Team 4 Week 1

Sioux Team 4 Week 1

Tuesday sendoff we were excited to get underway. Later we hit a little detour of our own doing but found our glitch 20 miles down the road at the same time we got a call and John’s dog got loose back home. We filled up with gas and the Y buy didn’t work. With all mishaps out of the way we entered the reservation crossing the Missouri River with a sense of awe. The land was beautiful. We met team 3 and headed to dinner to meet Mona, the mother to all teams out here. Carol was the executive director and Ben who is on the board. We also had the pleasure of meeting Tyson who is the Youth affairs coordinator. The food and talk was great and Tyson won “toss up Tuesday” and we got half of the bill.

Wednesday we started our day at the Sioux Y to pick up some gear and headed to La plant. We had about 8 kids and met the leader of the boys and girls club. La plant was the most difficult because the kids seem to be difficult to keep engaged. We feel this is due to the high amount of programming. The next stop was Swiftbird which is a small community and we had about the same amount of kids. The kids here were younger and were sad to see a kid named Cotton leave to move back home. A great kid who came up with a baseball game we were playing with every community today. He cried when all of us were leaving. We ate lunch and headed to Bear Creek which ended up being our favorite place. We had about 10 kids which were school age and very happy to see us. We played “Cotton ball” and sang some camp songs. The last stop was Cherry creek and had the most beautiful drive in to this community. We had 20 kids which were mostly older in age; there was a small group of younger girls which ended up being Bob’s shadow. By the end of the game there were 9 dogs playing outfield. We met a mom here whose name was June. She opened up her house to use the bathroom and use her yard for games, if we needed.

Note: she has pictures of Ben, Pat, and Derek when we first started coming out here.

Thursday:
We started our day at Bear creek and went door knocking. Bob found out from a mom that the kids went swimming and wouldn’t be back for a while. We did have one kid who came with us and one more a little later. During this time Josh and Bob played games with the 2 kids and John did his best to clean up the community center, which is in rough shape. When the kids came back from swimming, we had the opportunity to meet kids that were not there on Wednesday. We did some hitting and fielding drills and were amazed at the natural talent that some of them showed. At the end of our day, the kids taught us a new game that was really fun. After that we ate lunch in the van and picked up Rikki who works for the Sioux Y. We all went to Cherry Creek which was also Rikki’s first time there. On our way there Rikki told us that people call this area God’s country which we all agreed. We went knocking on doors and started with a few kids. By the time we started programming we had a large group of kids but many were new faces. We worked on fielding, batting, and outfield work. At the end of our time the kids wanted to play us in basketball. We used the indoor gym and man can these kids really play ball. Rikki was working with some younger kids and is really trying to gain all the knowledge she can so when we leave she can continue to do programming. We were all worn out and went back to drop off Rikki; Bob and Josh grilled some great food and we ate like kings.

Friday
We went to Swiftbird and came into the Y to do send in our blogs and do some lite clean up. We are off to the Badlands to go camping and act like tourist.

Note: We are working on logistics for setting up another tournament so that when team 5 gets here they will have a lot of kids at this last event of the summer. We will talk with Tyson to bring in other communities and the Youth Diabetes Organization to bring Water and Snack. We will also talk with Carol about transportation and talk with the city to use the field. This last event we hope will be a huge deal with lots of families throughout the reservation.