quote:Originally posted by Midlo Dad:quote:For this reason IMO delayed gratification has to be taught, the same way and with the same, and perhaps more emphasis as physical skills
O44, if you ever move east, look me up, we should coach together!
Flattered, thanks!
quote:
I definitely agree, but it is an uphill battle. Teaching delayed gratification, work ethic, etc., is supposed to be the parents' job. A coach should (in a perfect world) be able to trust that kids come to him already having this ingrained, and asking him to give them the baseball-specific stuff they need to succeed. The fact that they don't is troublesome.
And then as a coach you have to deal with the reality that, when you try to teach delayed gratification/work ethic, many parents actively oppose you. Because they are the ones who took their sons off the straight and narrow path in the first place.
As adults too many of us have "drunk the Kool Aid", seeking our own instant gratification by seeing our sons elevated to star status before our very eyes. E.g., We don't want our son taught to pitch. He's already great. Just put him on the mound and stop "messing with him" (i.e., teaching him proper mechanics and such). And of course we all know whose fault it will be if he gets lit up. Same scenario for hitters, etc.
In the end, you go sifting through players (and parents) until you find a roster (or at least, a nucleus) of players who have their minds right. The one advantage you have in travel ball is that you can do this over the years. In high school, you're constrained to whoever shows up for tryouts, and games start just a few weeks after that. Either you get a good bunch or you don't
So true.
IMO getting their minds right, delaying gratification, teaching them to actually enjoy the process of working hard long term to acheive a goal, a willingness to invest long term in themselves is now, in our society, so far out of the norm that most parents and players think you are from Mars. They want it all they want it now. And if they cannot have it today then they look somewhere else outside themselves for instant success, when they shgould be looking inside. They see high tech change in a day and they figure that the human developmental curve has compressed as well. They simply fail to see and/or appreciate the length of the human developmental curve and the time, and effort and mental skills required to make that curve a long term reality. Both athletic and human development is a lifelong process of success/failure/adaption not a "well constructed product launch"
The good news is that the ability to sharpen your best weapon, your mind, to help you acheive in baseball and beyond is a lost art and those who can are an increasingly rare and special group.
The other aspect is that by doing so, by waking the player up to the values to looking at the process in a new (old) way, a way that that he does possess, can not only give him the skills to change his basball, and his academics, but his life. That's the best.
44.