One of the great things about July is a 2 week break from college and we also get to travel to Lismore in northern NSW to particpiate an the Timberjacks Baseball Tournament. Timberjacks bring together teams mainly from northern NSW, Brisbane and the Gold Coast but players are also invited to play in friendship teams.

This year I participated with two of my Canberra buddies Chris (Polly) Pallamountagne Aaron (Aza) Sloan for the Far North Coast Red under 20’s team.

It was an absolute ball, we played pretty good baseball and won a couple of games which was a good effort seeing that we were a team made up of players who hadn’t played together.

The schedule was pretty full on, arriving Thursday evening, playing six games Friday, Saturday And Sunday then travelling back Monday.

The head coach of the ACTAS Academy Brent Phelan is helping me weed out a couple of glitches I have in my batting swing and what I find  is how helpful it is when he shows me what he wants me to work on using video recordings he’s taken of me batting.

He’ll play back the video in slow motion and points out what he suggests I should be working on and then shows me video of major league batters and how they execute.

I find it good stuff and a great help.

But what I really find helpful is being able sit down at home and surf my favourite baseball websites and watch videos of big time batters and study their swings watching for what my coach suggests I identify.

One of the best websites I have found to backup what my coach is teaching me is www.chrsioleary.com who has put together a marvelous collection of batting videos which have been slowed down frame by frame to allow Chris to make comments throughout the swing.

I highly recommend this website to any young baseballer, click this link to see an example of what you can find on Chris’s website. I also invite you to post a comment and let me know what you think of the website.

I’ve just discovered one of the big benefits of  personal branding and registering a domain name.  Performing a search at Google, Yahoo and Bing for the search phrase James Burdin sees me positioned number 1 on all three search engines. By the way, if you didn’t know, Bing is Microsofts latest challenge to Google.

Considering there are thousands of pages competing for the top position it gives a great indication of how important owning your name as a domain name is.

If you want to register your own name as a domain name you can search to see if it as available at www.godaddy.com If it is available you can also register it with godaddy for around $9.00, it’s where I regsitered my domain, it was fairly simple to do and proving a great investment.

If you find your domain name is taken try searching with a hyphen in the name such as john-doe.com and also try .net like johndoe.net if .com is taken.

I would really like to know if you managed to get your own domain name so please drop a comment if you did.

The National Under 17’s Schoolboys has just been held in Canberra and the tournament was an emotional mixed bag for me because for most of the tournament I was out with a lower back injury which devoloped a few days before the tournament got under way.

All states from mainland Australia were competing along with the ACT Schoolboys team which I was lucky enough to be selected for.

Historically the ACT usually finish in the bottom three for this baseball tournament so although I was out injured for the preliminaries it was a pleasure to sit on the bench and watch my teamates win the first three games against the big states to secure us a place in the finals.

I had visits to to a physiotherapist and chiropractor during the week and they did a mighty job to get me fit to play in the finals.

The finals were played in a round robin draw where the top three finishing teams played off for Gold, Silver and Bronze medals.

Unfortunately we just couldn’t put it together in the first two games which saw us playing off for the Bronze medal against South Australia which turned out to be the most exciting game I have ever played in.

We ended up with a 6 - 5 win in the last innings which we entered 5 - 4 down. It was absolutely thrilling and something I was privelaged to be part of.

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Below are the team statistics for the Vikings Under 17 2008-2009 season.

I was pretty pleased with my batting performance for the season but I’ll need to work hard on my pitching to get my ERA down. Read the rest of this entry »

I have played junior baseball for the Vikings since I was ten years old. The grades I played were Under 10, Under 12. Under 14, and Under 16.

Brian Albrecht

My coaches during those times were Brian Albrecht who coached me through to first year of Under 16 and Gary Page who coached me in the final year of Under 16’s.

Gary Page

I consider my self very lucky to have had the coaches I have had at the Vikings Club, both Brian and Gary have a great understanding of baseball and their approach to coaching was fantastic. Both coaches have the ability to bring the best out in players and get players to reach the height of their abilities.

The level of coaching the team received is reflected in the results we achieved with having reached every junior baseball grand final each year we played and going on to win four of them.

This is a video of me pitching for ACTAS against Bandits a Canberra baseball club which plays in the summer A Grade competition.

I’m in good company and supported by some solid defence. My catcher is Kyle Perkins who has been signed by the New York Yankees, in centre field is Sean Williams who has been signed by Chicago Cubs and in right field Hayden Calvert a switch hitting left hander who is attending the Australian Baseball Academy

I was pretty pleased with this performance getting out the three batters, who belong to a big hitting club,  for no damage.  The second batter also played pro ball in the U.S. So for me as a 15 year old pitcher just learning the trade it was a big buzz.

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