Looking Back: Part 1 (Coaching High School Baseball)

As I mentioned previously, I am still a month away from starting up with some more of my coaching duties.  So I'll take the time over these next few posts to look back on some of the coaching decisions I have had to make over the last 7 years of being both a dad and a coach.

My coaching career started 8 years ago when I was hired as both a JV basketball coach and an assistant baseball coach at a small, rural school.  Baseball has always been my favorite sport, but when it comes to coaching, I have always preferred basketball.  Basketball has always given me a better opportunity to control the game.  Considering I have always coached at a small school where the talent level is very, very small, being able to have some control is helpful.

Two years into my coaching tenure at this high school, the varsity baseball coach stepped down and I saw this as a perfect opportunity for me to step in and become a head coach.  I jumped all over the possibility of being able to run a program the way I wanted to run it, not just as someone's assistant.  The experience, to say the least, was terrible.

I have always considered msyelf a pretty tough assed coach.  Don't hustle.?  Your're running.  Mess up.? You're running.  Mouth off.? Your running.  After being the leader of the JV basketball team, the reality that I was a pretty tough coach had already been imbedded into a lot of the kids minds, immediately making up their minds that they didn't want to play for me.  Which at the time, was fine with me.  My thought was "I'm not begging any one to play.  Either you want to play, or you don't.  I'll take the field with 10 kids if I have to, I'm not begging."



Was the pawprint logo hat a good or bad choice? 

 Well, taking to the field with 10 kids is exactly what happened.  After starting the first week with around 17 kids, the first week dwindled them down to just 10.  Ten kids, at a small high school, playing baseball.  A recipe for disaster.  I guess I should have seen this coming a little earlier when one of my senior players opted to quit after a practice because I jumped on the kids for not being able to warm up properly which resulted in me making them run, throwing a baseball off of a pop machine, and kicking them out of practice. 

I also had very little support from the community and those higher up.  When I decided to run this thing my way, my first decision was to run the program the way I wanted to, with youth baseball leaders not getting involved and throwing in their 2 cents.  My first course of action was to change the locks on the cages so that I could control who used them.  This led to a lot of trouble and problems from the start.  The local youth baseball leader, "Kingfish", was not to happy over me changing the locks to the building "he built". With no one backing up me on this move from on top, I quickly lost that fight.  I also lost the fight over field use.  Yeah, field use!  As the high school baseball coach, I felt like the use of the HIGH SCHOOL FIELD should be all mine and I could use it whenever I needed and practice as long as I needed.  Nope.  I was told by,Orville, that my practices must end by 6:30 so that the local youth team could use the field.  So let me get this straight, 80% of our games are played at night, but yet I can't even practice at night?  Sign me up!

Politics aside, the play on the field was off and on all season.  We played some competitive baseball games from time to time, but the fundamentals just weren't there.  Throughout my time coaching baseball at this school, I always wondered what the youth coaches showed these kids when it was time to practice.  Fielding mechanics were all wrong, kids couldn't field properly, catch fly balls properly, nor hit or pitch all that well.  I would spend time doing basic little league drills with some of these players to try and show them the proper ways of doing things.  But when you have no competition from within the team to get better due to lack of numbers, there wasn't a whole lot of incentive in these kids to change their ways.

The final result of that first season wasn't great.  We finished the season with an overall record 6-15 with a 1-11 mark in our conference and a last place finish.  Despite all the bad things about that first season, I will always remember some of the good things.  We started the year 3-1 before falling apart.  In our opener, my starting pitcher threw a no-hitter and led off the game with a solo homerun.  In the last game of the season, we were playing a team that was a 7-time state champion and had destroyed us twice in the regular season.  We had little to no shot at winning.  But baseball can be a funny game.  We'd lose the game and our opponent would lose in the state semi-finals.  But we made them earn that first win.  We took a 1-0 lead after 2.5 innings before giving up 3 in the 3rd to trail 3-1.  We'd score in the 5th to trail 3-2 after 5.5 before giving up 3 more runs to provide the final 6-2 deficit.

With a full season under my belt, I was optimistic that year 2 would be better.  I only had 2 seniors with a large group of my best players returning.  That optimism would fade quickly....