Are you a parent with little or no baseball background? Have you learned much of your tips for your child online or by watching TV and listening to sportscasters? Maybe you played years ago and remember some things a coach once told you. I can tell you this, playing catch with your child can be one of the greatest experiences of your life and create terrific memories or it can be disastrous for your child. Have you seen the VW commercial where the dad is showing his kid to throw a baseball so fundamentally wrong its comical? I'd like to provide my perspective and guidelines to make the experience valuable on this age old tradition as a dad who played catch with his son for thousands of hours, and as a high school baseball coach. I was maintaining my high school baseball field this weekend after practice when a father and son who had a sibling playing another sport on our campus began playing catch on our outfield grass. They weren't sure about the distance between third base and first base at the little league level so I helped them out with an estimate. The son was a pretty good player, he had a very good arm to make the throw of the estimated distance and seemed to like the game of baseball. However, we he made a poor throw he would get angry. The dad would stand like a first baseman without moving and indicated the players were of smaller stature (of which is all true) and receive the throws of the ground balls he was throwing for his son. There was occasional praise, but the majority of the time was dad coaching the kid. I can tell you as a coach, most of the stuff he was saying was incorrect. It took everything in my being to not correct this dad. Here's the bottom line for playing catch with your kid. Make it fun! The kid wanted to do some "Tulo" plays, referring to Troy Tulowitski the All Star shortstop of our local MLB team, The Rockies who regularly fields a grounder jumps in the air and makes an acrobatic throw to the base. The dad wouldn't let the kid do this. When the kid made a bad throw he (the son) would throw his glove down on the grass in disgust. For this father and son, playing catch was an extension of practice and not fostering a passion for the game or building their relationship in a healthy manner. As a youth sports parent, your single biggest responsibility to your child is to be supportive and foster passion and love of whatever game they are playing. The only way this is going to happen is to have fun with your child and let them do what they want to do while playing catch. Let the coaches teach the fundamentals, or if your child ASKS you if he's doing it right, then provide feedback. Otherwise ask them what they want to do. If they want to make "Tulo" plays let them do it. And when they execute a "Tulo" play in a game you'l have a huge sense of pride for your child knowing that you helped them and that you've seen them make that play a hundred times before. You may even say with a smile on your face "oh yeah, he does that all the time when we play catch, no big deal." Coach Mike