I am in the midst of a four-week period where I'll spend the majority of my time conducting 45-minute long clinics at sports camps throughout Budapest and directing two week-long baseball day camps that will also require me to teach English (or at the very least baseball expressions and communication in English). These will usually be with kids ranging in age from 7-years-old to 14-years-old. I'll then have a week break, where I'm hoping to hold at least one tryout for our junior national team, before heading the Barcelona with the senior national guys.
This weekend will break up the monotony of everything, as I'll be traveling with a couple local teams to play in a tournament in Hluboka, Czech Republic. We will be staying in nearby České Budějovice, where the first Budweiser beer was brewed sometime early in the 19th century and was first exported to the US in 1875. České Budějovice is "Budweis" in German, and there's been a wrestling match between the Czech company that first brewed the beer and Anheuser-Busch for years over naming rights, marketing, etc. (see Budweiser History).
Should be a good weekend and opportunity to see what the level of competition is like in the Czech Republic. From what I hear, the facility rivals that of some top-tier Little League facilities in the US.
On Thursday, I'm going to see Sting in concert the local sports arena in Budapest. I'm pretty sure my folks will be jealous. I'm also making plans to see Bon Jovi in Vienna, Austria on July 22 (my mother's birthday. Mom, I'll be sure to call from the concert!), and hopefully to Frankfurt, Germany on July 19 for the gold medal game of the women's soccer World Cup, should the US make the final.
The link below is to a video of one of the clinics I conducted last week. As you can see as they practice fielding ground balls, they're very new to the sport. If I have 25 kids in a clinic, I might have five that have watched baseball on TV or the Internet, and one or two that have played the game before. We did make it through the practice without any busted lips or noses, which I always chalk up as a W for the day.
Clinic Clip