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Travel Softball’s Greatest Challenge
I was talking to a father the other day about how difficult it has been for his 12 year old daughter to find a team that will help her make the leap from rec ball/part-time travel to full travel ball. She had tried out for several teams, and like any good dad when the teams said they were interested he asked what was holding her back, i.e., what she needed to improve in order to increase her chances with the next team.
I found those responses both interesting and disturbing. The one I remember most distinctly was one team, which was touting that it had a “former college player” as a head coach, told him his daughter couldn’t hit the outside pitch.
Really?
First of all, the teams she was trying out for aren’t exactly on the top of the food chain. More like C level teams, perhaps middle B at best, so it’s not like she was overreaching in her ambitions.
But what struck me more about it was a simple thought: shouldn’t any halfway decent coach be able to TEACH a 12 year old how to hit the outside pitch?
It’s not that hard. You put a tee on the outside corner, a little deeper than you would hit a middle-of-the-plate pitch, and work with the hitter to keep her hands in instead of reaching out for the ball first.
But this encounter speaks to what seems to be the biggest issue in travel ball in my opinion. Which is that “coaches” either don’t want to or don’t know how to teach the game anymore.
More and more it appears that coaches just want to find players who already have great skills, throw them on the field, and wait for them to win ballgames. And if turns out the players they do select are lacking in any skills or knowledge, they just throw them on the bench until they figure out what to do – or hire an outside coach to tell them.
That’s just wrong to me. The job of a coach at any level, even college or professional, is to help their players grow and learn and improve.
Sure, at the higher levels it’s more refinement of existing skills than teaching new ones. But they are still looking for areas of improvement that can help each player get better, even if that improvement is incremental.
So there’s no reason a coach at the youth level shouldn’t expect to have to put in some work teaching their players too. At the 10U and 12U levels, that can involve a lot of teaching.
In my experience it’s impossible to know which players will ultimately grow to be the best by the time they’re 18, or 20, or 22. Many of the top players in the game today will tell you they weren’t superstars when they were young.
Everyone grows and learns at their own pace; every player follows her own path to get there. With a little encouragement and guidance a girl who seems weak in her skills, knowledge, or even athleticism today could just turn out to be great pitchers, catchers, fielders, hitters, etc. when they get older.
But they’ll never get the chance to find out if the people running teams are only looking for players they can throw out on the field today and watch them perform while the coaches sit back and watch.
To be honest, there is a lot of value and satisfaction in taking a girl (or a group of girls) who may not be fully baked right now but have potential and teaching them how to swing a bat, throw ball, run the bases, and perform other skills at a level above where they started. Much more so, in fact, than having them end the season at the same level they started – no matter how many trophies you may have won.
And while we’re on the subject of development, I also have to shake my head at all the ads I’m seeing right now from B and C teams looking for “one more bracket pitcher” or “A level pitcher” to round out their rosters. They might as well be wishing for those pitchers to bring a pot of gold along with them to the tryout because it’s just as likely to happen.
The reality is the A level pitchers are generally spoken for first, so it’s unlikely they’re available right now. Especially with the fact that tryouts for next season seem to be starting at the beginning of the current season these days.
A pitcher of that caliber may pop up later, maybe in the middle or end of fall ball if someone isn’t happy with their team choice. But if coaches are looking to settle their rosters today, they’d probably be better served looking for a pitcher who has the potential to be a bracket or A level pitcher if they are given the opportunity to work through a few disasters until they find themselves. Just sayin’.
Again, though, that would require sacrificing a few wins today for more in the future. It would also require actual, active coaching for improvement rather than simply managing lineups.
Look I get it. Coaching is hard. So is losing games, especially when you know you could have won them if your players had just been a little bit better on that day.
But as any good general or business leader will tell you, sometimes you have to accept short-term losses in order to realize longer-term gains.
That’s why it pays to learn how to be a true coach rather than just a manager of players.
If you’re a manager, you are at the mercy of your players’ abilities. If they play well, great; if they don’t, there’s not much you can do but yell and scream for them to do better.
But if you actually put in the work to become a true coach, you can change the equation by helping each and every player learn to play the game better. You can teach them how to hit that outside pitch, or turn the double play, or hit the cutoff, or lay down that bunt, or take the extra base on a hit to right center, or do any of the other hundreds of things that happen in a game that can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
And in doing so you don’t just change a game. You could end up changing a life – which beats winning a plastic trophy or a gaudy ring every time.
There’s a Difference Between Being Demanding and Being Mean
We’ve all seen the stereotype in dozens of sports movies over the years: the coach who constantly screams at and demeans his/her players early in the movie only to go on to win the a championship during the climactic ending.
It makes for great Hollywood drama. But unfortunately too many people today watch those movies and think it’s a blueprint for how to become a successful coach.
So all they really do is learn how to yell and scream at their players, calling them names and telling them how horrible they are. And then punishing them physically for a lack of performance.
Do they really think that helps? Personally, I think it’s more of a symptom that the real-life coach has no idea how to help their team better so they just yell or do other things in the hopes that it will miraculously scare the players into playing better.
So does that mean coaches shouldn’t raise their voices to their players or hold them accountable? Absolutely not.
But what they need to understand is there’s a difference between being demanding, or being tough, and being mean.
Being demanding is holding your players to a high standard – after teaching them what the standard is. Take a baserunner who is called out for not tagging up at third.
My first question in that situation is whether the coach actually went over the rules on tagging up and explained what to do in that situation. If not, they shouldn’t be calling out the player.
As a team coach, I always assumed my players didn’t know anything if I didn’t teach it to them. That way I was encouraged to teach them as much as I could about the game rather than assuming they knew certain things only to be disappointed later.
If the coach did teach it and the player had a mental lapse then yes, the coach should call it out. While they may get a bit heated in the moment, a demanding coach will remind the player that they went over it, here’s what you’re supposed to do (teachable moment) and talk about staying focused and aware of the situation.
A mean coach will call the player a name or two, ask if the player is trying to make the coach look bad, and probably bench the player for making a mistake. The problem is, if the player made that mistake she probably doesn’t know what she should have done instead, and the situation is likely to repeat itself in the future.
Demanding coaches are tough because they want to get the best from their players. To paraphrase the old Boy Scout slogan, they want to leave the player better than they found her.
Mean coaches are tough because they feel anything players do wrong reflects poorly on THEM, and their egos can’t handle people thinking they are bad coaches.
Demanding coaches believe in their players and hold them accountable to a defined set of standards. They care about seeing their become better at the sport as well as better people.
Yes, they want to win just like anybody else. But they’re also careful not to sacrifice their players’ self-esteem at the altar of winning.
Deep down they want their players to enjoy the experience and maintain or even enhance their passion for the game. And yes, their overall goal is for their players to have fun.
Mean coaches don’t rally care if their players are enjoying the experience or having fun. They don’t care if their players get burned out or lose their passion for the game because hey, there’s always another player coming along and maybe that one will be naturally better.
Which is a good segue to the fact that demanding coaches love to teach the game to their players. As with our baserunning example above they don’t assume anything; they thrive on the details.
Take the story about UCLA basketball and all-around coaching legend John Wooden. The first thing Coach Wooden would do with his incoming freshmen was teach them how to put on their socks.
Now, these were 18 year old college students who had presumably been dressing themselves for more than a decade, and many at first thought it was silly that their coach was teaching them how to put on socks. But the process served two purposes.
First, the way he had them do it would help prevent them from getting blisters on their feet during the long and difficult practices they went through. Very practical.
But it also served to show them in a subtle way that there was a UCLA way to do things, and that these individual players, all of whom had probably been stars on their high school teams, needed to adopt the UCLA way of doing things if they were going to be part of the team.
I find that mean coaches don’t teach the game that much – often because they haven’t put in the effort to learn much beyond the basics or whatever they were taught when they were playing. They would much rather just try to recruit good players and throw them on the field to fend for themselves.
Then, if their performance doesn’t meet the coach’s standards (i.e., it causes the team to lose), the coach will try to harangue the player into doing better or bench them in the hopes that feeling bad about being taken out will make them play better the next time they’re on the field – if there is a next time.
In the end, it all comes down to intentions.
The demanding coach wants to see players reach their potential not just as athletes but as human beings, and will remind them that the pursuit of excellence has no days off. They may sound mean or angry at times, but underlying that surface is a layer of love.
The mean coach doesn’t really care about the player reaching their potential except as it affects winning and the accolades that the coach will receive for the team’s performance. There is no love there, or loyalty for that matter.
It’s simply a transactional approach that sees players as chess pieces to be used and/or discarded as-needed to bolster the coach’s self-image, regardless of the toll it takes on their players.
The good news is both players and coaches have a choice.
If you’re a coach, think about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Is it helping your players to become better people as well as athletes?
If yes, great. If not, while you may think you’re being tough you may just be being mean.
If you’re a player, or the parent of a player, think about whether this coach cares about you as a person and is promoting your love of the game.. If yes, while you may not always enjoy it they’re being demanding to help you grow.
If not, they may just be mean. And you can either accept and understand it for what it is or move on,
Either way it’s not you. It’s them.
Angry woman photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com
Life in the Fastpitch Lane 