The Book: Our culture is obsessed with sports. Heads Up Choices recognizes this and illustrates practical lessons from a favorite past time.

Too many parents have fought over the interpretation of a rule while the spirit of the law and various character issues have been ignored. It's time to rise up and to grasp securely the seeds of greed and manufactured glory and toss them from our infields. It's time to discard coaches with double standards and special rulings. It's time to march in full uniform from smoke-filled rooms of slander and cursing -- dens where we seem to have lost sight of why we "draft" players in the first place. It's a season to sit with struggling parents in the bleachers and to be sensitive to their sagas without compromising our principles. Each player on the field is a special story. It's time for the kids to kick up the dust and to laugh and play and learn. This is also the time to help parents in decent programs to protect all that is good in their local organizations and to provide them with Biblical guidelines to do so.

The Marion Miracle: In a blue-collar sports town on the rise, hundreds of Marion, Indiana, residents voted with their feet for a baseball program committed to character development -- Heads Up Baseball. Here, the win-at-all-cost attitude is gone. Winning isn't everything, nor is it the only thing. Although the great national baseball programs such as Little League, Babe Ruth, and Pony League have addressed the win-at-all-cost attitudes, they all depend on community organizations to endorse them, to fund them, and to act with integrity. Heads Up realizes that integrity is best taught from a rule book which has been with us much longer than baseball. heads Up openly recognizes the need to follow Biblical guidelines -- not just to learn how to throw a strike but to keep us humans from striking out in front of our kids, and to facilitate whole-person development.

With no money, no fields, and no registrants a group of parents stepped out in faith and decided to offer a program that emphasized "competition with character." Heads Up Baseball is family-oriented and based on Christian principles. All managers of teams agree to the philosophical guidelines espoused by the league -- principles based on Biblical truths. This community organization recognizes that the Bible gives many sensible guidelines that apply to our competitive spirits. Some of these principles are applied to baseball and are contained here as a teaching tool for players age 9-18. Coaches and parents may want to share these with the younger players, while most players can read them on their own.

The Author: Jerry Pattengale speaks nationally and his most recent books include Why I Teach and The Purpose-Guided Student (McGraw-Hill, 2008, ’09), Helping Sophomores Succeed (Jossey Bass, 2009), Straight Talk (Triangle, second ed., 2008), Brief Guide to Objective Inquiry (Triangle, 2006) and Leading Business by the Book (Triangle, 2008). He has contributed to numerous other texts, including Historical Dictionary of the Modern Olympic Movement (1996), On Your Mark: Studies in Mark's Gospel (by Olympian medalist Kriss Akabusi, 1997), Events that Changed America in the Twentieth Century (1996), The Anchor Bible Dictionary (1992), Great Events from History: Human Rights (1992), and Consider the Source (Co-authored with Clarence Bence). Jerry has helped found and direct the international research center, The Scriptorium (MI), the Night of Champions (CA), the J.C.BodyShop (Marion, IN), and served as the founding president of Heads Up Baseball. He co-produced the award-winning Odyssey in Egypt interactive curriculum, won several grants including a National Endowment of the Humanities fellowship to Greece, and was twice named "Professor of the Year" at Azusa Pacific University. He currently serves as an Assistant Provost at Indiana Wesleyan University, where he also teaches Ancient History. His Ph.D. and Masters in History are from Miami University (OH). He also holds a Masters from Wheaton and is an alumnus of Indiana Wesleyan. His wife, Cindy, and their four sons practically lived at the baseball diamonds during the summer of 1998, watching nearly 200 games and as many practices -- thus, this book.