From both watching and coaching baseball for several years I am beginning to understand a very important principle- That "we must coach at the players level and ability".
Too often in the past few seasons I have seen how players try hard but just do not measure up to what their coaches or parents expect. The kids who usually do "most of the work" take a lot of hack when they do not perform to the standards put forth in the coaches minds. The kids are left worrying and wondering about their own ability to endlessly tring to figure out how to fix something that cannot easily be fixed (maybe not even in a season)! In turn it creates a dominoe effect on a team when this negativity builds up and everyone loses confidence in their own ability and ends up making matters worse.
When that happens, you find the coaches and parents are micro-managing everything in a game to death! For instance- the third baseman keeps pulling his head fielding balls and as such he has a 25-50% error rate or higher fielding balls. The coach will endlessly harp on him for not keeping his head in there as if he should just be "easily" doing it right every time. What we as coaches and parents need to realize is that we need to coach "at their level" and not the levels we wish them to play at, of the which, they just are not capable of playing at! Another for instance-
Pitcher takes mound, and pitches against the top team in his league. The coach wishes him to throw all three of his pitches with pinpoint control and then harps when after throwing three curveballs in a row he can't locate the change-up and hangs it which lead to a solid base hit. Next batter he throws a fastball and then throws 3 offspeed pitches and then go back and hit the inside corner with a fastball of the which he also misses.
This isn't the big leagues! Too often I think we micro-manage things to death expecting these kids to play as if they were in the major leagues and forget to realize that some of these kids won't even make the HS team and those that do make the team probably are not good enough to go to college ball or get drafted. Even if some kids do have the talent to get drafted or play after HS on a team, we need to realize that on average, players on pre-hs teams are just not going to make the crunch plays on a consistant basis all the time every time they play!
Are we as coaches spending enough time to meet each players different abilities on the team to help them improve? or are we just hacking on them for not playing up to the standards that we wish they could play at, all the while not understanding their own weaknesses and lack of abilities that should be addressed properly outside of the game in practice?
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