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Put Me In Coach, I'm Ready To Pitch
by Dave
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
This one is for the aspiring and acting pitcher.
I used to watch a lot of sports with a couple guys I played some ball with. They were decent at sports but I wouldn't ever mistake them for athletes. They were never willing to put in the effort to hone their skills anywhere near enough to compete at a decent level. To me, what differentiates the athlete from the non-athlete is the willingness to not only obtain certain skills, but also to work on those same skills in a goal oriented manner in order to compete against the very best opponents available. Then, when the true athlete finds him or herself playing against the best competition, the real work begins. There is no end to the work. The true athlete recognizes that the objective is not to win one race, to achieve one goal, but rather to continue the process of improvement indefinitely.
I believe I've seen the same dynamic play out in my working career. I made a mistake when I was younger. I blew off an athletic scholarship because I didn't want to work as hard during college as I had during high school. I saw graduating high school as the end of a road. I didn't see it as the beginning of another one. Then my father died and I was a psychological mess. Eventually, I found I had to keep a full-time job in order to pay for college. In the end, I was working 50 hours a week while attending college full time and trying to maintain a 3.9 average in my major and 3.6 overall so I could get a good enough job to justify the expense of college. I probably worked ten times harder than I would have had I decided to work hard to begin with.
I did get that really good job but initially I saw this as the reward for working so hard during college. That was another mistake. Graduating college and obtaining a really good job was a beginning not an end. But I got back on track and worked to improve "my game" on the job. I obtained skills and built a repertoire of knowledge which allowed me to earn a good living while enjoying the challenges I faced every day. Each level of career achievement provided the opportunity to face greater and greater challenges. There was no end to the race. Improving enough to compete at higher and higher levels provided only the opportunity to work harder than at the previous level. That's life.
At one point in my career, I was in a position in which I had to hire and supervise the work of numerous people with advanced degrees. Initially I think I was impressed by the pedigrees of these employees. They had obtained all sorts of degrees from very good universities and I expected they would possess much greater knowledge and skills than I. That was another mistake. None of them had worked as I had to build their knowledge base. And most saw their higher degrees as an end, as a permission slip to back off the hard work. Most of my time with these folks was spent motivating them to work harder and teaching them that the degree was not an end but a beginning.
One of those childhood friends of mine had a good curveball. When I say good, it dropped off the table and did so late. Nobody could hit this guy's hook ... when he got it where he wanted it ... which is to say almost never. You see, even though he had tremendous athletic ability and had learned the right way to throw a curve, he never worked on it enough to make it ready for prime time. We used to watch a fair amount of major league baseball together and, in the middle of a game, this guy would exclaim, "I can throw a curveball better than that guy." I would usually just shrug and blow off the comment but one day I finally got annoyed. I told my friend, "you know, you probably do have a better curveball than that guy. But he could kill a mosquito on the back of your head with his. You can't throw yours for a strike."
My friend got mad at my comment. He insisted we go immediately to the field and he would throw the hook for a strike at least 50% of the time. So we got up from our chairs and went to the field. He warmed up for about 5 minutes and got bored. He said, OK, let's go. So I pulled on my catcher's mask and set a good target. The first pitch was uncatchable. The second was closer but by no means a strike. The next missed too. So did the next one and the next one ... After about ten balls out of the zone, several not even breaking very well, he said, "you know, my arm is kind of sore right now. Let's do this another day." We never did get to that "some other day." He never again complained about being better than a major league baseball pitcher.
So why am I telling you all this personal stuff? There's a point in there somewhere, that's why. Recently I have seen a couple of things play out in the sport of softball which I think should be addressed someplace, someplace like this site.
At the facility where we go for pitching and hitting lessons, and physical training, there is a regular cycle or rhythm to the year. I'll begin describing it in January since that's as good a place as any. In the beginning of the year, there is a regular core group of pitchers who work private lessons at the place. These are the serious ones who are there 52 weeks a year. Position players sometimes take batting lessons during this period but they are mostly doing physical training, and they do a lot of that. During February, a lot of kids start taking private batting lessons in preparation for school team tryouts. In March, when school season starts, the HS players disappear from physical training because they get plenty of that during their team practices. The pitchers continue but they move their lesson times due to conflicts with practices. Physical training continues for the youth travel players and some HS kids come in to work on hitting in a last ditch effort to make varsity or the starting team. By late April, recreational players, particularly pitchers, begin showing up. Then once rec and school season is over, in June, things go back to just the serious players. Travel players continue to work in preparation for tournaments and nationals. A few rec players continue to hang around and work on some skills. These are kids who are going to move into travel shortly. Many HS and travel players come back for physical training. Many of the kids who took pitching lessons from late April to June disappear. In the late summer months, things get particularly slow with only the serious players around. People who are less serious go on vacation or spend their time at the beach but do not have time to take lessons. Then when fall rolls around, some of the rec players who are playing fall ball show up again. After that season is over, they disappear again. The serious players continue to hang around and work on their skills and conditioning through to the winter holidays when the cycle begins again.
The reason I summarize the annual cycle is because within that cycle there are a couple of interesting trends. The first is the kids who are starting to catch "the fever" and will become the next generation of 52 week workers. The other is a rather larger number of kids who come into the place at the beginning of their rec or school seasons in an almost total panic because their skills have atrophied. The kids aren't generally in as much of a panic as the parents but you can feel the tension in the air as they begin arriving. After their lessons, the parents make stressed inquiries as to when they can get in there again, preferably soon. They go nuts practicing in the yard for a couple weeks while trying to get in for privates as often as possible. Then they disappear again once the season is over. They only worry about finding their umbrellas when it is actually raining out. They don't look for it even when the weather man tells them emphatically that it is going to rain tomorrow. And their pitching never progresses to a much higher level.
There is another group of kids within this structure who take lessons mostly during their seasons but usually also for a few weeks before and then maybe a month or two after. They come in for a few lessons in between but it is a highly irregular pattern. They recognize that it will be raining tomorrow so they find their umbrellas before the sky opens up. But they don't like carrying the thing once it has stopped raining and they are not willing to put more effort into the process than they perceive is the minimum. These are the really smart "C" students I remember from high school. They could easily pull Bs if they put out any effort and A-minuses if they really worked. They are satisfied.
Within the community of serious pitchers, those who come for lessons 52 weeks per year, there is another similar phenomenon. I'll call that the "lesson pitcher" who does regularly show up over the whole year. These are kids whose parents have enough money to keep them in lessons the whole year but they expect that for all that money the coaches will make their kids into championship caliber players. They don't practice on their own and they too do not make much progress. These are the kids with perfect attendance who do their homework at night but don't put any real heart and soul into any process. They are generally decent players on the softball field but they usually struggle to play with the really good kids. They aspire to that level but they just do not see the way to compete with those kids is through hard work and perseverance. They imagine the good kids are just naturally gifted and stronger. That must be why they are better.
Over the past few years I have seen the results of some of these approaches to pitching play out on a couple of travel teams. On one, there was a team with light pitching. The ace spot was filled. The three other kids who signed up to pitch were inexperienced and really just at the beginning of their development. Another girl came to the team under the assumption that this lack of pitching was an opportunity. Her parents thought that because the team only had the one good pitcher, she would see plenty of time in the circle. The resolved to take some lessons a month or two before the travel season and set their sights on what they thought would be a great opportunity for their kid. One of the second rate pitchers worked through the winter. Another worked a bit less but far more than the last kid to join the team. Then fall turned into winter and the team conducted some practices for just pitchers and catchers. This last kid to join was pretty awful and two of the kids had progressed quite a bit. The parents started up lessons immediately.
A month or so later, the team was continuing its pitcher-catcher sessions and this kid started to show some results from the several lessons she had taken. It looked like she was going to see some circle time after all. Her tense parents exhaled after holding their collective breath for a month. Then they started to let lesson times slip. if they had anything to do, it took precedence over the lesson. Even though the team manager had let everyone know that it was OK to miss all or part of a practice to attend pitching lessons, this family decided they had to cancel lessons if their was any team function. They would cancel lessons even if that was the only time available that week. Then tournament season started and they really got lax.
At first this kid looked OK in tournaments but it was obvious that one or two of the second pitchers was passing her. By early summer, this kids mechanics began to fall apart. She dropped a few mph off her fastball and she had trouble hitting her spots. Her change-up remained pretty good for unknown reasons but without the speed on the fastball, that didn't much matter. All the batters were sitting back since she couldn't put one by them. And if you're throwing slow to begin with, a change-up is not going to do you much good. Her dropball began to look like a change-up so that didn't work either. And during this time when her skills were dropping off, the other two second pitchers were improving steadily. Eventually it got so bad that the team manager felt he could not responsibly allow her to pitch. It wasn't safe. And he owed the improving kids more time in order to encourage them to work.
Eventually this team began playing the harder tournaments on the schedule. This last kid to join now became a regular denizen of the bench. her parents got stressed out and tried to get some more lessons in. But scheduling lessons became more difficult because the serious tournament players had booked the place for all the convenient times. They got a few lessons in but each lesson became more and more painful as each tournament brought more bench time and no pitching opportunities. They quit the team and, I'm sure, blamed it all on the manager or somebody else. They were sure it wasn't their fault.
Another girl I have observed at this facility is a kid who was in a pitching clinic with my kid. Clinics are an alternative to private lessons but one does not get any real personal attention in a clinic. It's a great way to start learning but once you get to a certain point, the value drops off sharply. This kid in the clinic had taken a few more lessons than my kid - both private and group and she was rather rude to my kid, trying to show her the way since she was obviously not very good. That was in our very early days and when we still went just to clinics and only during or around the seasons. Then we started to make this into a year round commitment. We lost track of that little snotty kid who had been so rude. She disappeared once the season was over.
About a half year later we ran into her again during a winter workout at another facility. She and her father had rented a cage and she was working on her pitching. To say it wasn't particularly sharp is overly kind. She was pretty dreadful. My daughter, who had progressed quite a bit since, got a nice chuckle out of seeing this nemesis. Then we didn't see her again until the other day when she showed up for a batting clinic - yes, it's rec and school ball season. We saw this kid at the batting clinic but as we were leaving, she was still there because she was attending the pitching clinic as well! Then when I took my daughter for her agility class, this kid had signed up for that too. As we were leaving I realized again that she was staying! She was signed up for private lessons after that! Her parents were going to cram a whole year's worth of lessons and conditioning into the next couple of weeks. And the season she was "preparing" for had already progressed into games! That is what got me going on this particular piece.
Another anecdote I want to tell you about involves a "lesson pitcher." She was moving up an age group and her travel team was falling apart. Several girls wanted to play a higher level of competition and had joined another organization. She was friends with the coach so he asked her to join the team too. Her parents talked with the coach with an eye towards determining whether she would get an opportunity to pitch. The coach said she would definitely pitch some on Saturdays but likely not very much on elimination days. He caveated his promise of some circle time with the admonition, "if she continues to progress, if she continues to work."
Weeks after the initial conversation, the team held formal tryouts. The coach told parents of recruited players that they did not have to attend tryouts. Afterwards, the parents of this lesson pitcher got concerned about how the tryouts went and inquired whether anything had changed. The coach told them no, their kid was a member of the team, that was never in question. But he also said, she shouldn't view making the team as an end. It is truly just a beginning. Now she must work on her pitching and bring it up to the next level. the parents responded by saying "of course!"
Winter workouts for this team began in November. The coach told team parents that kids could miss practice but A) they have to earn play time and if they aren't in practice, there's no way to earn it, and B) missing practice for school sports was an acceptable excuse but participation in recreational sports was not because this is a travel team and it requires commitment. The parents of the lesson pitcher immediately informed the coach that their kid couldn't make some of the practices because she was participating in school basketball.
Unbeknownst to these parents, the softball coach knew full well that his practices did not conflict with school basketball - it was a parochial school team, the workouts she was missing were on Sundays, and the school team coach and softball coach shared common friends. The coach asked one of the parents directly why the school team's season conflicted with Sunday practices. The parent lied to the coach by confirming that it was in fact the school team which conflicted and couldn't offer any explanation for why that was. They believed the softball coach foolish enough to just accept their explanation out of hand.
The softball coach noticed that the lesson pitcher was also occasionally missing her lessons but more importantly she had regressed quite a bit. She was moving up an age class as well as competition level and her pitching in mid-winter would have been unacceptable at the previous level. She viewed making the travel softball team as an end in itself, failed to work and failed to progress. the parents promised she would work knowing full well that they had no intention of doing that - they lied to the coach to get their kid on the team.
When the season rolled around, this kid did not pitch and her parents got mad. They approached the coach to inquire as to why she hadn't pitched. He had promised after all. The coach chose not to tell the parents that he knew they had lied to him, that their kid hadn't been practicing the way they had discussed when he invited her to the team, and that their kid's ability was far beneath what he had hoped, actually it was far beneath his worst nightmare. He had become afraid to put this kid out in the circle because he knew there would be substantial risk of injury from a batted ball. He also couldn't justify pitching her when other pitchers were working hard and progressing far beyond the lesson pitcher. Instead he tried a couple of different explanations but refused to make any promises about pitching time. The parents poked and prodded until finally the coach admitted he was afraid to pitch the kid for fear of serious injury. The parents decided to quit the team. To this day, they feel betrayed by the coach and believe it was his fault their darling daughter had her heart broken.
I tell you this story because so many people try these tactics. So many people treat making a team as an end in itself. So many people act as if doing the bare minimum in a competitive situation is enough. So many pitcher's parents try to exact promises of circle time from travel team coaches and then act as if that's the golden ticket. they act betrayed when they don't live up to their end of the bargain. They don't see this as a process, a process of constant improvement. They see it as an activity to round out their child's experience.
I want to add another anecdote to the mix. I recognize that lately I've been harping on negative stories and I want to get off that. My first experience with travel softball occurred quite some time ago when I, as a parent, decided I simply must see what this "travel" thing was all about. I searched and searched until I located a local tournament which seemed on the surface to be pretty good. We packed up the car to go see what I thought was a 10U game. When we arrived, one team was waiting for another pair to finish their game on an adjacent field. The game we would see was supposed to be the 10U championship. We sat down to wait for the action to start.
I observed a person I took to be one of the player's parents. He had what I would describe as a growth coming out of his butt. It looked like a bucket - the kind of bucket you would keep balls in - but the way he was sitting on it looked as if it was just another part of his body. he had obviously sat on this thing more times than he could count. His daughter was pitching to him and I immediately knew we were in the wrong place. There was no way this kid could have been a 10 year old. She was that good. I supposed she was a small 13 year old. She pitched to her father for a good half an hour. Then I saw another kid come out to pitch. the kid we were watching was not going to pitch the next game. She was practicing, not warming up. the other pitcher was equally as good, perhaps a touch better. Because we could see this was obviously not the 10U game, we got up and left to see if we could find the 10U game.
Eventually we came upon a high school aged game and sat down to watch that. We were very familiar with high school ball and found these girls to be particularly skilled. About halfway through this game, the team we had been watching on the other field arrived at the same place. There was a table there with trophies on it and this team had obviously won the championship game. This little (I supposed) 13 year old received the tournament MVP or some such award - I couldn't hear exactly what was said. But there was one thing I could clearly make out and that was that whatever award she received, it was in fact for 10U!
After this experience, I resolved to coax my kids into playing some other sport. I realized how futile it would be to continue on with pitching lessons at this point since there was no way on God's green Earth my kid could ever compete with that sort of obvious talent. I kept my thoughts to myself but then my wife voiced the same sentiment. Somehow hearing her put to voice what I was thinking made it seem wrong. She said, "maybe we should give up the pitching thing." I replied, "no, we just need to practice more." I knew what I said was ridiculous but I'm not one to ever just give up. My kid said she wanted to play softball and pitch so, by gosh, that's what she was going to do.
The kid we had watched with her "bucket dad" planted in permanent catcher position turned out to be something we hadn't entirely expected. We saw that she pitched a perfect game at some nationals. We saw her a year later and a year after that. By the time she was 13, we could clearly recognize that she could have pitched for many of the varsity high school teams we had seen, not the best ones but some of them. She's not in high school yet but she will be next year and we'll be watching for her. As I understand things, she now works even harder than she did back then. She's going to really be something.
More importantly, my seeing this kid shouldn't have caused me to worry or give up on my own kid's pitching. We just happened to walk up to one of the best pitchers within a hundred miles. There was no reason to take that experience and just throw in the towel. But the experience did teach me about the level of commitment softball pitchers need to make if they want to compete with the very best. It requires an extraordinary level of commitment.
In closing up this anecdote laddened commentary, I want to draw some conclusions for you. First off, the element which differentiates the athlete from the non-athlete is a recognition that there is no golden ticket inside the chocolate bar wrapper which entitles you to slack off. It is perfectly OK to not seek the highest levels of competition. But if you put yourself into that level of competition, you must redouble your efforts in order to effectively deal with the responsibility to teammates and oneself which comes with the territory. If you are bold enough to attempt to pitch at higher levels, don't try to take shortcuts or extract promises of pitching time and then slack off on your work. There are no shortcuts for players in this game, least of all for pitchers. Don't try to fool coaches into believing you have been working on your skills and then get mad when they don't play or pitch you. Listen carefully when they tell you what your responsibilities as a player are going to be. And don't try to fool coaches into excusing you from what every other player has to go through. Don't lie to coaches when what you are telling them can easily be checked. Trust me, if they don't like what you tell them, they will check its veracity. If you lie repeatedly, eventually you are going to get caught and the ramifications will not be positive. Don't beg for pitching time unless and until you are really ready to get it!
I'll leave you with the insane thoughts which are bouncing around my head today:
Put me in coach
I'm ready to pitch
Look at me
I can get
hit in the face
Oompah loompa doopety doo
I've got another riddle for you
What do you get when a pitcher won't practice?
You get lots of pain and that is a fact!Labels: pitching, work ethic
Permanent Link: Put Me In Coach, I'm Ready To Pitch
 
Decisions, Decisions
by Dave
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Life is all about making decisions. You do your best to always make the right ones but there are no guarantees and you will make mistakes your entire life. The trick is to make the best decisions you can while living with and learning from your mistakes. As you move through life, certain patterns will develop and these should teach you to make better and better decisions. You can't force the world to conform to your will. You have to, for the most part, live on the planet the way it is and move through the world the way it has been created by other people. This applies to almost every aspect of your life including personal relationships, education, and sports. You have to do the best job you can at gathering information, weighing your options, and then moving forward with the decisions you make along the way. That's a macro or big picture view but it also applies to every little aspect of living.
When you are in your teens or twenties, you may decide to date somebody for a while and eventually conclude this is not the type of person you want to spend your time with. You work at a fastfood place and decide you don't want to spend your life slinging hash. You take spanish in elementary school and french in middle school because it is part of the required courses but, when you get to high school, you have to decide what language you will study. You give soccer, basketball, field hockey, cross country running, and softball a shot and decide you like this game or that better than the others. After you have made decisions about say marrying this person, studying this subject or that at school, or playing this group of sports, you really do have to follow through and suffer the consequences of your decisions. You can change whichever track you are on but, at some point, on some level, you must follow through with decisions made or you just won't get anywhere.
Here are some typical questions you will see on softball forums:
1) My 8 year old is playing recreational softball and she absolutely hates it. The coaches stink and so do the other players. One coach told my kid to stop throwing the ball to her teammates because she throws too hard and the other kids can't catch it. They're going to get hurt. She came home from her first practice crying while saying she hates softball and never wants to play it again. What should I do?
2) My 13 year old is on a 14U travel team but she is not having a good experience. We were led to believe they would be better than this. My kid is the best on the team. We wanted her to pitch but the coaches are asking her to pitch almost every game. There are one or two other good players but some of the other kids should be playing rec. We're going to lose every tournament game unless my daughter pitches a perfect game. We're thinking of moving to another team. Does anyone know a good team we can move to?
3) I am a college sophomore at a Division 3 university. I was the starting shortstop and clean-up hitter last year. I'm not bragging but I am the best player on the team. Some of the girls couldn't make my high school team and my high school team wasn't that good. Now I'm thinking I should try to transfer to a Div. I or II school and see if I can make the team as a walk-on. Do you have any advice?
These three questions are seemingly completely different, applying as they do to very different age and competition levels. Yet they have elements which bind them inextricably. They all involve: A) a decision previously made, B) a learning experience, whether good or bad, and C) a potential future decision. I think there are some general approaches we can use to find appropriate answers. And there are some informational aspects to these decisions which also must be considered.
The very first points I want to make here are you should never take decisions lightly and you should never fear making a decision. That's a contradiction but life is full of contradictions. The two points are, you have to try to gather as much information as possible in order to make an educated decision. You must search available resources, weigh the facts as you know them, and use your brains to come to the best decision you can. But even when that information is not enough, you still have to make a decision. If you don't gather information, you will not make an informed decision and will have to rely on luck or a higher power to guide you. If that's what you aim to do, so be it. If you make a mistake, there's nobody to blame but yourself. But if you make a real effort to gather information and there just isn't enough available, you still have to make a decision. Otherwise you are stuck with nothing but your own thoughts pondering the issue and looking for answers that don't exist. You'll be left right where you started and nothing will have been gained. Another way to look at this is "nothing ventured, nothing gained" or no risk, no reward.
Even though you must gather information and make decisions, you also must be aware of the limitations of your information and the fact that decisions need to be made in a "step" fashion. You cannot decide you want to dedicate your life to softball and go after that big time scholarship because you hit a homerun in your first at-bat of tee-ball. At that point, it might be appropriate to decide you like this sport but it doesn't tell you anything about how you will feel in two years and it doesn't provide information concerning 14U competitive play. That information and those decisions will come at some point in the future but when you are taking your first baby steps, you shouldn't be making phone calls to the Olympic track coach.
The next point is you should always move towards something rather than away from something else. You never want to run from a bear if there is nowhere to hide. Bears like it when you run from them. So do most other predators. If you can get yourself inside some kind of shelter before you become the predator's lunch, run to it. But odds are you are better off standing your ground (staying and living with your situation) when there is no place known to run to.
Third, it is always better to have a goal than not to. Goals should be both short and longer term. And there is always interplay between shorter and longer term goals, sometimes there may even be conflict. You step to the plate and most of the time you want to get a hit - you want the best possible season batting average. But if a runner is on third with nobody out in the last inning of a tied elimination game and time is about to expire, a grounder to second may do just as well as a homerun. You see the first pitch is down and away but hittable, there's no reason to wait for a better pitch if you can hit the ball into play and get the winning run across. You usually have the short term goal of getting a hit but here the longer term goal of winning the game is more important yet conflicts with the even longer term goal of the best possible season's batting average.
You must try to fit together shorter and longer term goals into an overall mix which suits the big picture. To exaggerate a bit, if you're after a softball scholarship at Stanford or UCLA, you might want to play recreational softball for a year when you're eight but after that, you must move into travel and work your way up the foodchain to higher and higher level competition. Eventually you must play ASA Gold and play for one of the better gold teams. heck, it might be advisable to sell your Tennessee McMansion and move to a flat in SoCal!
That's logical enough but many parents of 8 year olds don't know what the term "ASA Gold" means. They haven't heard of, let alone seen, the OC Batbusters. They haven't yet gathered enough information. So we come around full circle to where we started from which is you have to gather information and make decisions. This accentuates the need to make early decisions because sometimes the most important information is not available to those who fail to make the early decisions.
For example, if you took a poll of parents standing around the 8U recreational softball game about their thoughts on big-time college scholarships, they'd all probably say you have to play high school ball and be exceptional there. Most wouldn't know anything about "travel softball" and most would not be familiar with the term "ASA Gold." If you took the same poll at a 14U ASA, NSA, Pony, Fast, etc tournament, a majority of parents would know about Gold and fully understand that travel ball is where most prospects are identified. The people standing around the rec field have no sources of information regarding travel ball so they don't know about it. If they learn about it and then start playing travel, most of the people standing around them at tournaments will be talking about ASA Gold or some such as if they were talking about their careers or families. They're conversant in the subject and able to provide a decent foundation for the once rec parent to begin gathering real information.
Why this is important is due to the fact that if the parents of the 8U kid in question number 1, above, never learn about travel ball, they'll never actually learn about college scholarships. They'll not have the sources of information or even know they exist. They'll base all their future actions on faulty information - the information they learned growing up - and make bad decisions.
Before I go any further, I see it would be good to define some terms in order to move forwards. I'm not looking for 100% accuracy in these terms but what I want is to provide a foundation with which to further the discussion. I'm going to kick around terms like "A, B and C ball" so, while I cannot conform to everyone's idea of those things, I still want to define them in the way I am using them so we'll come to a common understanding. Here are some definitions:
"Recreational softball" or "rec ball" means any softball program run by a town or group of towns which is provided to anyone who chooses to participate. Not all rec ball is created equal. There are some few very competitive rec ball programs like some of those provided in southern California towns like those around Anaheim which are highly competitive. There are also many rec programs which are extremely poor (depending on the coaching) in terms of the skills they give the kids. There's nothing wrong with that since they do provide a means of "recreation" which is what they are designed for.
Your typical recreational player takes her mitt out of the closet for league "tryouts" and then it stays in the trunk of the car to be ready for her team's three practices and 12 games. She may keep it there for the three-a-week all-star practices which last for 3 or 4 weeks. She may even play for a middle school team, summer "quasi-travel" "C" team, or other summer or fall ball team. But she doesn't take lessons or attend many clinics. She isn't nearly as serious or dedicated about the game as her travel ball sisters. And, again, there is nothing wrong with that.
"C ball" means an offshoot of recreational softball. It is the typical traveling town all-star team or the "quasi-travel" program which sometimes grows out of rec all-star. There are great town all-star programs out there but most are just a means of extending the rec season for the kids who are "players," the better softball players in the rec league. Most of these teams will maybe win one Little League or Babe Ruth tournament game or even one regional or district series. I include in this division those "quasi-travel" programs that are no longer associated with a recreational program but which do not seek out better and better competition.
The "quasi-travel" team plays a few tournaments, mostly against other similar teams. They seek out the type of tournament in which they can compete reasonably given the lack of seriousness and dedication of their players. This is a really fun way for a rec player to get her feet wet and play a lot more games than she would otherwise. The "C" team provides much better practices than rec does. It is really the beginning for the few budding players who will compete at the highest levels in the years to come. Many players who really like the game, can't stand trying to play catch with someone who can't catch, and want to bring it to a slightly higher level yet avoid the stress of high level competition will stay at this level for most of their careers. The eventual "A" players will usually stay here only for one or two years at the most.
"A ball" means highly competitive travel ball. Kids come from as far away as an hour and a half to practice three times, sometimes more, each week. Some few of these teams practice up to 10-15 hours per week. They have generally well attended tryouts. The girls are athletes, highly competitive (sometimes in the social sense as well as athletically speaking), and well schooled in softball fundamental skills. They come to these tryouts on a quest to get the kind of coaching these teams provide. They also spend money for lessons on a regular basis, attend speed and agility camps and sessions year round. They seek to play against the absolute best competition they can and hopefully win lots of games at this level.
A few "A" teams have some interesting pre-qualifications for the kids they will even consider for their roster. I know of one which is completely uninterested unless a girl has a birthday between January and March since these will obviously be older kids. January 1 being the cutoff date for age group classification, if all your kids are January birthdays, your team will necessarily be older than a team with a bunch of kids born in October. One team I know of only takes kids within certain height and weight parameters. They want the tallest kids with the most muscle mass. When you play against them, you feel as if you are moving up at least one age category from your own. But they're all legal. They're just bigger, faster, stronger, and more athletic than everybody else.
The "A" teams will not just plan to attend some sort of nationals. They hope to place in the top 1-4 of the lesser sanctioning bodies' nationals or fight for a berth in the sweet 16 championship round at the better sanctioning ones. They are generally well coached teams in which players must earn playing time. Some kids cannot take the pressure at this level of play until they are mature. Enough kids can, at least for the short-term and some of these kids burn out before they go out for their high school varsity teams. It's tough - there's not much "nice" about it. Things can change for an individual player on one of these teams over the course of a year.
"A teams" often have a complete set of 12 or more girls who would be extremely successful pitchers, shortstops, or centerfielders at the next lowest level (B ball which I'll get to in a moment). Performances at team practices are extremely important for the decisions made regarding the lineup in the first game or tournament. After that, play time is determined based on in-game performance. Say a girl enters the first tournament as the ace pitcher for her team and has a bad outing, she may very well not pitch again for quite a few games. The coach may be making the right move not only for the team but also the girl herself who might be better suited to playing rightfield but we don't have any way of knowing that because she doesn't get much opportunity to pitch after her initial failure. She may even develop a confidence issue which forces her to give up pitching. The same is true for other positions as well.
You might be a great catcher who is not nearly done growing or developing physically. You might even start at the team's first couple of games. But if you aren't making the plays, you may see your playing time gradually diminishing while another girl who is doing things better becomes the starter and then begins to take away the fewer and fewer innings you begin getting as she gets in better and better game shape and begins to be able to handle two or even three games in the hot sun.
Backup players on "A" teams often see most of their playing time in preliminary round tournament games. They often sit the entire championship round. Sometimes this significantly hurts their development in addition to their confidence. And some kids are perfectly suited to these kinds of circumstances and will be made better by the high level of intra-team competition. Having a bad start makes them work harder to make the starting lineup and they become better for the experience.
"A" players are not always the best available players. Some parents won't let their kids play "A" ball until they are sure they are emotionally suited and mature enough for the experience. I remember one pitcher I once saw who played for an "A" team. She was the team's number 3. They travelled to a tournament in Oklahoma City at the Hall of Fame and she got two innings of work the entire trip which cost her family thousands. I saw her pitch once and was not impressed. She didn't feel comfortable throwing her pitches so she stayed with the fastball and change-up. She didn't have great control within the strike zone and the kids on the other team hit her. She was playing for us because she had a friend on the team and wanted to explore joining us. Ultimately her father decided to keep her on the "A" team because we weren't good enough for her level of play. Had she joined us, she would have been a very solid number 3 pitcher on our "B" team.
So this brings me to "B ball" which basically consists of everything between "A" and "C." That is not to say most travel teams out there are "B" teams. It just is the catch-all category I'm using for this discussion. "B" ball is a pretty wide category which includes a broad spectrum of talent. There are girls there who are refugees from bad rec and all-star programs who want to dip their feet into the real travel softball pool. Many skip right over "C" ball and give "B" a try because they aim to eventually get to "A" play. And some of these girls will make rapid advancement.
There are also girls in "B" ball who "belong" in "A" but they choose not to go for that, usually because their parents think their emotional development is not suited to that level of competition. Most often they are right. The girls do not "belong" in "A" ball but they are good enough to make most of these teams. And most of these kids will eventually give "A" ball some sort of try at some point.
The thing which really differentiates true "A" ball from "B" ball is the number of very good players on a team. Your typical "B" team will have one or two or even three "A" players, a bunch of pretty good players and some girls who, to be perfectly objective, don't necessarily belong on the team. But you've got to fill out the roster. Players need a place in which to develop - "C" teams do some of that but not nearly enough. And a few of the lesser players on a "B" team will rise to the competition and eventually become "A" players.
I want to point out one important aspect of these varying levels of softball. They aren't always what you would think they would be. Like I said before, many "A" players are not as good as some "A" level "B" team players. Many "B" team players are not as good as kids on the "C" teams. And rec is not always recreational in nature.
My personal experience with rec ball was not very good. Despite the extremely poor level of play, parents coaches and league officials were hyper-competitive. They wanted to win more than they wanted to prepare the girls to play. I remember a game we had several years ago in which I told my 8 year olds not to slide but instead allow themselves to be tagged out if the play was that close. A league official saw one of my girls score on a play in which the ball was still in the outfield. The catcher was standing with both feet on homeplate. My kid stopped running at home and then gently touched the plate with her foot before running into the dugout. The league official said, "coach, you've got to teach your kids to slide." I responded that the catcher had interfered and you really ought to be talking to the other coach. I'm not going to teach my kids to slide. They aren't old enough and I'm not going to be responsible for some kid breaking the growth plates in her legs. The official winced and then said "what would have happened if there were a play on her?" I said she would have been out. He winced even more severely, so I said, "hey bud, this is rec ball. We don't keep standings. Sometimes we don't even keep score. If you care about winning and losing at a 9U rec game where there are no standings, no score, and all that matters is the kids learn what the game is about, perhaps you should seek counseling." That one didn't go over very well. But my point here is rec ball is often more competitive, at least from the parent mental standpoint, than ASA Gold is! It isn't often a nice place just to get a ittle exercise for your couch potato kids.
Armed with some of this information maybe you believe yourself ready to plot a course and go. But I caution you, there's more to it than you can possibly get from a web site written by someone you've never met. You still have to gather more information for yourself. There are quicksand pools all over the place.
Let's say you've got a kid who is beginning to show herself to be a player. She's on a "B" team which provides her the opportunity to be a star. She tried pitching last year but the team she was on had two or three good pitchers so she played the outfield. You've found yourself another "B" team where, like I just said, your kid gets to be one of the big dogs and pitches most of the time as the 1 or 2. Should you push her into "A" ball? Maybe and maybe not. I can't answer that question because I don't have enough information. You have to make an informed decision based on all available information. And maybe, just maybe, you are going to have to take some risk and try that out. It may be a success for you. It may be an abject failure. You make the call.
Looking at a slightly different situation, let's say you are in the above situation but are committed to your current year "B" team and also helping out with team coaching. Roster spots are still open and you can think of a couple kids who are nomads and currently available. These kids are "A" or near-A players who for one reason or another have not settled upon an "A" team. Should you go to the team manager and tell him you have a couple really good players looking for a team and they are ready to make the switch to your team? Before you say anything, consider the consequences of your actions. Will one of these girls really impress the heck out of the manager and work her way into the circle? Will she cut into your kid's playing time at her chosen positions - the ones you were hoping she could work on while sticking with "B" ball? Is it worth it to build a really high quality "B" team, one that may beat a few "A" teams, while hindering your own kid's development? Consider that you cannot actually turn a "B" team into an "A" one simply by adding girls who could play "A" ball someplace else. And why exactly is it these girls are not currently playing on an "A" team? Why are they "nomads" or what I like to call "free agents?"
I guess at this point I should define what I mean by "nomad" or "free agent." Within "B" ball, and sometimes "A," there are kids who are developing into very good players. They will likely one day be exclusively "A" players but they are still developing. Their parents are usually very good parents but they haven't yet found their way in softball or they never played competitive sports themselves at higher levels so they do not fully appreciate the value of learning to commit to a team and be a good teammate. These kids are ones who are at risk of becoming prima donnas or the type of kid I was telling you about yesterday who moves from being inwardly critical to being outwardly so and shows up her teammates because they are not good enough.
Free agents' parents spend an inordinate amount of time and effort sorting out the teams in their area. They think they know who the "A" teams are and they may even tryout for them. They may decide another year or two is needed before actually playing "A" ball. So they spend a great deal of time and effort evaluating the "B" teams and trying to figure out what would be the best fit for their kid. They check out all the coaches and then have their kid practicing with a bunch of different teams. Then the time comes to commit and they stick with what they think will be the best opportunity. Often this means the most pitching time or the opportunity to hit fourth and play shortstop or whatever when not pitching. They want as many innings as possible without much regard to whether the kid is actually happy playing those innings. These kids move to a different team every year in search of something that is most likely not out there - the perfect fit.
There's a pitcher in my area who is at the top of her age bracket. She's pretty good though I wouldn't say special. She was with a team which plays within a "B" organization (one that typically fields "B" teams) but the team at her age bracket happens to be extremely competitive. They can compete with most "A" teams in the age group. This team once had four or five very good pitchers. That was a problem since five pitchers cannot all possibly get enough pitching time in any tournament even if they play five games each day. Somebody, probably two somebodies, maybe three somebodies, are going to get shorted. So one pitcher left and then another, leaving three. This girl was the third. Her parents wanted her to be pitching two games a day so she left too. She explored the possibility of playing with a number of different "B" teams but she carried with her a reputation of being poison and her father was considered to be a detriment to a team's parental chemistry - something never to be ignored. So most of these other teams wouldn't bite. None of them was willing to make the sort of commitment the parent and apparently kid wanted so they settled on remaining within their organization but playing one age bracket up. Her team has ten or so tournaments scheduled so her father held her out to pitch for any organization which needed an "A" pitcher for certain kinds of tournaments on certain dates. One organization didn't know her reputation and picked her up. When she plays for them, she's the big dog and she gets upset when the "B" to "B-", not to mention "C," players on her team make errors or cannot produce enough runs to win games. The decision to bring this kid onto the team to make them more competitive was probably a bad one. The moral of that story is you want to make efforts to learn whether the team you have chosen or are considering choosing has an open roster policy or is still looking for an ace pitcher to round things out. That may spell trouble for you or it may be a good thing. I can't say - I don't have enough information - you do or can get it if you ask enough questions.
I guess we come back to the issue of information and I guess I should say a little about obtaining information here. I know of a father of a girl who had outgrown rec and the "C" team which had begun as an outgrowth of his daughter's rec program. He went to see a tournament at which there were a number of "A" and "B" teams playing. He sat there enjoying the games but what he was interested in most was learning about the teams. One team caught his eye. They were mercied three straight games - this was a good tournament - but the kids seemed to be having a load of fun despite getting beat up.
The parents all were having fun with each other too. The kids would have a bad inning and the parents would initially get upset but then they would begin laughing and enjoying themselves again shortly thereafter. The team would be down by 11 runs in the third inning and one kid would drill a double into the outfield or do something else really good and the parents would all actively applaud her effort.
They - the kids and parents - didn't seem to mind losing though they were hardly resigned to it. They played hard and tried to win every game but they were overmatched. Yet, that did not break their spirit. They came out every game and expected to win. And the kids weren't that bad - this wasn't a bad team, it was just playing out of its league in this particular tournament.
So this parent decided his kid would be well suited to this team next year when she was ready for "B" travel. She tried out and the team manager selected her because, although there were kids at the tryouts who might have been better, he saw a spark in her and decided she was just right for his team. Everyone seems to be better off for those decisions.
The moral of the story is find situations which seem comfortable based on some real effort on your part to learn what you can, and go with them. Don't be afraid to make a decision but do make some effort to learn about things.
I've got a lot of energy on this subject and could probably continue into eternity. But something tells me I've gone on far too long and there are probably more than one pieces which should have been spawned from this line of thinking. I'm going to have a devil of a time spell-checking and going through the grammar before I can publish this so I'm going to try to bring it all to a close. Here goes that Herculean effort.
Life is about making decisions. You need to make informed decision but you must decide. There's a lot out there in any given pursuit which can modify any single decision. That's as true for softball as it is for educational issues. Try to educate yourself. Classify the different kinds of play in a way you feel comfortable - you don't need my classification system of "rec, A, B. and C ball." But you do need something with which to organize your thoughts.
Don't make all your future decisions based upon today's information. Sometimes the first decision opens the door to more information concerning your future decisions. Some information is not available at the doorstep of the library. You have to go in and find your way through the stacks of books before you get to the good stuff. Talk to the people you meet in the library. They know where some of the good stuff is. You'll find more good stuff but you need some sort of guidance.
Be aware that there are pitfalls and quicksand pools all over the place. Some of those are obvious and some are not. Go into this thing with eyes wide open and keep them open. Don't get into a habit of jumping your kid around all over the place. Softball people notice that. It is a relatively small circle. Don't always look to get your kid on the best possible team whether that means an "A" team or a "B" team with an open roster - open for the next "A" refugee or nomad free agent kid who comes along to take your kid's playing time away.
Going back to the three forum questions, there's one I haven't dealt with in any detail. That's the one the Div 3 college player asked. That wasn't actually a forum question but one I received in an e-mail from a particular woman. I replied to her that she had chosen, for reasons unbeknownst to me, to play Division 3 ball. I asked her for more information about that decision. Then I got to the heart of the matter. I said, "How do you like your professors? How is the academic life at your institution? Do they challenge you. Do the other kids challenge you? Do you feel yourself stretched intellectually, emotionally, personally? Are you getting out of your college experience about what you thought you would going in? How would you feel right now if you had to miss numerous classes to attend practice, lift weights, or travel to Florida or someplace else to get your head bashed in by Texas, UCLA, or some other top level Div I program which plays the sport as a virtual profession?
I suggested to her that the reason she was in Div 3 was because ultimately she had chosen to do that. Somewhere, some how, some way, she had chosen to put softball second to something else. It may have been a close second but it was second nonetheless. I told her there's nothing wrong with that. She cannot most likely play softball for her entire allotment of remaining days on this planet. If she wants to be a doctor, lawyer, special education teacher, or anything else, does it really matter that she is disappointed that her Div 3 college team wasn't good enough to play for a championship? Does it really matter that she's the best kid on her team? Does she need to throw away everything she has right now in order to find a better level of competition? She replied that I had given her a lot to think about. I'm pretty sure she decided to stay the course at the current school. But if she didn't, I hope she gathered up all available information and made the right decision for herself.
As a final comment, I advise you to see this whole sport thing as a growth process. Don't hide down in rec in order to be the star of your team of non-players. Come out into the travel arena and give it a shot. You have some goals for what you want to get out of the sport and while recreational softball is a great thing to do on a Saturday afternoon for two hours in May, it has its limitations if a kid is getting pretty good. If all you want is maybe to eventually play high school ball, go watch one or 12 of those games and gather a little information. If your kid will be going to my kid's high school, you may learn something you hadn't anticipated. That is, just about the entire team is made up of travel players. Many of those play "A" level ball. A few are "B" travel players. The "C" level players are on the team too but they are the kids who go out and throw with the outfielders between innings or chase down the foul balls in the parking lot. They do not get in games. The kids who only played rec ball usually don't make the team. The few who do generally carry the water and equipment. That is one of the ramifications of decisions made long ago.Labels: parenting
Permanent Link: Decisions, Decisions
Shake It Off!
by Dave
Monday, April 02, 2007
Tara, a softball mom, writes in with a question:
Over the years I have tried pep talks, discussions about feelings, rewards (even ice cream and tennis shoes!), negative sanctions, sitting her (when she was on my rec team once), visualizing, positive affirmations and probably everything in between to get my very competitive, small but quite athletic 11 year old daughter to control her emotions. She's had coaches "talk her down," be very sympathetic, sit her, discuss the problem in front of the whole team (shaming) and probably more, and still the problem persists. She was the starting pitcher on her 10U Tournament team this last summer and she’s a fanatic about form and game function – the whole sport just turns her on. Her creative writing papers at school frequently include playing in college, coaching someday and getting the sport back into the Olympics. She is great when she's doing well, but when her performance falters her confidence can drop and she just falls apart. Recently she's been able to "laugh it off" more when she strikes out, which really isn't that often, but at 11 years old this is getting ridiculous. I am just wondering if you have seen anything that is effective with such a child.
My first reaction to this question is, "oh sure, I know what to tell you." But as I sit here thinking about yesterday's tournament, I feel totally unqualified to answer the question. There's a lot to this. There aren't any easy answers. But I'll give it a go because it may help me figure out what to do with my kids!
The first thing that comes to mind with the subject of ballplayer meltdown is the psychology which gives rise to it. If you've got a kid who melts down after she makes a bad play or throw, strikes out, or walks in a run, you've got a kid who cares about the game and her performance. It may or may not be a confidence issue. But it is definitely a caring issue. A kid who cares about the game and her own personal performance is at least better than a kid who doesn't care about anything. I'd rather a kid have emotional highs and lows than one who is always in some "Stepford Wives" even keel.
I once thought my older daughter completely unflappable. She was out there pitching or whatever and didn't seem to mind doing something wrong. She could walk the bases loaded and then strike out the next three on 9 pitches. Everyone said, "I wish my kid were like that. She always worries about the next pitch, never the last one. That's a really good quality." Then my kid realized she was pretty good. And every "mistake," no matter how insignificant, became an "I suck" moment.
Yesterday I was short players and had no choice but to play my budding star at short, a position she's never played. She's a very good third baseman with decent reaction speed and a good arm. She was always a little slow afoot until we put her into agility training. Now I'd have to say her foot speed, especially in the field, is well above average. So, she's out in the field with a runner on second and this kid hits a smash linedrive up the middle. My kid ranges to her left about three steps and makes a great short hop play on the ball. The speed with which she got there would lead you to believe she was moving before the batter hit the ball. She was Johnny (um, Sally) on the spot. The runner crossed in front of her and she reached to tag her out but misses by about 2 inches (actually she tagged her but the ump missed it). She then threw to first and missed getting the runner out by half a step. I was so amazed at her head's up play that I was speechless for a couple seconds. I couldn't believe she fielded the ball let alone had the presence to try to get the lead runner and then to even think about making the throw to first. It was split-second play and she had done everything right. I looked out at her to tell her what a good play she had made but when my eyes met hers, I saw she was crying. She wasn't blubbering or anything like that but there were clearly tears in her eyes. I was a little surprised by her emotions.
After the tournament was over, I discussed the play with her. I asked why she had gotten so emotional about it. She explained that A) she had been very tired during that game (our third in 5 hours) and that while she knows she did most things right, she expects more out of herself. She said, "BUT, I want to be really good!" I said, "OK, but after the play, you cannot have that one back. There are no do-overs in softball. You can only attack the next play. And, if you've got tears in your eyes, you can't." You've got to learn to shake it off.
In another game we had yesterday, a meaningless preliminary round game - our first game together as a team, we were down four runs in the last inning and tied the score. Then we got a runner on second via a double. A wild pitch put the runner on third. Then a batter struck out to put us down to our last out. No problem - up came a kid who was 4 for 4 to that point. I thought about doing a delayed steal with our baserunner because the pitcher was inattentive but I opted for letting this kid hit, I was so sure she would line a single and we would win. She got down 1-2 and with three minutes left before the game timed out, I called her over and said, "hey, there's nothin' to this. You've been pounding the ball today. relax and just make contact. You got this girl." Strike three!
So after the game as we were gathering up our stuff to run to the next field, I noticed this girl was crying. She had been complaining about some pain in her wrists so I grabbed her and we walked down the third base line. I said, "I can see you crying but I'm not sure why. Are your wrists hurting really bad? Is something else hurting you? Because if you're crying for a reason other than pain, I really don't understand why. You didn't do anything yet today worth crying over." Then I talked to her about missed opportunities and how the best thing about this sport is we are going to have 50 - 70 games this year. I told her she'll have plenty of opportunities to hit that game winning hit. She calmed down and had a good day in our next two games. She shook it off.
Another little anecdote I have about this involves my younger kid, not an emotional rock, when she was 9, playing 10U. We were in the elimination round of a tournament, playing against the best team - the best team next to us. It was about 95 out at 3:00 and the game went to the sixth. She had pitched two and a half games the day before and given up maybe one unearned run. It was the sixth inning of a 0-0 game. She had allowed just one baserunner in the first five. But we couldn't hit their stud pitcher either. In the bottom of the fifth, my kid walked the first batter on 4 pitches. Then she struck out the next kid on 3. The next batter hit a slow grounder which the second baseman misplayed. I could see my kid getting red in the face - not from anger but from the heat. She had about had it for the day. I said to her hang in there and work the batter. You can get us out of this. She walked the next batter and bases were loaded with just one out. But she sucked it up and struck out the next hitter. Bottom of the last, 2 outs bases loaded 0-0! The next kid hit a pop fly to left where we had a very young kid playing. She never had a chance. Three runs scored. Ballgame over. My kid was very upset and crying. We talked that one over for quite a while and she finally realized that this was actually one of her better performances and there really was nothing to get sad about. She just had to shake it off and she did.
My point at this stage of the piece is, the sport of softball is largely about what you do AFTER a failure of some sort. You can be the greatest athlete on the planet but if you do not learn to deal with the emotions of the game - learn how to shake it off - you cannot succeed. As much as we teach fundamentals of fielding and throwing, hitting, pitching, etc., the bigger lesson is how to shake it off - forget the last play because you can't have it back - and make the next one.
There's another kind of meltdown I want to bring up here for the sake of a complete discussion. That is a meltdown not directed inwards. That is the meltdown where a player shows up another or openly criticizes her. That is a much greater evil to avoid.
I was watching a 14U game in which a really bad team was playing. I know they're bad because I know the team. They have 2 bona fide 14U travel players and the remainder is a bunch of weak 14s who have never played travel before, and some extremely inexperienced 13s, 12s, and even one 11. The 2 "bona fide" 14s would probably make most travel teams in our area but they wouldn't be on the "A" squad and most likely wouldn't see much action on elimination days. One would see more action than the other as she is a decent pitcher. She's been clocked at 60 which I don't doubt because I know her coach and he's stood behind me clocking pitchers - not my idea - when I tried them out. He doesn't have a fast gun.
This pitcher is the only real "player" on the team and she knows it. She's a cocky player who pitches most of their games. But she is definitely hittable and when somebody gets into one of her pitches and the defensive player botches it - which happens most of the time - this girl begins showing up her players. It begins with a look to the other bona fide 14U player. Their eyes meet and they exchange a "knowing glance." Then on the next one, she throws her head back in disgust. Later, she'll say something like "Oh come on!" n And from there it breaks down further and further. She'll actually tell a team member to her face "you suck."
This outwardly turned meltdown spells disaster for a player. There is no such thing on this planet as a player so good that she has a right to tell another that she sucks. Nobody is that good to begin with and, more to the point, that sort of bad behavior only sets the stage for more errors in the field. That'll lead to more meltdowns and eventually a complete breakdown of the entire team. They'll never win a game after some point in this process. Coaches should be on the lookout for this sort of thing and put a stop to it immediately, abruptly, and rudely if necessary. You can't tolerate that for a moment. If you do, not only will you be hurting your team, you'll also be hurting your superstar. She'll never get anywhere with that attitude.
I've gone a little astray. We're talking about inwardly aimed meltdowns. But I thought it necessary to discuss the other kind because sometimes, probably all too often. the inwardly becomes the outwardly. That's a danger parents need to be aware of.
I've seen parents actually encourage "showing up" teammates. The really funny thing about that is the parents and the kid are out there thinking the kid is really good and it's too bad she can't find a good team where she wouldn't have to worry about her teammates being so bad. The reason she can't find such a team is all the good teams already know her! We all sit out there on the sidelines telling stories about kids like this. We speak of them by name and everybody within 60 miles knows who they are.
If you're the parent of a 14 year old kid who throws 60, hits the cover off the ball, has a rocket arm, and makes most plays in the field look easy, you may be wondering why your darling daughter cannot make the cut when she tries out for "A" class teams. She's as good as those other girls. Why didn't they invite her back? You may be wondering why you always have to settle for poor teams. The reason is everybody knows who you are and wouldn't invite you to play for them if they had a roster of 8 players. They'd rather forfeit than lose with you on their squad. You can't see the poison mark on your face but you're the one who put it there. We can all see it clearly.
We coaches are a club as well - at our unofficial meetings, we often discuss "poison kids" while suggesting it is in each of our best interests to exclude them from our teams. Some coaches don't listen to that. They learn the hard way.
So I guess the moral of that story is, we really do need to find a way to teach our kids not to meltdown, to just shake it off. Tara says, I've "tried pep talks, discussions about feelings, rewards (even ice cream and tennis shoes!), negative sanctions, sitting her (when she was on my rec team once), visualizing, positive affirmations and probably everything in between." Nothing seems to work. I too have tried many of these things and I can't say I have THE answer. But here are my thoughts.
Your first efforts should probably be via talk. I would point out that the absolute best pitchers do not have 0.00 era's. That means they do give up runs, however infrequently that may be. The best hitters in the world do not bat 1.000. An exceptional hitter might hit .500. That means she "fails" 50% of the time. I was looking through the stats of a pretty good Division One college team and noticed they had one .400 hitter. Their next best was .320. After that, most everybody hit in the low two hundreds with one struggling starter "on the interstate," hitting in the hundreds. That means more than half of the hitters on a good team, at the highest levels, "fail" 80% of the time.
One girl I've coached is a huge major league baseball fan. Her father asked her if she thought so and so was a good hitter. She said, "yes." he asked her what the guy's batting average was and she said three hundred and something. he then asked her if she knew what .300 meant. She didn't. So he showed her how to calculate a batting average and then showed her what .300 means. he then pulled up the guy's situational stats and showed her that he was a .350 hitter with runners in scoring position. He then showed her that while the guy was a good hitter in the last inning with the game on the line and a runner in scoring position, he was certainly not perfect. He pointed out to his daughter that being successful just less than 50% of the time meant a player was a true star, an all-stater, a team leader, a great player. A light seemed to flash on in this girl's head and she seems to understand just how hard she has been on herself. I like this technique as a starting point.
The next thing I think a parent or coach can try in order to calm down a meltdown kid is another kind of discussion. That discussion should point out that there are players on the other team just like them. If you're up in the last inning with the winning run on base and get yourself the game winning hit, remember that there is another person out there who has failed - the pitcher or defensive player who missed the play. Right now they're the one doing the crying or otherwise melting down. If they are not crying or otherwise melting down, so much the better. Point out their reaction or lack thereof. Learn from other kids who already learned the lesson and who don't melt down.
Tara says she tries both positive and negative reinforcement, even sitting her down when she melts. I think that last point is an excellent idea. But you've got to get a coach who understands this, buys into it and has the courage of his convictions. if your kid is a superstar, the coach may not be willing to sit her. He isn't doing her any favors but you can't always convince a kid to act in your kid's long-term best interests. If you're the coach, whether the kid in question is yours or somebody else's, you should know that you're setting the stage for disaster by letting a meltdown kid melt. You need to work with the parents to resolve this issue. I suggest telling the kid that if she melts, she sits. Then you MUST follow through every time.
I tried this threat of sitting with 100% follow-through with one of my kids and it seemed to work pretty well. That wasn't a game meltdown situation but it was a meltdown along the same lines. The day I threw her out of practice and then wouldn't let her join the team meeting afterwards seemed to strike a chord in her. I did say that right, didn't I? That's right, I kicked my own child out of practice and made her stand there with tears rolling down her eyes while we conducted a team meeting after practice. It didn't sit very well with my kid or her teammates. I guess they figured out I was serious after that. You melt, you sit.
I just remembered another coaching experience I had. We had a very young team which was playing together in a fall league. It was actually parts from two teams and we were just playing together for fun in a pretty competitive league. But my objective was just to play for the experience. I used underage pitchers and players as frequently as I used the better kids, including the few star players we had. This one kid, one of our two best, started copping an attitude. I had seen the attitude developing for a while. It started out inwardly directed but quickly spread outwardly. At first this kid said, "I suck." That mentality was supported by her foul mouthed mother. Then I heard this kid was sitting in the dugout saying "we suck." I knew what was coming next so I carefully picked a fight with her mother and kicked the lot of them off the team. And her father was my only assistant coach! The incremental improvement the rest of the kids made over the next three practices more than made up for this "one-of-two-team-stars!"
So sitting or removal from a team is a technique I suggest. But the removal thing is awfully harsh. I reserve that for the absolute worst outwardly aimed meltdown kids who are poison to the team. With the other kids, the ones who are still inwardly melting, I try to talk them down from the ledge.
I am not an advocate of positive reinforcement in this particular area. I am a positive reinforcer in general but that's a technique I use to reward good general behavior like fielding a ball or throwing with good mechanics. I don't believe in positive reinforcement where really bad, harmful behavior is concerned. As a parent, I would never scream at my kid or smack her butt because she didn't eat all her dinner or some such minor behavior. But I believe firmly in the use of physical punishment when physical danger is involved.
When we brought home the second baby and the first experimented by pounding her on the head, I used physical punishment. When my kids tried to put their fingers in electrical sockets, I used physical punishment. When they fight like cats and dogs, I usually go verbally ballistic because I think it shows them what they sound like. And where minor behavior problems are exhibited, I like to use words to discuss the thing over. Most of all, I like to point out that I know exactly what the motivation is. And if we're talking about a kid melting down after an arguably bad play, I like to ask them how they did with the tears rolling down their face. I like to point out that they cannot possibly play as well as they want or are capable of when they are melting down.
Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't.
I do like visualization and relaxation techniques to generally develop a ballplayer. But Tara has tried that and it hasn't worked so I don't want to waste time on it per se. Instead, I'm going to transcend visualization and move right into the next logical step. As sportscaster Warner Wolf says, "let's go to the videotape!"
If you've got a videotape or digital recorder, I have a suggestion for how to use this to deal with a meltdown kid - your own meltdown kid. Turn the thing on every time she melts. Hopefully you will be able to capture a play subsequent to the beginning of the melt and capture an instance in which the melt actually harmed her performance. Don't let her know she is being recorded. She'll probably go ballistic if she sees that and it will only make things worse. But tape her meltdown episode if you can. Then when things are quiet and devoid of stress, tell her you have something you want her to see. Before you show her, make her understand that this session is not optional. have her sit calmly and discuss the meltdown thing rationally. If you've picked the right moment, she should be receptive to the discussion. if she's not, choose another time to show her the tape.
If you've got your kid in the right frame of mind and she is receptive to the discussion about how melting down hurts performance, explain to her that you are both on the same team. You're not on Kaitlyn's team. You're not on Ashley's team. You're on her team. Your only interest in this gosh darn sport is for her benefit. Everything you say and do is about her - not you, not the team, not anybody else. You're only interest is in making her enjoy the game more and you;re concerned about this meltdown thing. Once she is completely receptive, show her the tape of what she looks like during a meltdown. Show her the bad play she made after the meltdown occurred. Show her how these outbursts hurt her.
If you've gotten to this point without, well let's be honest, another meltdown, you shouldn't stop there. I would suggest you point out what it means to be poison and that melting down directly leads to that even though it may not seem like a logical progression now. The I would suggest to her that if the meltdowns continue you are not going to allow her to play the sport anymore. Threaten her lightly - not directly. Tell her that you are watching her development as a ballplayer and you have real concerns. You are just now beginning to think about making her stop playing. You haven't made up your mind yet but you are considering it. It may not be until a year or more from now but if these meltdowns continue, you may one day no longer allow her to play the sport.
Once you have made it clear you are on her team, how bad of a trend this is, how ugly it is, and that you are actually quite serious about never letting her play ball again, I suggest you then move into the cause of the melts. She'll probably tell you that she isn't pleased with her playing at least some of the time. You should discuss the success-failure rate in this sport then and explain that there isn't a human being on the planet who can do it every time. Discuss the batting average and era things. Talk about Cat Osterman's failures at winning the NCAA championships. Talk about anything you and she know about in terms of failures and successes. Also point out that much of the time the other team and players have something to do with you and your team's failures. It is a game (certainly not "just a game") and that means there are always going to be winners and losers. But melting down is never going to help her or her team.
They say the best approach to stopping those 3 year old temper tantrums is to ignore the kid throwing the tantrum. I've found that to be true with my own kids. But when the kid is 10, 11, 12, 13 or older, you've got to do more than ignore the problem. My personal opinion is showing them what they look like when they melt (essentially throw a temper tantrum) is as good a means of anger management as any other. If you don't have a video camera, the money you spend for one might just be the best parenting money you ever spend. It isn't about softball. It's about the kid.
Softball is certainly a game. It isn't "just a game" but it is a game. There are always going to be winners and losers in terms of scores, stats and standings. But if your kid melts and doesn't learn to control that, she is going to be more than a loser of games. She is going to lose, or at least not win as much as she should, at the game of life. Teach her to shake it off.Labels: coaching, mental toughness, parenting, Visualization
Permanent Link: Shake It Off!
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