Theory in to Practice?

Coach B25,
I'm sure there are many High School coaches out there that do make their players better. I am also sure that there are some High School coaches that get credit for kids success and really had little or nothing to do with except to be smart enough to not change anything.
I believe right now my son's improvement is up to him. That if he is to get better it is because of the hard work he does away from the school. He will benefit from it as well as the coaching staff who will get the credit. I have no problem with that except when kids transfer in thinking they are getting something they are not because of rankings.
Some coaches get the job by default, some do it for the little extra income, some are football guys and then there are some that the kids can learn from.
Those that really do teach and make a kid live up to their potential are the best. Those that try and make all the players do everything exactly the same way, cookie cutters are the problem. There is no one way.

bb1 that is a very good post. During the hs season the vast amount of time spent at practice is devoted to "Team" oriented stuff. Bunt Defense , Bunt offense , 1st and third defense , 1st and thrid offense , cut plays etc etc. Of course you spend alot of time working on fundementals of hitting fielding and throwing. But the bottom line is if a kid is looking to learn how to hit once the hs season starts he is not even going to make the team.

You hope you can help them make some adjustments if they are struggleing. You hope you can teach them some mental stuff along the way etc. The off season is where I have always tried to spend my time teaching a kid how to hit and learning how to make adjustments etc. But the bottom line is if they are going to be an exceptional player they have to put in alot of work when the hs season is not even in session.

Three month players will always be three month players. They may or may not help your hs program. There are certain things that I believe all hitters need to do. Swing at good pitches. Be agressive up in the count. Keep your eyes on the ball. Basic fundementals that were true 100 years ago and still are. As far as the technical stuff in hitting there is no one way to do it. Each kid is different. If you can mash you can mash and I aint going to break it. I do want to shorten your swing if you are long. But the bottom line is cookie cutter coaching hurts the talented players. It only allows for players with no talent to be average at best. It can take a great player and make him average as well.

That is just my opinion.

Coach May, our practices may be too long but we seem to always have the ability to get a few hundred swings in. Of course having 3 cages, a half cage and two portable rolling cages for live arm on the field helps. We typically have some 10-14 stations including the cages where player can do their work. I've been blessed to have outstanding assistants who also have hitting as a passion.

I'd love to come watch one of your practices some day. I'd get a kick out of it. I love watching all of the different ideas on defensive practices. My favorite that we do is called multiple infield. I'm betting you do much the same.

Not many takers on the theory to practice. To me theory is fine but you have to understand that you can communicate the same thing in two or three different ways and sometimes that is what you have to do for a player to "get it." I like being able to look at players, notice what I think that they need to work on, talk to the player for what they think they need improvement on and then getting to work. In any successful coach is the ability to get the player to come along for the ride and buy into what you are coaching. A part of that is listening to the players. Yes, I coach hitting in a way different than some. Yes, some would have success with or without me. I don't discount that but I also don't let them go on their own. Then the difference is what you do with those that need extra time and effort but have the drive and desire.

Oh, besides coaching at the HS level, I also:

• Give private instruction to one or two individuals. Which have included whole teams and up to 70+ kids on a given day.
• Help coach my daughter's softball teams. One of which won a national title last year. (No, she didn't get to go play in that tournament since she was incrediably sick from a spider bite.)
• Serve as a Guest Speaker at various Coaching Clinics. (I recently gave a speech at a local coaching association in front of some of the best coaches and guys I know.)

Well, enough on me. What do some of you other guys do beside type on a computer?

Coach B-52, impressive creditials and I like your facilities both new and HS. I spent 25 years as a HS coach including 16 as the varsity head coach. In addition I coached 20 years in a summer league for current/former collegiate players. I have worked at a handful of camps/clinics every year for the past 25 years and have established a niche as a sliding instructor. I am in my second year as an asst coach at a community college. I have played for the last 18 years in a "senior" league which has been a blast and allowed me to apply principles that I teach. I attend clinics and surf web-sites such as this to continue my education. I consider myself as a student/teacher of the game.
Since this was posted on the hitting format I guess you are asking about applying hitting theory. I'm no "Loose Cannon"! I'm a generalist that can coach all phases but my strength is defense and hitting is not a strong suit. I focus more on the mental aspects of hitting. The best hitters in the world fail 70% of the time. Focus on one pitch at a time, not refleting on past failure or future apprehension. Live/play in the moment. Visualization: see yourself hit the ball, use both eyes, see ball hit ball. As Coach May said, laying off bad pitches. An interesting dilemma: the more pitches you see the easier it is to hit a pitcher but fallling behind in the count increases the difficulty. The value of productive outs, moving the runner to 3rd with a grounder to 2nd. Its not what you hit but when you hit. Quiet head and eyes, short or no stride. Strikeout to walk comparison. I analyze game performance, identify problems and potential shortcomings and work on them with the player(s). Focus on the process not the outcome, the journey not the destination. If you are not having fun then something is wrong.

Flintoide, IMPRESSIVE! Sounds like you have a very good grasp of what you want to do as a coach. The facilities I hyperlinked are not mine but the facilities are going to let me bring a bunch in during their "down-time" and they intend to promote their facilities through our use of those facilities. You know, word of mouth etc. We've even offered to let them take some video of us using their factilities so that they can show other teams what they can do in their facilities.

Thanks for the compliments. I've been blessed by the people I've been around and naturally, any coaching success revolves around the kids that you get to coach. In that regard, I've been around top notch hard working kids. I'd go further to say that my parental support has been second to none.

The purpose of this thread is for those others that read our posts etc. to have some kind of grasp of which of us take the theory out to practice. I appreciate your post on this topic. I know our site has a lot of other members that work hard at this great game. Let us know who you are and where you coach.

Now those are two great posts. If you coach you can not live on theory you must teach what your experiences have proven to you over time. We spend a tremendous amount of time hitting every practice. Some weeks we spend two days on nothing but hitting. Some weeks we spend more time on defense. But no practice is complete until we swing and swing alot. We have two full cages and we use the field as well. We set up stations at each cage and rotate through all the stations. JV hitting varsity defense then switch. Thats pretty much how we do it.

Im no guru on hitting. I like to think we have a sound approach to teaching a solid base on hitting fundementals. Im more of a guy that teaches the game and has a good solid understanding of all phases of the game. We have some great assistant coaches that specialize in hitting , pitching , catching etc. Im the guy thats going to make sure we understand how the game is supposed to be actually played etc.

Theory is just that - theory. There are guys that can sit in an office at a computer and figure it all out. Put them in the field and put them under the gun and they fall apart when their theory doesnt quite hold up to reality. I will go on my experience and my belief that real world experience is way more valuable than a video clip and a theory. JMHO

OK. Here goes.

First, I learned how to hit mostly from my father who played in an industrial league in West Virginia in the 1930's and early 40's [Pre-WWII]. He also played in the service during WWII *He was a Navy Seabee and told me the second thing they built after the airport on the various Pacific Islands they were assigned to was a baseball field*. Also, being a sort of a bookworm as a kid, I read a lot of "how to" books about playing baseball in general but my favorite book was Ted Williams book on hitting. When I read that book, I was so impressed that I committed a lot of it to memory and tried to practice what he preached every time I got a opportunity to practice hitting.

My first "coaching" position was when I was 14 years old. I helped my father coach my youngest brother's "biddy league" team [6 through 8 years old]. My father's coaching method for this age group was more of the cookie cutter variety as most of these boys had never swung a baseball bat before. I observed Dad's methods and tried as best I could to emulate them for 3 years.

Later during my summers home from college, besides playing Independent baseball, I was asked to be the head coach of a 13-16 year old boy's baseball team. In this position, I did almost no practical "how to hit" coaching using the limited practice time we had for defense. I did work with those boys that swung at bad pitches or took a lot of good pitches and, on an individual basis, offerred them my "theories" on how important getting on base or putting the ball in play was rather than striking out. I did use practice to work a lot on team bunting [both offense and defense], something that seems to have gone out of fashion these days.

I got away from baseball after finishng my 2 years in the Army [played some ball in the service but didn't coach] until I was asked by an old friend to coach his son's high school age Big League Team sometime in early 1980's [I had no children of my own at this time]. By that point, the local high school team had a batting cage, the Little League field had a batting cage and there were more ways a practice devoted to hitting alone could be undertaken. We used Sunday afternoons [at that time the Little League had a thing about playing on Sunday] and I would have 4 or 5 players at a time come to the cage as a group and we would work on certain things with that group for an hour. Then the next group of 4 or 5 would arrive and I would begin again. Each group was organized on the basis of where they were in their hitting "education" so to speak. One group might spend half the cage time on bunting and the other half on watching the ball and only swinging at strikes. Another more advanced group might spend the entire practice time working on how they adjusted to an off speed pitch. Each group practice was somewhat different based on what I had observed in the games we had played the previous week. These kids were my "guinea pigs" and I must say that I learned a lot about how to teach and not teach hitting from those kids. I did this for 4 or 5 years. Several of these kids went on to play college ball [although one or two as pitchers for which, as one told me jokingly on one ocassion, I was no help at all].

My first son was born in 1987 and at some point soon after that I moved down to T-Ball to coach my brother's daughter [at his request as he was coaching his oldest son at the time]. I now felt confident that I knew what hitting mechanics/fundamentals were essential to emphasize at this level and what was not if a player were to have a chance of success at the upper levels of baseball [high school and above]. T-Ball is great for seeing the bat hit the ball with both eyes and striding to create a consistently level or slightly downward swing. Most important, however, it is the place where kids must learn that the game is a lot of fun. At that time both boys and girls played against each other at that age level and, as they were drafted anew every year, I chose a lot of girls on my T-Ball teams. Several girls I coached at age 6, 7 & 8 started for their High School team and my brother's daughter went on to play softball at a DII college in West Virginia, receiving both an academic and an athletic scholarship to go there. Not, I think so much for my "hitting" coaching but more for my "fun" coaching. That is, these girls learned to love their game and put the work in to suceed at the next level.

I stayed in T-Ball and when my oldest son arrived in 1992 or so I was ready for him and his contemporaries [yes, I was drafting mostly boys now]. My youngest son arrived 2 years later and I coached both of them as head coach all the way through Little League, Senior League and American Legion. What I learned from this experience was that the kids that were taught the correct fundamentals of hitting early on still had to be reminded of them at each level but at least they knew the language. And the kids that had never played early on really had to start from scratch but most could pick it up fairly quickly with the right teaching and the proper motivation. But the biggest problems were those that had been taught incorrectly early on and had developed habits that had to be changed. They were, by far, the most difficult cases because, although I knew what they were doing would not bring success at the higher levels, what they were doing garnered them some success at this level and the disconnect was simply too great for them to "retool" so to speak. Once I learned this, I quite drafting those kids on my higher age teams.

When my oldest son finished Legion ball at age 19, I got my youngest son on a 19U travel team and was an assistant coach on that team. That is where I reverted back to my original hitting coach mentality. There was not much I could change about their hitting technique but we could discuss their mental approach to hitting in regard to situations, certain counts and playing to their strengths and away from their weaknesses. Some listened and some did not. That is the way of it.

I still work with my youngest son [a freshman playing baseball at a local DII college] on all aspects of the game but the one we spend the most time on [at his request] is hitting. Last year I was asked by another friend to take charge of our local T-Ball program and "train" coaches at that level how to teach the game's fundamentals including hitting to that age group. We will see how that goes as it is too early to tell.

I hope this is the kind of response that CoachB25 was looking for. If not, I am sorry I bored everyone.

TW344

TW344, not boring at all. Great story. You've coached over a long period of time. I'm sure while coaching both softball and baseball that you've seen it all. This is very much theory into practice! Thanks!