Since I have been 10 years old the only thing I have wanted to do in my life is to work in baseball. I remember the moment like it was yesterday. I was alone throwing the ball as high as I could in our front yard. I would pretend I was a Big League outfielder and I was making amazing catches on Major League fields. Sometimes I would drop my mitt on purpose and catch the ball in my hat. The crowd roared and said to one another how they have never seen a play like that before. I was going to bring joy to the fans and bless others with the money I made. 

There have been plenty of twists and turns over the past 40 plus years since that moment. While I did not end up a Big League outfielder and make that sweet hat catch, I have been fortunate to be a part of baseball for a long time. I’ve been able to bring joy to those fans and also get my share of boos. I also have been fortunate to bless others the way I hoped to. I expected most of my years in the game would be as a player, but as it turns out I have spent more time as a coach. 

Experience has molded me into the coach and leader I am today which includes a lot of success and failure along the way. On paper you would call me a winner because in my 12 professional seasons as a minor league coach our teams have a record of 427 – 305, which is good for a .583 winning percentage. Every team in those 12 seasons had a winning record. That includes 6 trips to the postseason, 5 appearances in the league championship series, and 2 championships. As a young coach when we did fail, I took it hard, and I was almost inconsolable for days or maybe even months when it carried into the offseason. To me winning was everything, but when I came to realize it wasn’t, I became a better coach.

Hearing John Wooden speak in person and then diving into his books have been life changing. He didn’t talk about winning, but that’s all he did as a college coach. In 28 NCAA seasons his teams went 664 – 162 and every one of them had a winning record. That’s a winning percentage of .804 and they won 10 National Championships! He demanded a lot from his players, but from everything I read there were 3 things that he wanted the players to focus on mostly and those are our 3 points today. Here are three things a coach should ask their players to focus on. 

1. Prepare Your Best Mentally

Yogi Berra said that baseball is 90% mental and that the other half is physical. While that quote will frustrate our friends in the analytics department, it does make the case for preparing mentally and practicing mental fortitude. One way we would prepare mentally is to know everything we could about our opponent. We combed through video and scouting reports to find tendencies in them and then created a plan on how to attack them. Challenge your players to go the extra mile and take the time to do things like this especially when it is offered to them by their coaching staff.

Practicing mental fortitude is also very important. People call baseball a game of failure and that drives me nuts because you are focusing on the negative. Baseball is a game of opportunity. Name another sport where you play 6 times per week. If you don’t perform well in an at-bat, then learn from it and move on to the next one. You are going to have around 20 more that week! If you’re a starting pitcher and you don’t execute a pitch well, move on. You have 90 more to throw in the game! The way we speak is also important. Instead of saying “don’t worry about that” say “focus on this”. It’s the same message but said in a positive way. Search for the positive and you will find it. Focus on the negative and you will find that as well.

2. Prepare Your Best Physically

I believe this is worked on more than the mental side, but the question is are your players working smart or just hard? The length of any sport season is a grind and in today’s youth sports landscape people are playing way more games at a younger age. Preparing their best physically is essential and focusing on foundational things like stabilizer muscles are extremely important. Examples of these would be muscles in the core, shoulders, hips, and spinal area. Working on chest, back, and legs are something that most athletes focus on in the weight room, but in my opinion most athletes’ injuries happen in areas associated with joints.

Working smart is also learning how to manage your workload. From a baseball perspective as an infielder, I need to have a routine that I follow daily, but that may not include taking 100 ground balls every day. One day I might just do some glove drills from my knees out in the grass to work on hand to eye coordination. Learning to listen to your body and know when you need to pump the breaks a little is important. There is also the other side to those who don’t get their work in. Recovery is important but ask yourself “What are you recovering from?”. If you are not putting in the work, you don’t need to spend 30 mins in the Normatech leg sleeves. Seriously, don’t be that guy.

3. Give Your Best Effort

This has ties to point number two but goes beyond it. Preparing your best physically puts you in a position to perform at an optimal level, but how often you will give your best effort is almost more of a mental challenge than a physical one. Giving your best effort is a choice. You can prepare your body and mind all offseason for the upcoming grind, but when the lights come on will you decide to lay it all out every day. Giving your best effort is when you take everything you prepared for mentally and physically and you execute it to the best of your ability when you are called upon.

At the end of each day a player needs to be able to look in the mirror and ask themselves if they did all three of these things to the best of their ability. Did they mentally prepare the best they could? Did they do the same thing physically? Did they give their best effort? If the answer is yes, they can rest easy regardless of what the scoreboard said. If the answer is no, they may have to deal with a little regret and then learn to shake that off and focus on being better tomorrow. Once I started telling the players I coached that these were 3 three things I expected of them, it relieved the pressure of winning. I believe that when you focus on preparation and effort, execution follows and at the end of the day that leads to scoring more runs than the other team.

“Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and he will establish your plans.”– Proverbs 16:3, NIV

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