Imagine you are going into the hospital for a simple appendix operation when your doctor informs you that the person performing the surgery will be a youngster fresh out of medical school, with no actual experience but plenty of practice operating on cadavers. Oh, and there won’t be a more experienced doctor in the room, but they’ll be around if needed.

Or you’re being sued by someone for everything you have after a fender-bender accident and your law firm informs you that your case will be defended solely by a law student who’s never tried a real case before but did “really well” in college mock trials.

How would you feel? Would you be confident, or would you find a lack of experience to be worrisome?

Now think about what often passes for coaching in fastpitch. A recent college graduate who played college softball is hired and handed the reins of a team. Or a former college pitcher with no teaching experience is installed as the pitching coach, I guess under the assumption that if she did it she can teach it.

Well, gang, I’ve played musical instruments for more than 40 years, but I wouldn’t say it qualifies me to be the band director at the local school. Performing a skill and teaching it are two separate things. Many college pitchers are able to pitch, but they don’t necessarily know how they do it. And knowing the how and why is essential for teaching. Otherwise you may just be repeating the bad advice you received and very likely overcame in order to be succesful.

The same goes with hitting. Mike Epstein’s whole system is based on the idea of “Do we teach what we really see?” He contends that the answer is often no. Instead, we repeat what we’ve heard. Whether you agree with Epstein’s system is not important. But what is important is whether what a coach tells you to do is based on knowledge and experience, or simply something he/she has heard along the way.

Think of it this way. Suppose you’re a high school player who has taken hitting lessons for a few years from a qualified coach. You’ve had good success and improved each year. Now the new high school coach, fresh out of school from her playing days, comes in and tells you you’re doing it all wrong and should change to do it her way. What if you asked her this simple question: what are your qualifications for teaching hitting? What would she be able to say? That she played at Wherever College (a D3 school, by the way) for four years and hit .313 lifetime? Ok, that qualifies her to play high school softball. But does it really qualify her to teach hitting to others?

If I was hiring her to be my daughter’s private instructor I’d want to know how long she’d been coaching, what certifications she had or classes she’d taken that focused on hitting theory or how to teach, etc. If all she’d done was play fastpitch softball, with no coaching experience, I’d have to pass.

It is vitally important to the sport that we encourage players who have finished their careers to go into coaching. But it’s just as important, for their sake as well as the team’s, not to just assume that the ability to play equals the ability to coach. Instead, we need to mentor these young ladies, have them work with more experienced coaches, and let them grow into the position just as you would in any other business position. Otherwise we’re setting them and their players up for failure. And they won’t even realize it until they (or their players) quit in frustration.

Had a discussion at the end of the Mundelein Thunder Board meeting last night that is probably worth mentioning. Not so much for the topic itself but for what it brought to mind afterwards.

One of the things all of us coaches have to guard against is getting so caught up in what we teach that we close our minds to anything else. Paul Nyman at SetPro used to talk about this with hitting, and referred to it as adopting a religion. When people gain religious fervor for their beliefs, they tend to close out any contrasting ideas, even if the evidence shows otherwise. There’s a lot of bad information based on old beliefs out in the softball world, so it’s especially dangerous for us.

The topic had to do with bunting. The Thunder as an organization teaches running both hands up the bat and keeping them together to bunt. We went to this several years ago and have been teaching it for a while. The reason we made the switch was A) we were exposed to it at the National Sports Clinics by a college coach and  when we tried it it was more successful than the traditional split-hands bunt. We defined success as getting the bunt down reliably in fair territory and in the direction we want it to go. Which is primarily toward the pitcher, and sometimes toward the first baseman.

Mike Hanscom, our 10U coach, doesn’t care for this technique and I think would like to see it change. He learned split hands as a player and believes it is a better technique. At the last National Sports Clinics he reported that all of the coaches demonstrated split hands, and when asked subsequently the ones he questioned said they don’t change it when the player comes in, but would teach it split hands if given a choice. Of course, many of those coaches might also say that they wouldn’t teach the rotational hitting mechanics being espoused by Mike Candrea, Sue Enquist, and Carol Hutchins either, but that’s a story for another day. 

What I wonder how many have actually tried the hands together technique and discarded it, and how many are more of the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mindset and have determined there is no need to change. They may believe there is no need to look at other techniques, or they may have determined ahead of time that it is not as good as hands together or hands partially separated.

Of course, that cuts both ways. I have to admit to a bit of religion on hands together myself. I see the technique used quite often both at the Womens College World Series and increasingly in baseball. As I mentioned, I’ve seen players use both and have more success with hands together. Like the college coaches, if I get someone new in at the 14U or 16U level who uses split hands I don’t change it — unless they’re having problems. Then I will ask them to try the technique. Most have preferred it once they tried it.

Ultimately, I am not sure that there is An Answer that will settle the question. But it does point out the importance for all of us, me included, to keep our minds open and constantly question what we teach rather than just doing things because that’s the way we’ve always done it. You may wind up right back where you started. But at least you’ll know how you got there.

One of the most difficult parts of improving skills for players, coaches, and especially parents is learning to focus on the process — how you do something — rather than the immediate result or “success.” Yet worrying too much about the results can really get in the way of learning.

Take hitting for example. On the one side, a hitter may use a lousy swing and hit a ball through the infield. I refer to this as a blind monkey finding a banana now and then. On the other side, she may have developed a great swing but strike outs out anyway. If you watched both you’d say the one with the hit was more successful today, and you’d be right. The question is which one will have greater long-term success? Sooner or later, as the competition gets better, the player with the poor swing will find herself getting on base less and less, and the player who has taken the time to develop the better swing will have see the profits of the time she put in. That is all part of the weeding out process in the game of softball.

It’s even more obvious with pitchers. A pitcher who is trying to learn good form may throw a lot of pitches high, low, or wide of the plate as she replaces one set of mechanics with another. Many a father-daughter argument has been started when Dad feels he’s made too many trips to the backstop that day. Been there, done that. Yet if your only goal is to get the ball over the plate, there are simpler ways to do it than the windmill pitching motion. But if you quit worrying about balls and strikes during the learning process and just focus on the mechanics of what you’re doing, it won’t take long before you’re throwing strikes anyway. Accuracy is a result of good, consistent mechanics, not a goal to be achieved. If you focus on the process of throwing correctly, the results will be there — guaranteed.

This thought doesn’t apply only to individual skills, either. It also applies to teams as a whole. I remember an interview with Martina Navratilova that I read a few years ago. She was talking about why Americans were having such trouble competing with European players. Speaking as an American she said something to the effect that Americans are very focused on winning, even at an early age, whereas Europeans are more willing to lose a match in order to work on parts of their game that need work. They don’t take the most expedient route to a win, but instead define success as accomplishing a particular goal, such as developing their ground stroke, even if it means losing in the process.

How many 10U or 12U coaches do you know who will place their focus on winning as many plastic trophies as possible rather than on developing all of the players on their teams? How many upper-level coaches will have a kid ride the bench all season, then be surprised when she can’t perform in the big game when the star gets hurt? Yes, winning is important. Nobody likes to lose. But great coaches can look beyond winning an individual game (today’s result) in order to focus on reaching loftier goals (the process). I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s definitely rewarding.

Be willing to accept lesser results today in order to improve your game overall. Focus on the process instead of the results, and the results will come.