Chico Escuela posted:RJM posted:In almost every college baseball environment half the players will fail and transfer or quit freshman or soph year. Many have never failed before. It can’t possible be they weren’t up to the task. It must be the coach’s fault. Failing as a freshman or soph as an athlete doesn’t necessarily mean the kid can’t play. If you think the competition to get recruited is stiff wait until it’s about getting on the field at college.
Respectfully, I'd say you're changing the subject. Do kids today need to be better at handling failure? A lot of people think so. No one in the thread has said we should blame coaches if our kids can't cut it, or if that coaches shouldn't hold players to high standards and let them know if they fail to meet them.
But why do we accept behavior from coaches that we would not from accept from business managers, teachers (as PitchingFan noted), or just about anyone else outside a military or correctional context? Is it more effective? Does it make a team cohere better?
There are tough coaches out there. My son had a jerk after the first coach took a different job. My experience from talking to other dads and stories my son told the jerk coaches aren’t as bad as the players who don’t cut it make them out to be. It’s also a matter of how much the player takes it personally. For these kids it’s the first time they’ve failed athletically. They have trouble accepting it’s partially on them.
Some kids and their parents don’t understand college athletics is the real world. The coach is feeding his family and paying the mortgage based on what he can get out of his players. Failure means getting fired. Those players who don’t get it done are swept aside. It doesn’t mean they can’t play. It means they won’t be playing there.