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Intermediate Defensive Drilling
by Dave
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
IntroductionI sometimes think we do most things backwards, particularly in sports. For example, compare what happens at the entry level of youth fastpitch with the goings on at higher level travel ball for 14s, 16s, or 18s, or with what your typical high school team does in practice. At entry levels, the emphasis is mostly on games. Some recreational teams don't even conduct practices because they haven't enough time. Higher level travel and high school teams practice every day, often even on days they have games. At entry levels, we say we want to emphasize the “fun aspect” of the sport so we schedule two games a week as soon as it gets warm enough and dry enough to hold them. This cramps the already over-booked schedules of our youth and leaves little time for meaningful practices. And that's not where the backwards approach ends.
The typical youth practice is conducted with an eye towards preparing kids for "real games" so there is more emphasis placed on hitting real pitching than there is on say working hitting mechanics at the tee. Interestingly, at the very lowest entry levels, the games are hit off a tee. But as soon as the games involve live pitching, the batting tee is thrown away! I once inquired about this at the equipment pickup of our local youth recreational program when I noticed that all the coaches from the lowest divisions were handed batting tees automatically while those in older age groups had to ask for them. I was told that not very many of the coaches above tee ball wanted or needed tees! They need to prepare the girls for live pitching so they don't use tees.
Another observation I have about youth practices, on the few occasions they are held, is even the defensive drilling is targeted towards "real game situations" and there is almost no emphasis on fundamental skills. Often the coach places the girls in the field where she figures they will play in games and then balls are hit to each position and the play made in accordance with instructions. This will most likely result in the kids making the plays to the proper base but it does nothing for how they accomplish the task.
If you were able to act as a fly on the wall of a higher level team's practice, the thing that would strike you is the degree to which players are working the most fundamental skills and drills imaginable. Batters are hitting off tees or soft toss; throwers are working the most basic throwing mechanics fundamentals; fielders are working on fielding rolled balls and the emphasis is on fundamentals, more fundamentals, and even more fundamentals. These higher level teams must also work situations and complex throwing drills but those are inserted after fundamental skills drills.
Let's revisit the central theme of entry-level youth softball which is to emphasize "fun" over other considerations by making the season consist mostly of games with not much time left for practices. Is this really done so the kids can have fun? Is it fun to go stand where the coach tells you and watch pitchers throw ball after ball and then, when they finally get one over, have that ball come screaming at you off somebody's bat? Then when you finally pick it up, you know neither where to throw it nor how to throw it? Then you sit around on an uncomfortable bench waiting for your two or three times at-bat so you can take your turn walking and then trying to decipher what the coach is screaming at you in the event the ball is hit into play? It's hot. You have no idea what is going on. You can't field a grounder. You can't make a throw of more than 15 feet. You don't know what the heck the coach means when he or she says “swing level.” You don't like it when the coach begins yelling at you to run since you really have no idea why you are running or where you're supposed to run to! This game is such fun!!
The real fun of fastpitch is doing something difficult properly. And the effort required to do the skills in a fundamentally sound way does not end in the lowest levels of youth play.
Muscle Memory
I read a very instructive article the other day published in the New York Times. One of the parents of a girl on my team sent it to me because it struck her that my practices were very similar, at least in philosophy if not in quality, to the approach of a tennis coach in Russia. This tennis coach produces more world class competitors than anyone else. Her approach is to start at the right age, about 7 or 8 for girls, and to work them on technique only. She insists that these children not play in competition for three years while she develops their fundamentals. Think of that in softball terms! No games for anyone under the age of 10 or 11! Such heresy!
Now you might be sitting there thinking that this doesn't sound like much fun. Practice is work and games are fun, after all. Yet her students love what they do in practice. Their lessons are the best part of their days. I have to say that I have found the same thing to be true. When I have focused on fundamentals in youth softball, the kids all seem to love coming to practice. They can take or leave the games. They're just OK. It was the same way for my own kids. They loved (and still do) going to the softball academy where they work exclusively on fundamental drills. They like games too but if I had to say which they prefer, I would say practice wins out over games every time. And trust me, I work them hard in practice. It's no bowl of cherries. By the end of one of my practices, everyone, including me, needs a shower and a nap!
This Russian tennis coach makes her future world champions run through the same set of drills every day. She says something along the lines of, it isn't worth practicing unless you do all the skills, all the drills, every day. And she spends an inordinate amount of energy correcting every error no matter how small. She praises too. You cannot build motor memory without positive reinforcement. But she doesn't let her charges get away with lazy or improper mechanics.
I think I have told you that my typical experience in a youth softball season goes something like this. My team members all work on fundamentals to the exclusion of "real game situations." We throw, we field, and we hit off the tee. That's true at the beginning of the season and it's true most of the way through. So our team loses a lot in the early part of the season. The kids don't seem to mind. Most of the time they don't have any idea what the score is anyways. But as the season progresses, they get better to the point where I feel I can work in some situational stuff and live batting practice. Then we win several games, often beating the otherwise undefeated team on the last day of the season! And next year, when the draft is conducted, my kids usually get picked first. That is one reason why I moved out of recreational softball and chose to stick with travel. In travel, you can work with the same batch of kids for several years.
It broke my heart once when a child I had the year before thought I hadn't picked her for my team because I somehow didn't like her. I told her parents that I didn't pick her because she had gone fourth in the draft and I wasn't allowed to pick until the 18th pick. Now, more than a year later, they still do not believe me. In one game against this girl's team, one which we lost badly, I had been coaching third base when this girl fielded a screaming grounder and made the third out to crush our burgeoning rally. I congratulated her on the play. After the game was over and I was the last person in the dugout, busy picking up our equipment, the girl crept up behind me and gave me a hug. She said, "you taught me how to make that play." I almost cried thinking about how I had helped this girl be the hero and she thought I didn't like her because I couldn't get her on my team.
The essence of the New York Times article was an examination of the scientific study of sports "talent." It bounced back and forth between this Russian tennis coach and a study in US universities in which researchers were examining the physiological basis for athletic prowess, the roots of "talent." The Russian tennis coach emphasized fundamental drills. The US universities studied the myelin sheath which encircles nerve cells. The science says that myelin is added to nerve cells when they are repeatedly stimulated. Myelin is basically fat and its purpose, as explained to me in my college science class, is to make the neurons work better and faster. So, if you repeatedly stimulate one neuron over others, than neuron becomes better. To place this in the context of sport, that is the foundation for what we refer to as motor memory.
The more complicated aspect of motor memory is, if you stimulate the wrong neurons, you reinforce improper mechanics. Think of it this way, if you permit kids to throw, hit or field with wrong mechanics, you create the neurological environment in which their bodies back up improper mechanics – they encourage or reinforce more fundamental errors. So, not only do we miss an opportunity to perform a service for these kids, we actually do them a disservice.
Successful Approach
At some point what struck me was the very best teams we have seen in travel fastpitch are the most fundamentally sound ones. The girls who turn your head and make you say "she's really good," are the ones who do things like throw with the most perfected mechanics, move extremely well, or have those "picture perfect" swings. What has never happened to me is finding myself thinking that a particular girl is really good but if her fundamentals were better, she'd be a superstar. When I see a kid with poor fundamentals, I usually write her off quickly. I refer to success with poor mechanics as a form of short-term luck. A girl might throw the ball hard now but if she didn't throw it well in terms of mechanics, she won't throw it hard for long.
I have been told that top college coaches often don't even watch prospects much in games. They prefer to observe them in warm-ups and practices. Understand this isn't something I invented or heard once or twice. Rather, I have heard it repeatedly. The usual line goes, sure the coach wants to know how the kid does in games. She's got all her stats. But what she really wants to know is how good her fundamentals are. If a girl hits .60, the college coach still doesn't want her if she swings improperly. She figures that since she is looking at a 15 or 16 year old kid, if the kid's swing mechanics are really bad, there is nothing she can do to correct them at this late stage. And if mechanics are bad, eventually this superstar is going to hit hard times because the top level pitchers will find her weaknesses and eat her alive. Similarly, if she's an infielder who goes about her business with improper fundamentals, it really doesn't matter how much success she has in youth or high school games once she starts facing college players. Improper fielding or throwing mechanics will defeat her and she'll be more of a liability than an asset in the field when she steps up to the next level.
The most successful long-term approach to coaching softball is a decided emphasis on fundamental skills. It may not make you popular with the parents on your 8U rec team since they "just want to win one game." But the kids will love doing fundamental defensive drills. And if you teach them to throw – really teach them to really throw, even the parents will get over their disappointment from your losing season eventually. They won't remember you in a couple years when their kid throws better than everybody else and makes the jv or varsity team their freshman year of high school. The parents won't remember you but the kid might!
Hopefully I have made my point which is basic skills are fun and simply must be emphasized. That's true at 8U but it is also true at 12U, 14U, etc. You must always do like the Russian tennis coach does. Run the basic drills every practice and don't let any player get away with improper or lazy mechanics. The difference with older kids is you move through the basics more quickly and you continue to emphasize fundamentals in the more complex drills you run.
Some Intermediate Defensive Drills
It's odd but I wrote what follows this paragraph first and everything above it afterwards in an attempt to craft an introduction. Philosophy got the better of me and I ended up writing two pieces into one. What I started out here trying to write was a few things about some intermediate defensive drills. I guess, before I get into that, I want to say again that, as a coach, you would run these drills after the fundamentals are done. And while you are doing these intermediate drills, I want you to focus less on the drills themselves and more on your charges performing them while also maintaining proper fundamentals.
Ground Ball Drills
It is important that you have all your players work ground ball drills at all positions. It is also important to move from simple to more complex. Another objective is to work them so that they get tired and learn to field and throw when winded and fatigued.
I like to start kids off with a simple grounder from about 50 – 60 feet and a throw back to the coach or a catcher stationed next to the coach. We start our kids in a line by third base and hit soft grounders to them one at a time. You can get through a line of 12 kids in about a minute. And if you have two coaches, you can form two lines so you get through each turn in about 60 seconds. Keep a couple balls lying around in case somebody misses one. Let the missed balls go – get them later. For now, keep things moving and retrieve balls in between drills. After each turn in the line for your entire team, hit the balls a bit harder. Ultimately, you want the kids to field a hard hit short hop.
My next move is to have every kid field a ball from the shortstop position and make the throw to first. I continue my line of grounders at third but add an additional station for kids fielding the balls at short. A player fields the ball at third and then runs to the line at short to field one there and throw it to first. After fielding a ball at short, she runs to the line behind first to take a throw there, then runs behind the hitter who is hitting balls to the third base line. This gets the girls winded after about 5 minutes, leaves nobody standing around for long, and gives them experience fielding a short hop at third, making a throw to a point in front of them, then fielding a ball at short and making the typical throw, then also getting used to taking a throw at first. if you want to make thing realistic, move your first base line towards home and have those girls run to cover first.
The next variation is to put your catcher over by home and have the hitter hit balls to short from there. The girl at short fields the ball, throws to first, then runs to cover second. The girl at first catches the throw from short and then throws to home. the catcher catches the ball thrown from first and throws to second base where the shortstop is covering.
Next, move your line at short over to the second base position and do the same two drills. It isn't enough to have all your fielders field a grounder at short. The ball approaches differently to second. Spins are different and you need to have everyone become accustomed to fielding balls from both middle infield positions.
Your next drill sequence is to hit the ball to the first baseman and have the line of girls stationed out at second base cover first. This is as critical to success in fastpitch as having the pitcher cover first is to baseball. During this drill, you continue to run your line at third for grounders. This allows you to continue to work fundamentals of ground ball fielding and prevents the girls from standing around too much.
Our next drill is to move players into lines for all four infield positions and do away with the short hop grounders hit to third. Two hitters are stationed, one between first and home and the other between third and home. Both are much closer to home than to the bases. The hitter on the third base side hits to the second base position. The hitter on the first base side hits to short. Second base throws the ball to third. Shortstop throws the ball to third. A girl moves from position to position after each turn. After she takes the throw at third, she moves to the shortstop line, then second, then first. After first base, she runs behind the hitters and over to third again. I call this the "cross grounder drill" for reference sake.
My next drill is a little more involved. It involves 1) a girl fielding a rolled ball bare handed from third (20 feet in front of the bag) and making the throw to first; 2) a girl fielding a grounder at second base and throwing to third; and 3) a girl running out into the outfield from the actual second base, first towards rightfield and then towards left. the stations, in sequence are, 1) 20 feet in front of third, 2) first base, taking the throw from third, 2) second baseman position, fielding grounder and throwing to the third base bag, 4) actual second base, fielding a fade popup into the outfield, and 5) third base bag taking the throw from the second baseman. Draw this out on a piece of paper to see how it works. Keep in mind that you need to have at least 12-14 girls and 3 coaches in practice to make it work since there are 5 separate stations, 3 ongoing drills, and 3 to 4 kids will be running to take up their next positions at any given time. But once you get practiced at this, it should run smoothly. Start out moving slowly so nobody, especially the coaches, gets confused.
Pop-up / Linedrive / Flyball Drills
I jumped the gun slightly by mixing in the pop-up fade drill with all our grounder drills. But I think you'll forgive me for that minor transgression. The point of doing fade drills is to get the girls used to moving laterally for a ball while it is in the air. Have them move in both the left and right directions sideways for this drill. Then you can move on to some other skills.
This fade pop-up drill is intended as an infielders drill but it is also good as part of your outfielding drills. Another thing you should do as part of your outfield workout is go over the basic mechanics of fielding a high fly. One of the best ways to run a drill for pop flies is to drop your mitts and pick up the tennis balls. Have two separate groups with a coach at each and simply throw the girls flyballs. here, yet again, the mechanics of catching a flyball are stressed. You should be able to run through this drill in about 3 minutes with each player getting a half dozen or so repetitions.
After this we run a more traditional drill where fielders have to field a liner or pop fly from the rightfielder and leftfielder positions to points along each the foul lines. If you can hit the ball there accurately, so much the better since it will spin and move through the air quite a bit differently when hit. We break into two groups, one in left and one in right but rather than having them run from station to station, we rotate the groups once in the middle of this drill. Then we work each group on balls hit toward the alleys, then rotate them again. Finally, all the girls from both groups are stationed in the centerfield position and random flies and lines are hit at them. these kinds of drills take a bit longer since a number of balls will presumably be missed. If they aren't, you aren't hitting them difficult enough.
When you work fly ball drills, you work fundamentals of catching and rotating to throw with the tennis balls and when you move to hitting more difficult balls, part of the objective has to be training the eyes and training the fielder to keep eyes on the ball while running. When you are hitting balls, you still want to see good fundamentals but you also must make it difficult for the fielder to field the ball. Perhaps more is learned from chasing after a ball you missed than is gleaned from making an easy catch.
After this drill, we set up three lines in the outfield, one for each position. A couple infielders get a break at this point as we need someone to retrieve throws in from the outfield. We place a fielder at each of the bases excluding home – this isn't an infielder drill. One hitter hits balls to the outfield from around homeplate and each fielder makes the throw to each of the bases. You don't have to hit three balls to each fielder in sequence. You can do whatever you want but it probably works best if you hit three consecutive balls to right, then center, then left, etc. Each kid in the drill takes three balls from each of the three positions. It doesn't matter what kind of balls you hit at these fielders. Just mix it up so you aren't hitting three screeching linedrives to one kid, three grounders to another, etc. Everybody needs to field a variety of different types of hit balls and make throws into all the bases.
The objects here are to maintain good mechanics while getting another opportunity to learn to judge balls, and most importantly while completing the play by making a good throw. You want to continue to remind the players about good fundamentals of making the catch or retrieving the grounder. You want them to learn about difficult plays so you want to make them run for the ball. But you must correct improper throwing mechanics too. It's a lot but that's why they pay you the big bucks.
Cutoff Plays
At some time before you get into actual games, you are going to have to work cutoff plays. You don't need me to go into details on who throws to whom but suffice it to say you must work every situation for everybody who is likely to work the outfield at least once and will probably spend more time explaining the play than you will in the play itself, at least the first couple of times you do this. This takes more time than drills where you work one skill or work single skills at individual stations. You may not be able to work cutoff drills into every practice and still have time for all that you want to accomplish. That's where an overall master plan for several practices is useful.
You've read through my intermediate infielding and outfielding drills and you're wondering how you are going to find time to get to batting practice. But if I were to recap practice at this point, I suggest you still have plenty of time. The fielding drills took less than 60 minutes as follows:
A) grounder to third = 3 minutes
B) third plus short = 3 minutes
C) third plus short to first, to home, back to second = 5 minutes
D) Same as B and C from second = 8 minutes
E) Second baseman covering first = 4 minutes
F) Cross grounder drill = 5 minutes
G) Water break 3 minutes (doesn't have to necessarily be here)
H) Final ground ball drill = 5 minutes
I) Outfield drills 20 minutes total (more if you shorten up some of the infield drills)
Including a warm-up of 5 minutes, the speed / agility 10 minutes, and about 10 minutes of warm-up throwing, our entire practice to this point has totaled to less than an hour and a half. If you hold a two hour practice - which by the way is appropriate for an intermediate level – you still have a half hour to do hitting. If you run proper stations including tees, soft toss, and even live pitched hitting, you've got plenty of time for each of your kids to take over a hundred swings. If you're smart, you can work baserunning into your speed / agility segment and you've covered absolutely everything you need to cover in a practice.
To me, if you are really working with an intermediate level of players, at least some of the time, I urge you to conduct three hour practices These will allow you lengthen any of the above, add more advanced features such as complex throwing drills, including run down plays, and even find time to do some short scrimmaging.
Conclusion
I started out with a desire to cover an intermediate level of practicing. As I tried to write an introduction, it became apparent to me that I needed to make a case for an emphasis on fundamental skills. I got a little off track but I hope you found that discussion helpful. The overall point I wanted you to get is you don't simply skip the basics when you move to more advanced practicing.
When discussing fundamentals, it was important to mention that fundamentals are fun not just work. And top athletes also do the most basic of drills while correcting mechanical flaws. This should be kept in mind when developing and implementing a more intermediate level of practice.
The discussion of fundamentals also stressed the need to perform and reperform the fundamental drills at every practice. Don't skip right to running cutoff drills because the team really, really needs to do these. You really need to do the fundamental skills at every practice. If you're short on time, either get more of it or cut some of the other drills a little shorter. Don't get into a habit of just skipping simple ground ball drills or throwing fundamentals.
When you run your intermediate level practices, keep everyone moving at all times except for a few water breaks. You want your team to perform these skills with sound fundamentals while they are winded and somewhat exhausted. If they can perform with sound fundamentals when tired, they can when they are well rested. In order to accomplish the objectives we have set for ourselves, the best approach is to draft up a practice on paper. Include drills you want to run, a schematic of those drills if you will need to instruct your coaches on how to run them, times set aside for each drill, and a list of what you can skip if time runs short. As you conduct an ever increasing number of practices, you will get a better feel for which drills you can shorten and which you need to elongate. The more automatic or programmed your practices become, the more time you can spend watching and correcting fundamental errors.Labels: coaching
Permanent Link: Intermediate Defensive Drilling
 
12 Year Old Olympians!
by Dave
Monday, March 12, 2007
A visitor to this site from Australia writes in with an all too frequent comment / question about which I have deep feelings. So I'll share the question with you and give you some of my thoughts about it. I paraphrase the question as follows:My 12 year old daughter is a second year player and first year pitcher. She is getting outstanding coaching but is not blessed with great speed as a pitcher and has been struggling with her hitting which is making her lose confidence. A parent of another player suggested that her lack of speed and seeming lack of "natural" batting skill is going to limit her future success. He claims that senior A-level athletes are almost always junior A-level athletes, and that there is very little that can be done to overcome the underlying genetic influence.
The reader of this site wants to know it all senior softball stars were great players as kids. He says, "I'd like to think that instruction, practice, and dedication must also play some part? It seems silly to write off some kids so early – my 12 year old hasn't even reached menarche (puberty?)! I wonder if you have any views about the correlation between performance at junior softball levels, say 12-14 years, and subsequent performance in later years."
The first thing I want to say is if your child isn't playing proficiently at 9 years old, you might just as well pack it in and focus on academic pursuits. If she can't throw 50-55 by 10, forget about it. If you weren't a world class athlete, she probably won't be either. I strongly advise you to just give up the sport and move onto something easier like calisthenics or library science.
That's the first thing I want to say because I enjoyed saying it. Most likely so did this "other parent" who advised our friend against his daughter continuing to pursue a softball career. Of course this "other parent" is a blooming idiot who should be taken away from interaction with other human beings. And of course, my comment is also completely wrong. But I did enjoy saying it. It was rather cathartic!
The truth is, folks, fastpitch softball players are made, not created. Sure, there is such a thing as natural talent but that gets you so far and not much further. The garbage bins are piled high with "great" junior athletes who give up sport for any number of reasons. The hall of fames in this and kindred sports are stuffed full of "over achievers" (whatever that term means) who had what it takes between the ears more so than in the genetic make-up of their musculature and nervous systems.
I want to be clear that I do believe there is something to the notion that natural talent for certain things makes a difference in all sports and in softball. I once knew a kid who had tremendous natural talent in swimming. We would work our butts off to the point of exhaustion and well beyond, sprinting lap after lap working to improve our times by fractions of a second. This kid would swim a half lap and then dive below the surface of the water, holding his breath until we finished 4 laps, then shoot up and stand next to us waiting for the next repetition. He had a great stroke but he never actually practiced. I suppose he did have extremely well developed lungs but he was a sprinter not a distance swimmer! He would do good times in meets and rose through the ranks. I once wondered what made this kid tick - why he kept after the sport if he was unwilling to practice. Then one day I found out. Whenever he lost a race or came in second, his father would pretty much abuse him. That was not a great thing to watch but this kid, after he got over the extreme substance abuse thing, went on to get a full Division One scholarship, two silver and one gold Olympic medals. He was blessed with natural talent, and a fear of losing. By the way, at some point he did learn to work hard too!
I knew another fellow who was far less dysfunctional. He was a baseball player. He had a nice swing as a result of having a father who knew sports well and practiced with him. His best natural gift was an ability to learn good things from coaching of all qualities and put the best technique to work for himself. But he was short, slow afoot, and had really only an adequate arm. As a result, he wasn't all that high of a pick in the baseball draft and his career only lasted about 8 years in the majors! This kid knew how to work at sports from the time he could pull the pacifier out of his mouth. He loved baseball and I suppose all he ever really wanted to do was play in the bigs. So despite having been a remarkably good student, he chose baseball over other pursuits and chose to put his efforts into that. And those efforts were necessary due to a lack of real natural talent.
This kid and I had a teammate who was just incredible. He actually had a all those natural talents you hear about. His swing was equal to the very best you have ever seen. He was a fast sprinter. He had a remarkably good arm at a very young age. He was a mediocre high school player who lucked into a scholarship at a college trying to build their baseball progam. Later he got drafted but ended his career in single A. I remember this kid hitting the ball 300 feet from the time he was about 11. And he could hit a nat on the chest protector of the catcher from deep right field from about 12. he knew he had great potential because veryone told him so from the time he was 10 years old. But there werte some problems like the lack of any gray matter between his ears. And there was a deep open space in the place reserved for work ethic. His swing stayed with him - that's what got him drafted. But that stellar arm got mediocre along the way as other kids worked and improved their throwing to the point where you would say his arm was a minus. And because he never really worked at running, his foot speed also fell to minus status over the years. The lack of speed and the poor arm are what took a kid who really could hit from being a prospect into being a early minor league washout.
My point here is one athlete blessed with natural ability almost ended up on the junk heap of life. Another less gifted one made it into the big time through hard work and dedication. yet another blessed with as much natural talent as anyone ended up being a truly mediocre player because he did not work at his craft. In my travels, I have seen so many really gifted athletes fall by the wayside while less gifted ones worked their tails off and excelled.
This sport of ours is extremely complex. It requires a degree of natural ability to be certain. But in order to make it to the top, natural ability alone is not enough and, in fact, a lack of natural ability is not enough to hold one back. It is possible to make up for less than stellar natural gifts via hard work, dedication, perseverance, mental toughness, etc.
The greatest throwing, hitting, fielding, pitching mechanics on the planet are learned, not bred into any person. You do need a modicum of what might be called traditional athletic talent to really excel but if you throw with poor mechanics, swing the bat wrong, and don't work hard at pitching to spots and learning new tricks, you are absolutely destined to failure. Conversely, proper mechanics (LEARNED mechanics) will turn a mediocre athlete into a noteworthy one.
I think of a few groups of people when someone suggests genetics are critical to success at sport. First, I think of all the sons of major league baseball players who also made it into the big time. It would be easy to chalk that up to genetics except that more often than not, the sons have better mechanics, better learned behavior, than their fathers! So while there may very well have been a number of characteristics passed from father to son, what was really handed over was probably a lifetime of extremely high quality coaching, father to son. And I'm sure the fathers of this new generation of great athletes also had something others lacked. That is the ability to know good coaching from bad and keep their sons away from losers who might ruin their careers at a young age. You know the loser, don't you? They're the ones who say things like a kid can't be good at this game unless the first time she walks onto a diamond everyone bows down and acknowledges her greatness. They're the ones who say too bad your kid isn't going to be good at this game because she doesn't posses "natural batting skills."
I also thing of some really gifted athletes whose children never really participated much in sports and did not excel when they did. I remember one kid whose dad made it to triple A minor league baseball and the kid could barely throw or do anything else on the baseball diamond. His father was always someplace else and never had time to even play catch, let alone teach the kid to throw. Another kid I think of had a father who was extremely quick, as in a 40 yard dash of 4.3 - world class speed, the mother had several state championships and all-state credentials to her name. The girl never learned to run mostly because kids don't run around outside any more. But as soon as this kid got involved with competitive sports and received any coaching and encouragement from her parents, she began to excel. She demonstrated the strength and athleticism, mental toughness, etc. which I'm certain will one day lead to a very successful sports career. She was blessed with those "good genes" but nearly allowed wonderful athleticism to atrophy. It was when she decided to apply herself that she began to excel.
I also think about my own kids when I think of this issue. I was a pretty fair athlete but nothing to write a book about. I received a full scholarship offer but was disinterested and so refused it. I do believe that I could have been a decent college level athlete - I did make all conference as a walk-on for a college team in a lousy (I do mean lousy) conference. But I never applied myself. I never understood the value of effort back then - I was stupid. And I never got good guidance with respect to sports.
My father used to say, "you see that baseball team you're on? They're pretty good. Nobody on that team is ever going to make it into professional baseball. If, by chance, one of them does, he'll end up quitting at the single A level. There are millions of kids playing youth baseball and only a handful will ever realize your dream of playing big league ball. the best kid you've ever seen is a mediocre ballplayer. The world is full of good ones."
You know what? My father was wrong on so many levels I don't know where to start. But let's say that of the starting 9 on that team, three played professional baseball for a time, one made it to double A, and one played major league ball. But that's not where my father's errors ended. He missed the single most important aspect of sport. This is embodied by the words of Jessica Mendoza, softball gold medal winner. Jessica says her motto is "love it, dream it, live it." That means start with what you love, dream big things about it, and then go live that dream. Her advice is to work to improve a little bit each day. I find this entirely more appropriate than my father's advice which was to strive with all your might for mediocrity and never believe you can do more because there are a lot of people out there, some very gifted!
Where this all leaves us is with something which cannot necessarily be applied universally - to every person walking the face of the earth. But the very highest achievers in our society understand it on a gut level. That is, pursue the things you love - live life passionately, dream big things for yourself and don't let anyone else be the decider who informs you that what you can accomplish is limited. Once you have found the things you want to excel at, pursue them with all your might. Keep those dreams which seem unrealistic to others in the the forefront of your being. Seek out things you really love, pursue them, don't be afraid to achieve - don't hold yourself back.
In the words of Jimmy Valvano, coach of the "over-achieving" 1983 North Carolina State University national championship basketball team, "Don't give up. Don't ever give up."Labels: youth tournament teams
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