Autism – my experience

Yesterday I saw on the show 60 Minutes that Sesame Street introduced an autistic character. This made me remember the only exposure I have had to an autistic child. It was when my children were younger and I coached Little League (coach pitch) when I had an autistic participant. It really turned out to be a very strange and awkward situation for me.
There was a group of people who ran the baseball program in the small town we lived. It was called the Diamond club and they met in a local bar. Because of this I never joined because I stayed out of bars for many many years due to an alcohol problem. So I was left out of choosing up the teams. The people in this club became notorious for stacking the blue team with the athletic kids and the red team got the leftovers. They threw in a few athletes to make it seem like it was fair but everyone knew the red team was the leftovers. Kids didn't really seem to care. Of course I coach the red team and got the players that they decided I would get. I asked two years in a row to be included but was never notified of the meeting. For two years in a row they gave me a child named Danny who was autistic. His mother wanted to "mainstream him". Part of this mainstreaming was that he got to play baseball like the other kids. I would not have had a problem with this if someone would have talked to me in advance and give me some idea about a deal with this. All I knew was he showed up for practice and his mother drove away. It all seems pretty strange now, she never spoke to me once for two years. I had no idea how to deal with this issue but had to learn and the kids on my team told me how to deal with it.
I have no real problem with him being on the team but it was pretty obvious early on that he just wanted to be around kids a went to school with. He enjoyed I saw that was really good. The only problem I had as and he had no interest in actually playing baseball. This is what made it very awkward. When he was in the field playing defense it I was terrified you would get hit in the head with a baseball because he never really paid attention. He found the dandelions in the field were much more interesting. Since he was part of the team I felt I would be very heavily criticized if I just sat him on the bench and so I risked having him play. I noticed up very early on he had no interest in actually hitting the ball and seem to deliberately avoid making contact when he batted. In coach pitch I would pitch to the kids and if they miss a three times they were out. Danny tried to miss and then he would sit down. One time the other coach insisted I keep pitching to him until he made contact. Is took about 30 patches and when he did make contact everyone started to scream "Ron". It was really hard for me to see but he was terrified by the screaming but there was nothing I could do about it. His mom was at the games and never said a word to Danny or me. Looking back I really felt used and totally unprepared by anyone that should've really cared about it. I'm just glad that after two years I moved up to the next level and Danny didn't go out for baseball. I still don't understand why his mother never help me with the whole thing. I'm just glad we never got hurt because it was baseball's can really do some damage. Two years and she never spoke a word to me. I have to say I enjoyed Danny and found a very interesting person but I've had hard feelings toward his mother all these years.