What makes me qualified to offer advice on how to raise a hard-working, self-motivated, well-adjusted child?  I certainly believe that everything starts with our parents.  Parents have the first and most powerful impact on their children.  Peers play a role as well but much later than parents.  I’m no different.  My early influences came from my parents.  I’m the son of a WWII veteran and a hard-working farmer.  My father was part of the Greatest Generation and had a profound influence on my values and beliefs.  Educated in a country school in northwestern Ohio, it was rare for a farm boy to go to college but I knew from a very young age that I would go to college because that is what my parents expected me to do.  In 1965 I became the only male in my high school class of 29 to go to college and the first member of my family as well.  In 1970 I received a BS in Business Administration from Ohio State and in 1974 became the first graduate of the Ohio State College of Dentistry to graduate from Dental School with an undergraduate Business Degree.  After 2 years in the Air Force Dental Corp and 5 years in private practice I left Dentistry to pursue business interest and spend time with my children and their various sports.  I’ve had many ventures in the business world including raising venture capital for private gas & oil exploration, construction, real estate, bar and restaurant business, baseball tournament business and the snack food business.  In 1988 I founded FUNacho, a snack food business specializing in nacho chips and cheese.  I started FUNacho locally in Cincinnati, OH, expanded regionally in 1990 and went national in 1991.  For 3 consecutive years in 1993, 1994 & 1995 FUNacho was named to the Inc. 500 as one of the fastest growing privately held businesses in the United States.  For the past 45 years my passion has been youth baseball.  In 1983 I built a 3-field baseball complex and organized the first select baseball program in our northern Cincinnati community.  In my 45 years of youth baseball, I’ve had over 30 former players drafted into professional baseball, including 5 first round draft picks, and over 300 players who have advanced on to play college baseball.  I have 4 sons who all had the opportunity to play division one college baseball and a daughter who is a gifted digital designer.  What shaped me?  What shaped my children?  What influences in someone’s life will lead to their successes and failures?  You can point the figure in many directions, but it will almost always come back to parenting.   I’ve heard it said many time that “there’s no blueprint for raising kids.”  Well, I would like to change that.  In my 32 years of on field coaching youth baseball, I certainly have not done everything right, but I have seen a lot of what parents do wrong.  My hope in this book is to make you look hard at your own actions and reaction to how you deal with your child’s athletic experiences and their successes and failures. How you handle their ups and downs can and will have a profound effect on their development into adulthood.  I have seen many well-meaning parents make some very bad life altering decisions in regard to their child’s athletic career.  Most of this book is written with baseball as the focal point because that is what I know best and have the most experience with but the principles can be applied to all aspects of your child’s life.  All of us want the same thing for our children.  We want them to be happy, well adjusted, productive adults.  Baseball and sports in general can be the greatest building blocks that you can offer your children to help achieve this goal if YOU do it right. You can also do serious permanent damage to your child’s chances for success in a career and in future relationships if you do it wrong.  It may sound extreme to make that strong of a statement about playing youth baseball or youth sports in general but it couldn’t be any truer.  How you handle your child’s youth sports career can and will determine his future successes and failures as an adult.