Cricket. Do you know what it is? Is it similar to baseball? Well lets just say that Cricket came before baseball. In fact, it was one of the favorite sports played by George Washington. And now we are beginning to try to teach this to our students in Charlotte in PE classes. I got connected with some great guys from the Charlotte International Cricket Club on Wednesday night and was able to practice with them. I practiced BOWLING, not bowling but bowling like pitching a ball in baseball. You see the guy in the above picture bowling the ball to me with an overhand straight arm. He was trying to hit the wicket behind me while I tried to protect it by striking the ball away with the bat, which is mostly flat on the striking side. The ball is allowed to bounce off the ground before I hit it. And by the way, I can hit is anywhere....forward, sideways, behind me but I have to be careful to protect the wicket. I learned a lot of information about this game during the course of a two hour practice. The CICC guys spent a lot of time coaching me and helping me get in position to strike the ball. I practice bowling on my own for a while and realized that I was a somewhat of an accurate bowler but did not have the speed behind it. I hit a few wickets but did not get up the 80 or 90 mile an hour speed some of the bowler have. Finally, we took field practice and worked on catching what you would call pop ups in baseball. By the way, do you know what they use in Cricket to catch a ball which is as hard as a baseball? NOTHING but the hands! So I got a few stingers but I caught most of the hits. This was a great night and I look forward to teaching this sport to my students as well as hopefully playing this again soon. And there is a saying on their website that pretty much sums up my whole 30 sport challenge so far:
"We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old if we stop playing"
No comments:
Post a Comment