Like every year for the past seven, I was making my way to a spring training site excited for the opportunities and possibilities that were ahead. Another season, new players, same plan as the year before. Develop players to become better athletes and men. The feeling of walking into the clubhouse as spring training starts is such an incredible thing. The energy of the staff and atmosphere is one I have become familiar with. There are no wins and losses at the point, only optimism of what is to come. Schedules are being drawn up and folks are settling in.
As you unpack your bag, familiar faces come over to check in and see how the offseason went. I enjoy this part the most. We become so busy over the next four weeks that it’s impossible to get this type of time for catching up. As we get situated and map out a game plan, we gear up for what is the grind of spring training. Except, this one was not to be. A few days in, before we could even get a rhythm, the talk of Covid-19 shutting down camp became a reality. Within a weeks time, our entire staff was back home feeling like the last few days were a blur.
Once you learn the routine of spring training your brain gets wired a certain way. You know the long mental grind and prepare for it in the months leading up to it. With quarantine in full swing, most of my friends within baseball started working on projects. As time passed, those projects became more detailed and refined. I dove into sprint and jump training and decided I would make myself a guinea pig. I put myself through book after book trying to further my understanding of how to increase accelerative qualities. Notice I said “acceleration” and not “speed”. After so many years of watching the game, I have refined my approach to sprint training. In the context of baseball, I want to train players to go “0-60” in the shortest amount of time possible. This may not help someone beat Usain Bolt in a 100m race, but it will beat the throw to second base on a steal.
As time went on, my desire to coach athletes grew. I decided to work with some youth baseball players in the area. It is incredible how different that was after being at the pro level for so long. Duh, right? While pro players may have one thing they need to work on, youth players have a much longer list. They are also victims of time. Time will improve many things that training cannot. You can hit a million baseballs and still not improve more than what puberty will provide. Baseball requires skill and technique, but it also requires strength and size. Google “MLB exit velocity leaders'” and you will find almost everyone in the top 10 is over 225 pounds. This comes at no surprise to folks that understand what it takes to hit a baseball very far. This is, among other reasons, why players even consider performance enhancing drugs. Bigger, stronger can lead to farther.
As I began working with youth players, stories of their team coaches surfaced. Pitching usage, lineup cards, game situations, and coaching decisions were some of the topics. These coaches tasked with developing young kids seemed to have one thing in mind: winning. I noticed each player’s experience was different depending on what coach they had. Kids playing for a coach with more experience showed better profiency at the fundamentals. Others had coaches that ran practices with no itinerary. How could this be? This led me down a rabbit hole of questions:
- Why doesn’t player A know how to do this basic skill while player B does?
- At what age/level does this basic skill get taught?
- Why didn’t the previous coaches for player A teach this basic fundamental skill?
- Why is one coach neglecting important skills needed to play the game at a higher level? Who checks to make sure the kids have learned these skills before they move up?
These basic questions led me to make comparisons. When you drop your child at school, you expect him to learn the things needed to progress to the next level. In school, they call each level a grade. To move on to third grade, you need to show competency of second grade requirements. These requirements are tested and developed with strategies and lesson plans. Parents trust teachers know how to develop those second grade skills. So why are sports different? When a parent drops a kid off at youth baseball practice, how do they know the coach is capable? Teachers go to school for education and continue to learn their craft. Coaches sign a paper and are in charge of such development with possibly no education. It is the wild wild west. Your son or daughter may know as much about the sport at the end of the year as they did to begin. Now, one year older, they move up to more difficult levels. Are they ready?
This, to me, is a huge issue.
In the pro setting, which I understand is different, has requirements to move on. Each player has a plan that outlining what needs to improve to move up the ladder. We do this in school. We do this in business. We do this in many walks of life. Yet in youth baseball, where tons of dollars are poured into, we do not. This is as sad as it is maddening.
Earlier this year, I wrote a post about developing a youth player like building a house. At younger ages, we should be laying a foundation that will allow the player to build the walls and roof. Before you run, you learn to walk. Before you learn to hit home runs, do you make consistent contact? Before you pitch in a game, can you throw a strike? To play a game, kids need to know the rules enough for minimal interruption. Before a kid moves up to more advanced play, does he or she understand where each position plays? Do they know how to run the bases? Do they understand the rules enough to play it without explanation? Are these checked off before advancing each level? Instead, you are dropping your kid off hoping for the best. The unfortunate part is parents don’t know to ask these things. “He’s the baseball coach so I’m sure he is covering that”.
Another issue with youth baseball is the difficulty to find good coaches. My dad coached my brothers and I for close to 15 years. Was it easy for him to work a full day and then show up at the field ready to teach young men how to be successful? No. Is that possible for other dads? Not always. There are some great coaches out there that don’t have the time to work for free. I get it and am not shaming anyone for that. I don’t work for free and if you are excellent at your career neither should you. What I am suggesting is putting together a simple to follow, detailed curriculum to give any coach that signs up a guide of what to teach. A dad with no playing experience would have an idea of where to start. Sample practice schedules, easy drills to use, skills needed to cover.
Travel baseball machines thrive on promising, “If you pay x amount of dollars your kid will get superior exposure”. By playing against other good teams, your kid should improve more right? The problem is that’s like a teacher saying, “If you pay x amount of dollars, we will give your son the test to pass third grade as much as you want”. He gets more and more familiar with the test the more he takes it. But, he never learned the problem solving strategies necessary to answer any question that comes up later in life. It was the problem solving skills he needed, not the stamp that says pass. Travel baseball allows you to test your skills, but practicing allows you to improve the skills. Yes, most of this feels like common sense. But after this pandemic, my experiences have shown me that this is not so common after all.
I am in no way saying I have every answer. There are so many brilliant coaches in the game of baseball at every level, most of them smarter than myself. I write this because I was a young kid playing the game with questions. When is the right time to learn how to hit home runs? When should I focus on my lead leg landing when I pitch? What is the best way to make a strong throw from the outfield? At different times of my career I had different questions. But what if we actually put this into a lesson plans for each level? That would take out the guess work and allow each kid to have the basic levels of understanding before advancement. Good players would excel, but the lower tier players would have exposure to the concepts. Development should happen from the moment they pick up a baseball and it shouldn’t be a luck of the draw depending on the coach you get.
I’m inviting any baseball minds smarter than my own to help develop this. My hope is that in a few years this is something on paper and available for youth baseball coaches. This may exist in some form, but not enough for the coaches in my neighborhood to know about it. That needs to change. I want every kid that doesn’t have the money for private lessons to know how to hold a bat to bunt. Paid lessons should allow for improving weaknesses and harnessing strengths individual to each athlete. But fielding a ground ball correctly? That shouldn’t be something you have to pay for private lessons to learn.
This is part 1 of a series. I hope this was beneficial and gets your wheels turning like it did mine. Comment below with any questions and thanks for taking the time to read!
Peak Sports Performance 