was over and one team had lost and the other had won and nobody cared, I even teared up a little.

Throughout the entirety of my athletic career, I’ve never, not once, witnessed a coach make a better call.

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