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Reply to "New Coach Seeking Advice"

We had our second scrimmage with our crosstown private school rival and we faired pretty well, held them to 1-0 through 4.  After 4 I subbed out some players to see what else we had and pulled my starting pitcher to keep him under 50 pitches and things went south quickly.  Final after 6 was 16-3.  I did expect some of that because out of 18 players I may actually have 10 that would make any other schools team and half of those would probably never see the field.  But overall I did determine that we can be competitive with our starters.

Then Friday we went across the county for our last scrimmage with another local small private school, one that I thought we could be very competitive with and even actually come out with a victory.  I get to the school and get on the bus only to find that 5 of my players, all starters for this game were not there.  W....T....H!!!  This is a typical problem for the culture of this school.  5 years ago when we started building the football program the defensive coordinator told me he did know who was starting on Friday nights until 30 mins prior to kickoff because he never knew who would be there.  So, needless to say our focus now is discussing commitment.  We ended up losing 18-3 against a team we could have at least been competitive with.  Fortunately our game this week has been rescheduled due to the other school being on Spring Break and not having enough players, we may fact the same issue next week with two games scheduled.

Anyone have any good suggestions on building and developing commitment in a program with this type of culture?

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