@PitchingFan posted:Been where you are at CoachB25 except there was no pressure to win. Coached middle school boys basketball first year and lost 3 games, lost 4 games second year. Became head baseball and the most wins ever in the school in one season was 11. We went 23-3 and lost 4 games second year then we moved. The biggest obstacle was teaching them how to win. The school had lost for so long in everything that they forgot how to win and baseball had never won so no one cared. Now it is back to where it was. No expectations and no winning. I believe expectations have to be there in most cases for a team to win.
There are a lot of smaller jucos that are run like a big high school but no expectation to win and they don't win. I think you find it in most colleges that have a JV. As long as you bring in money, we don't care. But at some point once you win there is a huge expectation to win. I've seen it watching programs for years. I've always believed you don't want to be the one who follows the big time winner as a coach. You want to be the one who follows the one who fails following the big time winning coach. He gets beat up for not winning and you only have to win a little to be liked, to start with. Nobody will want to follow Saban at Alabama, except for the money.
A lot of good stuff in this post. In fact, schools can go through such long losing seasons that the climate of the school is that they lose and they lose at everything. When I was hired at the school I became the HC in, I had a reputation for winning but I also had a reputation for being intense. That is why the AD didn't care for me at the start. In his opinion, I was win at all cost. I was not but I did make huge demands on these players. I recall walking down the hallway right before girl's basketball season started and some of the girls in the hall were making fun of a sophomore who was going out for the team. I knew this player's older brother who was going to be on the baseball team. I told this girl who was obviously an athlete that if she came out, no one would be laughing at her at the end of the season. At that time, it was easier to laugh and make fun of the athletes than it was to actually participate. That young lady became my daughter's idol and she played in college. By the end of that year, things had changed. The baseball team won 2 games and lost in the regional championship game to a team that placed 2nd at state. The girl's basketball team started a run of 5 straight years of 20 or more wins.
I would say this, there was a point in both sports where I could have lost the players. This was at the beginning when they didn't know me like they did at the end of each season. It was tough. We had 6 in the morning plyos for the baseball team and open gym for the girls. I jumped between both of them. As one said at the end of that first year, it finally hurt too much to lose.