The Head of Serbian Little League Baseball, Nikola Vučević invited the International School of Belgrade to form a Team USA and participate in an Indoor Baseball Tourney yesterday. We headed up to the beautiful facilities of the Serbian Institute of Sport located in the Belgrade suburb of Banavo Brdo. There were six teams from Belgrade and Novi Sad participating. I never saw this type of baseball before, the rules are described here in Serbian. The ball is hit off a tee and there field is a triangle, with two bases and a home plate. Runs are scored by the team in the field by recording an out and by the offense by the batter going around the triangle to score. We played with seven people, one catcher and six in the field. All defensive players must be beyond the triangle. All seven batters bat every inning. The games were 25 minutes long and scores were in the high teens or low twenties. It took the team awhile to get going because we haven’t played in such a long time, and these were new rules to us. It seemed like a game we would make up as kids! It was especially exciting when a ball was hit off the wall and came bouncing back towards the bases. Owen played excellent at first base and Oliver played some outfield and some catcher. The team made it out of the group stage and finished fourth out of six teams. They were excited about the medals. Most importantly, the boys really enjoyed themselves.
I would like to thank Nikola for inviting us and my colleague, Brian Lettinga for organizing and coaching the team. It was my first time inside the Institute. Here is a video on Vimeo that describes their mission and it will give you a good idea of how the Serbian language sounds.
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