posted by crawdad
Originally posted by Coach May:
Oh yes it made sense alot of sense. Great Post. I know people that dislike me today because of the sucess of my sons. There are people out there that are so worried about what other people are doing that they can not do anything themselves. When my son was 12 he wanted to play in the local league during the week and his AAU team on the weekends. He wanted to do this because the kids he went to school with heard he was pretty good and they wanted him to play with them. Also some of the kids were ragging him about the fact he didnt play with them in the league telling him he was scared and all that stuff. Well after about three games he was intentionally walked every ab. It did not matter what the score was the other coach would just walk him. When he pitched the parents from the other team would complain that he was going to hurt someone if he hit them and they should take him out of the game. I mean they would yell it from the stands. You would not believe the stuff these parents would yell out. Also they would laugh when he got up and say "No need for you to take a bat up there we aint letting you hit superstar". My son is a very confident but humble kid. It wasnt like he was some cocky kid. And the umpires would make him throw it right down the heart before they would call a strike. The other kids had the anywhere around the plate is a strike zone. One of my friends asked the umpires why they squeezed Jeff and they said "Man we have to give the kids a chance the only way they can get on is to walk". Well after about five or six games of this Jeff decided that he didnt want anymore of this. I supported him in his decision. At the end of the year we got a call from the league commissioner. He asked me if Jeff could play on their All Star team. I guess you know what my answer was. To this day their are parents of kids that played in that league that despise me. I have never understood this type of behavior. I have seen it at the HS level with kids that I have coached that were outstanding. I had a kid a couple of years ago drafted in the second round. His dad sat by himself because the other parents were so jealous of his son that they constantly called his son the coaches pet etc. Its really sad. Most parents are great and I mean that. But these types are the worst.
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My son went through this as he was coming up through LL and Senior League, except I encouraged my son to use the season to practice for the All-Star Tournaments. We spent a lot of time dealing with baseball politics and helping him to understand how to deal with it. We have watched as some players get destroyed by this tremendously destructive attitude by coaches and parents against real good players, and in the end it destroys many of the potentially great players, completely.
It served to demotivate and discourage my son alot.
And even though he would get really down, and sometimes just go out there, and I could tell that his heart was not in it on some days, and I would talk to him and encourage him all I could.
But after going through this for a while I could see that his enthusiasm for the game started to wane. It just so happened that is when I put him with Babe Ruth League Baseball. There he was respected and allowed to play and relax. He flourished and developed into a pretty decent player.
Sooner or later he figured things out for himself, that in the environment where he played, that maybe it wasn't best to show that he had better skills than other players. He decided that maybe it's better to just "fit" in. That "attitude" had been the biggest battle with him until he got away from that kind of thinking and those coaches and players.
Now he has learned to modulate his effort and his performance to an expectation level based upon the circumstances of the playing situation. In short he plays to the level of competition he's against. He seems to deal with the outcome better and has come to terms with what went on when he was just a young boy.
Now he is his own person and plays to satisfy his own idea of what is an acceptable performance. What others expect or don't expect of him doesn't enter into it. He knows his job and his skill level and goes out there on the mound with great confidence.
I'm glad he survived the ugliness of those early years because we really enjoy watching him pitch now.