Great Mantras

We used "One Pitch At A Time" for our pitchers And "Bring It" for our hitters.

With respect to defense: "Don't let your last error create your next one." A more positive alternative: "Break the chain of errors."

I once heard the Tennessee football coach tell his team to play with "Relentless Abandonment".

I spent a great deal of time looking up the definitions of these words and trying to determine their meanings (other than the obvious ones that come to mind).

The best I could come up with is this:

Play the game like your a "possessed madman" willing to sacrifice your life for the victory!

Knowledge is Power! Thank you Mavens and HSBBWEB!

Be The Ball- Ty Webb

cong

Cong, that'a a great one......Most probably don't understand it, though......

I had a Minor League Mgr. who was trying to console me after I had a bad game. He said "don't worry Doug, sometimes the best you can do turns out to be horsebleep". To this day I still don't know what he was trying to say to me.

bbscout, that was worth a great laugh. Thanks.

Coach C,

Right here, right now! A way of focusing your team's attention to the task at hand.

Breaking the game down into small parts, i.e. win the at bat, win the inning, win the pitch etc...

I also use as a team mantra WIN stands for "What's Important Now" more of a team motto... If we do What's Important Now at all times, we will be winners regardless of the outcome.

Saying is Loaned out to me from a College Football Coach.

i use 2 statements during practice a lot. when i start the team finishes it because they have heard it so many times (too many probably)

"take care of the little things, and the big things will take care of itself"

"in order to become a good baseball player, you must have the ability to overcome the boredom of repetition"

I like that second one mittman. My kids complain all the time about doing the same thing over and over. I will use that on them next time. I usually tell them "practice makes perfect", but they don't buy into it and continue to complain.

http://www.highviewheat.com/index.asp

http://www.kristensfastpitchworld.com/index.asp

Sorry mittman , but I don't like the second one. I don't think as a coach that we should suggest anything is boring. If you love the sport, even doing "find the 4 seam grip" 10000 times should not be boring.

I'm reminded of a player from before I started coaching telling me that he hated baseball practice. I knew the coach and the practices were nothing out of the ordinary. When asked why he hated practice he said"I just want to play games". This was a Varsity player. I told him maybe baseball wasn't his sport then. The next spring he went out for tennis and next was an all state tennis player who loved tennis. I know they did stuff that I would consider Boring in tennis practice.

Basketball Players dribble thousands of times a night=Boring. 50 free throws a night=boring. To me anyway. But not to the basketball player.

I say this because I am helping out with my sons 4th grade basketball team and one of the first things the head coach said was "You have to learn the boring stuff to be good." Wow! I thought, "He just told kids who were brand new to the sport(4th grade is when they start here)and all enthused about basketball that it's boring."

I would not suggest this is on the same level with "Just don't walk this guy". They both plant the seed.

Having said that. I did like and appreciate your ideas for group skill drills that you posted in the other post. I didn't mean to blast you here, it's just that sometimes we need to see another perspective.

coach i can see where you are coming from. but however, i know that high school players (no matter how much they love the game) think soft toss (ex.) is boring at times. so this tells them to overcome it if they want to get better (which in turn makes it important= not boring)

but hey i can understand where you are coming from. i am not so sure about planting the seed thing.... we shouldn't teach kids about birth control because it will want to make them have *** right????? just kidding (we just had that argument with our system) like they don't think about it 98% of the time already.

hey you have to learn on this website to have thick skin, if you are going to express your opinion, so i didn't feel like you blasted me.

Mittman, you have me lol.
I'm now a middle school teacher, teaching *** education. I recall being in middle school and HS and thinking about two things and two things only. One was baseball and the other was not school.

I like these 2. The first is on the back of our practice shirts, and the 2nd is just true.

1- No Retreat, No Surrender
2- Success is never on sale. You must always pay full price.

I once created a tshirt for our cross country team at school that read on the back " If you can read this you're losing." Heard a great line form Derek "greatest player in the game" Jeter tonight " You don't come here to put up numbers, you come here to win." Brash, boastful but proven.

coach knight, i really like #2

coach knight,
I like your second one so much that i'm adding it to the front page of our web site.
Thanks

Knowledge is Power! Thank you Mavens and HSBBWEB!

Saw this on a kid's t-shirt at a camp in a math formula:

SWEAT
+SACRIFICE
(underline)
=SUCCESS

Chicks & mittman - Thanks. I teach Economics...can you tell?
I love quotes like this. Here are a few more I've used:

1- All for one, and one for (place a picture of a baseball here).

2- One Goal, One Heartbeat

3- Whatever It Takes

4- WHO'S NEXT?
Building a Tradition One Day At A Time

5- From the Baseball Coaches Bible (best coaching book I've ever read - buy it soon!):

Picture of a baseball with the word "TEAM"
below it - a small baseball with the word "ME" on it

Since baseball is fundametally built around failure, ours takes care of any reason, excuese etc.

"Excellence is Expected!"

We do cite other often:

"Repetition is no fun but it's the reason we have won."

"Take one day off and you know it. TAke two days off and your opponent knows it. TAke three days off and everyone knows it."

"In the warrious code there's no surrender. Though your body says quit, your spirt cries never. Deep in your soul's an undying ember that knows its you against you. It's the paradox that drives us all."

"There comes a time when you have to stop dreaming of the man you want to be and start being the man you have become." Bruce Springsteen

"There's a difference between interest and commitment. When you"re interested in doing something you do it only when circumstances permit. When you're committed to sometning, you accept no excuses, only results

I like this one. It takes absolutely no talent to hustle. And also Hustle never slumps.

how about the one my dad use to tell me

"excuses are like a screen door on a submarine"

useless

One that our program picked up that we have adopted as our motto is "Palm Down". What that means is, if you have your palm up, you're saying "gimme, gimme"; palm down means that you are a team player. We picked that up from the coaching staff at Purdue University. Our kids really like it!

Chicks...The term was originally coined by Auburn Legend Coach Ralph"Shug" Jordon. It was "Reckless abandon" in the 60's. It was his favorite expression on his post game show in the era when he was competing against Bear Bryant at Alabama. The football stadium is called Jordon-Hare Stadium.

"Champions are made when no one is watching."

1. It takes no talent to hustle. (had to repeat it, Coach May)

2. Don't complain about the bad hops...anyone can catch the good ones.

3. Outwork your opponent. (gets through the "boredom")

4. Win every inning.

5. No matter how good you think you are, there is ALWAYS someone better.

6. If playing baseball were easy, there wouldn't be any S0CC3R players. (or lacrosse, etc.)

Is there some Mantra about how you practice like you play, or something like that??

Attention to detail is EVERYTHING!

Little things win games....
Go Hard or Go Home....

Start Strong, Finish Stronger.