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Hopes, Dreams, Goals and Such
by Dave
Monday, August 31, 2009
It is really important to have dreams. It is just as important to have goals. But what trumps both is differentiating between the two because doing so changes our actions and determines outcomes.
Dreams are wishes or desires which often exceed our realistic expectations. We hope they come true and we move in some ways to make them happen. But we don't necessarily expect them to come true. They are the upper limits of what we think we can attain.
Goals are things we believe we can achieve. We want them to come true and we act to make them reality. We expect to accomplish them. They are possible given our perceived abilities and ability to improve, and we expect that once they come to fruition, there will be new ones to replace them.
Differentiating between dreams and goals is important because, in the case of dreams, we do not take every possible step to achieve them immediately. I know a few folks whose dream it is to win the Mega-Millions lottery. But they do not mortgage the house or rob their savings in order to buy tickets. Whenever they happen to be near a lottery machine and have a spare dollar in their pocket, they buy a ticket. For a few hours, their dreams are filled with luxury automobiles, perhaps a new oversized house, or fantastic vacations. Then they go online and, if they are really lucky, they learn that they won two bucks to buy another two tickets for the next drawing. They dream about winning millions but they do not act constantly and consistently to turn dreams into reality.
In the case of goals, one does take many actions with the accomplishment in mind. A student sets a goal of achieving a B or B+ in some subject, as opposed to a C+ like they received last time, and they try a little harder every day to improve their understanding of the subject. Instead of devoting 10 minutes to the course's homework, they put in a half hour. Maybe more time is spent checking answers on tests. You know how that game goes.
With respect to fastpitch softball, the same principles hold true. Kids, parents, and coaches all have dreams and goals for themselves, their kids, and/or their teams. They may muse about making it to the final game of the world championship, dream about hitting the big homerun, or picture their child being recruited to play for the WCWS winning team. When we're talking about some Gatorade player of the year, some team which has already competed at the highest levels, or a kid, team or organization which has a realistic shot at achieving a truly noteworthy accomplishment, well, then we are talking about goals. But when we are watching our 11 year old daughter win the town rec championship, we need to temper or expectations and differentiate between dreams and goals.
This is all very rudimentary but I can tell you that often times kids, their parents and team coaches have unrealistic dreams and they act as if those are actually their goals. I would never suppose to take anyone's dreams away from them. I wouldn't even want to temper those, not even slightly.
When my daughter was four, she told me she wanted to be an astronaut. She had this little stuffed lion pocketbook which she cherished and carried around with her most of the time. So when she told me about her dream of flying off into space, I told her I was 99% sure that NASA would allow someone to bring their lion pocketbook with them into space provided that they had owned it a long time and kept it clean. She was very happy to learn this important detail and decided to wipe down her pocketbook.
When, years later, she told me she wanted to play basketball in college, well that was a different story. I thought about it for a minute and all that came to mind was, you are not going to be any taller than 5-6, you're not very quick, you can't dribble, and you only made two shots all of last rec season. So I said, "that's nice, and then we can come watch you play at a big stadium." She also liked the image that conjured up.
Early on in her softball career, my daughter began to play travel ball. She told me she wanted to be a softball player when she went to college. She was 11 at the time and playing on a 12U team of girls who were almost all 13 as of the beginning of the season. It was winter and the outlook for any playing time beyond a few innings on Saturday was not real good. There were four other pitchers on this team. The other girls had played more softball and were more in tune with the pace of the game than my kid was. As winter wore on, we worked very hard on her pitching. I had taken the focus off playing college ball (the dream) and placed it on pitching well enough to earn some innings (a realistic goal). She worked very hard and by the time we got to playing outside, she was pretty clearly the second best pitcher on the team. She had earned playing time through hard work and devotion to accomplishing a goal. She had not merely dreamed.
I tell you this story because very often at tryouts, I see kids who are decent pitchers or players but who could use more time in the laboratory. They make travel teams but do not practice real hard because they are not focused on goals. Their parents field the call from the team coach inviting them to join the team. After they get past the ancillary issues of cost, type of schedule, frequency of practices, etc., they get around to what matters most, "how much pitching time is Jillian going to get," "do you see her playing the infield or outfield," or "exactly where do you see her fitting into the roster right now?"
On numerous occassions, I have had kids play for me or seen kids on a team my kid plays for, who make a team, inquire about their status, and then never again work towards a goal because their dreams of playing for a winning team or of being the star pitcher, catcher or shortstop preclude them from making the realistic conclusion and sacrifice that they need to work and improve their game. On one occassion, I had a pitcher who I envisioned would develop over the winter, come out in spring and be primarily a Saturday pitcher who might also see some action for a couple innings in the field and then hopefully earn more Sunday time as she got her feet under her. Her parents were very proactive about my plans for their daughter, as you would expect. I explained about the need to work and earn playing and pitching time. Then when we got indoors for some live-pitched batting practice, it was immediately evident that she had not so much as picked up a ball since we ended our fall season a few months before. She couldn't pitch more than five minutes of batting practice without getting winded. She couldn't get a single pitch by our weakest hitters and we had a weak hitting team. They tee'd off on her and she got too tired to continue after the second batter.
At the time, I wrote this off and decided to put her in to pitch practice throughout the entire off-season to see what happened. One time she didn't have her mitt with her and could not pitch. Several times she couldn't make practice because she had rec basketball practice or games - her parents told me it was school ball because I had made an allowance for girls playing school sports to miss practice. I subsequently learned she was missing for rec basketball. I still wrote off the experience and hoped the kid would turn it around in the spring.
To be quite honest, that kid did not throw any better in April than she had in late December. When we played our first friendly, I could not, in good conscience, stick her into the circle. And they left my team precipitously. They blamed me, no doubt. I had broken a promise to pitch the kid. I had indeed but it was forced on me by her lack of work. She had unearned the right to pitch.
Another kid I had on my team was a pretty good hitter. She was moving up a class and an age group when she joined the team but she was a kid who I thought would find a decent amount of success. She was taking hitting instruction once a week and her swing was getting into a groove. We did some batting practices and everything looked pretty good. She was hitting the ball sharply. At some point, I noticed that there was the beginnings of a mechanical breakdown and she stopped hitting the ball. I didn't think much about it. Kids, even those in lessons, get into slumps where their coach is trying to correct something and they struggle for a while. Then her parent told me she was going to go "back to those lessons" as soon as the season started.
I couldn't understand what the parent was thinking when they halted this kid's hitting lessons. I knew money was not the issue. If it had been, it would have been a better idea to go once every two weeks or once every month. But this parent just plain stopped the lessons because we weren't in-season with the plan of jumping right back in whenever the weather turned warm. I'm not sure they ever started back to lessons. I do know the kid's swing never again looked right that year. She did not have the measure of success I expected from her when I put her on the team.
These are but two experiences I have had in which players acted as if making a team was the end goal of their lives. I can't count the number of apparently similar situations I have witnessed over the years. Some kid is the star shortstop for a team and she puts her glove away in late fall only to pick it up once a week during indoor training but never attends any clinic or gets out to field some grounders when the weather is agreeable. Another kid barely makes the cut, throws in the yard whenever the temperature rises above 33, goes to every clinic on the planet, makes her mom or dad get her out on the field to get grounders under threat of temper tantrum whenever they sit down for a millisecond. The team gets out for some tournament and the star can't make a play while the scrub acts like a human vacuum cleaner. Who do you think deserves to be SS? Who do you think the other 10 kids want at short?
Coaches are all too familiar with these kinds of happenings. We try out some kid in the fall and she forces us to buy new balls because the ones we were using are now coverless. Then we play real games and kid goes 0-fer-forever. We beg some tremendous athlete to join our team and she becomes the biggest liability on the field. I've heard pitching coaches who teach a large volume of kids talk about the freshman wunderkind who never got any better and was relegated to the bench in her sophomore year when the new promising freshman who played for some out-of-state travel team arrives.
A fellow I know had his daughter on some decent travel team. She was the youngest kid on that team, you might argue she was the twelfth addition to the roster. As tournament season proceeded, he began to notice that she played little on Sundays and not more than a game and a half on Saturdays. He began to get upset because he felt that much of her lack of improvement had to do with a lack of game playing time. Then, when another parent got very upset over her daughters perceived lack of playing time and voiced her disatisfaction directly to the coach, this fellow wondered if maybe he should do the same thing. He decided to think on it for 24 hours before saying anything.
This fellow, while thinking on the situation, placed a call to a relative who had several daughters that had played high level travel ball and then gone on to play in college. He explained the situation and asked for advice. The relative told him this was normal, a good experience for the kid, and not a circumstance which would be resolved by cajoling the coach into playing the kid more. He decided that the relative was right and while his kid's playing time did not improve during the remainder of the season, he learned a great deal and so did the kid.
The other parent, the one who had voiced her disatisfaction, got out of control. Her perceptions were off to begin with. At one tournament, her kid played about 3 innings in each of the team's three Sunday games. She complained to the coach that she was upset because her kid didn't play an inning, "not a single inning!" The coach informed her that she was way off the mark and he had the book to prove it. She threatened to remove her kid from the team. The kid's playing time ticked up a notch but when her mistakes started costing the team games, the situation went backwards and the kid did leave the team.
The parents of the kid most likely blame the coach but I can tell you that most travel coaches in the area know the full story. The kid is more or less marked. There are many teams and coaches who would be willing to give the kid a shot on their teams. But as soon as something similar happens, it is expected and the kid pays the price. That is, when the kid is not in a game for a couple innings and the parents complain about it, as they always do, coaches get their backs up and then start regularly removing the kid anytime she makes a mistake. The kid didn't learn anything. The parents didn't learn anything. The local softball community is wise to the games they play. The result benefits nobody.
As I said earlier, goals have a couple important facets. They need to be realistically attainable. Let's say you play a game and don't get a hit. Maybe your first goal in the next game should be getting a hit. If you've yet to make contact, grounding one back to the pitcher is a goal. I was watching a scrimmage recently involving one organization's kids. They put together two teams and the purpose of the scrimmage (as well as practicers and subsequent scrimmages) was to divide kids by ability and determine who would make which team. A kid from the prior year's B team was batting against the number two pitcher from last year's A team. The father of the B player yelled, "hit one out." The kid struck out! Now, I've never seen this kid hit one anywhere near any fence, let alone get an extra-base-hit off a very good pitcher. She should have been looking to make contact, perhaps get a single. But she began to tense up and swung way too hard because she needed to attain her father's apparent goal of going yard. She acted on the dream instead of accomplishing an attainable goal.
I remember one time my kid was called upon to bunt. She fouled the first one off. I cursed under my breath and yelled, "come on, get it down." She fouled the second one off. She took a pitch for a ball and then laced a lucky single. Another parent told me to chill out because "she got a hit and she's way too good of a hitter to be bunting in that situation." I cursed and told him that "my kid always gets her bunts down" and whether she is too good of a hitter to bunt there or not, that's what the coach asked her to do and as far as I'm concerned, she failed. I also told him, "as far as I'm concerned, if you can't get bunts down, you're not a softball player."
There are very few kids who can hit homeruns. There are very few kids who can be counted on to get hits in key situations. But every kid can get a bunt down. Just about every kid can hit a grounder up the middle when there is a runner on third and less than two outs. There are attainable goals in the shortrun which need to trump the dreams of achieving travel softball immortality. Players would be well advised to focus on something attainable and then set their sights a bit higher after the attainable has been achieved before shooting for the moon.
Tied directly into the issue of goals vs. dreams, of setting attainable goals rather than living and acting as if the loftiest dreams are the goals you should shoot for, is the concept of environmental factors. It is never a great idea in competitive situations to spend too much time and effort contemplating what others are doing. But on the other hand, one should not be oblivious to the competition. Players, parents, and coaches should take a look around themselves and see what others are doing.
I have had occassion to see teams play games in which one wipes out the other. The coaches of the victim team watch the other and comment about how well coached and trained they are. On a few of these occassions, I have tried to learn what sort of preparation the winning side does. Often I hear things like three, even four weekly practices year-round, or a large amount of fundraising which is then used to hire one or several professional coaches to come in a train the girls. I hear that this team has been trained together for three or more years under a particularly gifted coach. Perhaps this or that team is fully funded by some rich parent; they get over a hundred girls trying out because it is free; and all the best athletes from three states join this team because not only are they fully funded but they have the best training facilities available anywhere. You can't compete with that but what you can do is make the most out of what you can realistically do and what you have.
In these kids of circumstances, I never get the feeling that the coaches for the losing side appreciate the sort of preparation their opponent has done. They think if only they did X, got more committed athletes, or perhaps hired any old professional instructor for four weeks of lessons, the result would look like their opponent.
This breeds frustration more often than any measure of success. Coaches get wrapped up in this dream of coaching a team "like that one" and fail to recognize that the measure of their success is degree of improvement not beating the Olympic team. Their goals should be to improve their teams, not to have 9 batters come to the plate with swings that hold the potential of hitting one out every at-bat, or of having defenses that turn two every time there is a grounder and a runner on first. Coaches need to realistically assess the level of ability they have before them and work on devising practices which will improve their team and remove its deficiencies.
Similarly, players need to be aware of what others they play with and against are doing. I can't count the number of times I have heard a kid or their parent exclaim that so and so just "isn't much of a runner. She'll never be fast." I don't know if you all have been watching or not but fastpitch softball happens to be a sport! Running happens to be one of the primary skills. If you can hit a ball 300 feet 50% of the time, maybe you can get away with not running 50% of the time. Otherwise, you're out of luck. If you find yourself on a team which believes it can cover your lack of speed by positioning super-fast girls around you, great, but otherwise you sort of, kind of have to work on your foot speed.
It does not take very much for a kid who cannot run to get out in the yard or at some field and run 10-20 sprints a couple times a week. If you've got a few sheckles, it isn't all that expensive to enroll in an agility clinic once or twice a week. It does not so much matter that you'll never get to first in 2.7. If your current time is 4.0, I guarantee you that you can get that down to 3.5 with just a little effort and not too much time away from text messaging, IMing, or gaming. Think of it this way, when your friends say "what have you been doing," you'll actually have something to say other than "nothin." If you keep it up beyond a couple months, I'd be willing to bet you'll get down to 3.4, then 3.3, maybe even 3.2. Then all that embarrassed talk of "I can't (my kid can't) run" will disappear.
Pitchers in particular need to assess what the competition is doing. If all the other girls are throwing 4 times per week, 10 months of the year, you may be a big shot at 12U but the other girls are going to gain ground on you before high school if you make a habit of really working hard two days a week, only during real season, and only if it doesn't rain on your designated throwing day. I remember having a rough go of it in Little League all-stars. For whatever reason, the manager had designated some kid to be one of just two pitchers. I talked to her about practicing. She cheerfully came to me before one of her starts and told me she practiced every day that week. Well, she said, "not Thursday and Friday because it was raining but every other day." I asked her how much she had thrown and she boastfully told me "about twenty pitches." As you would expect, she got whalloped. She no longer pitches.
But that's an extreme situation and that's low level ball. I have seen similar situations at higher levels. One kid I can think of throws 5-6 days per week for hour and a half sessions. She perfects her pitches and can kill a nat on her catcher's shin guards with a curveball. Another kid has good stuff but throws only when she feels like it (like after she gets beat or when some other kid on her team throws better than she does). Eventually the kid who really works is going to consistently do better than the one who acts only when the spirit moves her. I have seen high school pitchers who are complete maniacs about practicing even though nobody, and I do mean nobody, ever hits them. I know of one girl who is in actual lessons four days per week. She is a throwing machine!
Not everybody can throw as long or as often as the two girls I'm referencing but everyone can plan and execute a program to improve their pitching. It takes a lot to be that good. You're not going to compete with these two girls unless you can realistically say that you've worked nearly as hard no matter how much talent you actually have.
In the middle of the pack, I cannot tell you how many times I have seen young promising pitchers who for one reason or another become satisfied and stop trying to get better. The typical scenario involves a girl who was lights out at 10U, 12U or maybe as late as 14U. She forgets what it took to get to that point and becomes enamored with her "talent." She doesn't work. She doesn't perfect her pitches and learn new ones. Then the hitters start catching up to her. She reacts with a spurt of hard work and then fizzles again. Then her competition begins to pass her and its too late.
We often see youngish pitchers who were once very good but who do not develop real command. Sometimes even their rudimentary control leaves them for extended periods. To be clear, I speak about control when I am referecing issues of throwing strikes and walking batters. I reference command when I mean actually hitting spots to get batters out. Pitchers without control sometimes hit spots. Pitchers with command sometimes walk batters, sometimes lots of them. But pitchers generally first get control and then look to develop command. Pitchers without command get pummeled at higher levels. Pitchers without control walk even number 9 batters on poor hitting teams.
I have watched pitchers who lose their command or fail to develop it. When the existing stock of batters gets better, they often get hit hard and then lose their confidence rapidly. They either go back to B ball and last a few more years or they give up pitching.
When younger pitcher lose control, they usually blame it on the umps or claim they have injuries which are never discovered by medical people. They walk too many batters and before long they find themselves not inside the circle. They seem to be better than that other kid but the coach just won't pitch them. They get invited to join teams but not as pitchers. Eventually the dream diminishes and they learn to play other positions or quit the game altogether.
All these little stories of failure obviously share a common theme. They are about kids who do not practice their craft. I believe much of this is caused by a focus on unachievable dreams rather than attainable goals. I would never try to shoot down your dreams. I would never even suggest that you cannot achieve them. But you've got to get there by working on goals and then stepping up those goals when you achieve your first ones. Before you hit the game winning homerun in the D-1 WCWS, you must hit the ball to begin with. Try that first. Then perfect your swing at the tee in your garage. Then be the star rec player. Then test travel and learn to be a good hitter there. By the way, don't frown when you get the bunt sign, instead lay one down.
You may not ever get to the D-1 WCWS. You may have to settle for the D-2 or 3, maybe even the junior college version. You may have to settle for just making some college team. Perhaps that college scholarship your dreaming of will only cover 10% of your school costs. Maybe you'll just barely make a D-3 school team but get academic money that covers the whole thing while attending a great academic institution which propels you to a wonderful career.
Maybe your dreams only extend out as far as pitching for the high school team in the conference tournament. Maybe they only go so far as 14u or 16U B tournament ball. You still need to focus on attainable goals and then make them happen. Before you do that, you need to determine which of those thoughts in your head are dreams and which really ought to be goals. You need to differentiate and then get to work.
I hope this discussion is helpful to players, parents and coaches. I could say lots more on goals. But I'll leave it at this because this thing has gotten way longer than I thought it would. And besides, I'll need something for another day.Labels: coaching, parenting, work ethic
 
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