Jr. Giants go digital to continue building character

Like a lot of things during the COVID-19 shutdown, the Junior Giants have gone online.

With the spring season of the online Jr. Giants wrapping up, the Lodi chapter is planning two summer sessions, with the first starting June 8.

“Since the whole COVID thing hit us, the Jr. Giants over at San Francisco threw this thing together,” said Russ Lake, the commissioner of the Lodi Jr. Giants “It’s incredible how fast they put it together.”

The online program consists of Zoom meetings with a Jr. Giants ambassador which cover both physical activity and character-building topics.

“We create them based on the age ranges. So we have a t-ball league, a juniors league and a seniors league,” said Anne Hughes, the Jr. Giants Ambassador for Lodi and Rancho Cordova. “Basically we have 30- to 40-minute sessions where they’re on Zoom. It’s run by two or three coaches. We run through stretches, a word of the week, and usually some kind of character building concepts.”

The online program covers a lot of the same concepts that are covered on the field, such as the Jr. Giants’ Strike Out Bullying campaign. Hughes said it can even be more impactful, with smaller group sizes allowing more one-on-one interaction.

“I just feel like we were able to connect with players on a more personal level,” she said about the spring session. “I feel like they were more engaged since it was more discussion heavy.”

While the pandemic has been tough on a lot of people and organizations, the Jr. Giants’ online program has allowed it to land on its feet fairly well.

“We were ready to go, we had all of our flyers, boxes of them ready to hit the schools with,” Lake said. “April 1 was our signup date, and in the middle of March we got the notice to shut everything down.”

Hughes, who said she was a volunteer coach with the Lodi Jr. Giants for two seasons, said she has drawn on that coaching experience to provide informative sessions for the participants.

“[The numbers are] a little bit lower, but

across the board we had more kids sign up for the online program than we expected,” she said. “That was our main goal,

was to keep the community connected here in Lodi.”

Hughes said the program reaches children all around California, and even into Mexico, Oregon and Nevada.

“This is really a baseball

league and a learning program. We teach confidence, integrity and teamwork,” Lake said. “This program they put together encompasses all that stuff. There’s a lot of aspects of it they can do at home, and hopefully

using the computer and stuff, because when they get back to school that may be what they’re doing.”

For details or to sign up for the program, visit www.jrgiantsathome.org /lodi/register.