Coaches Thinking For Players

Baseball season is getting underway in Colorado which means we’re back to youth coaches sitting on buckets and calling pitches for their players. They relay the signs to the catcher who relays them to the pitcher.

At the amateur level, and especially the youth level, I believe a coach’s job is to teach. Period. Unless it’s the end of the line for an athlete’s time in the sport, the coach will be passing the player off to another coach at a higher level. Whether that athlete won or lost doesn’t matter. How they understand the game does.

Sure, the coach knows better. They can read the situation, read the hitter’s intent.

But, they’ve taken away the role thinking plays in an athlete’s development. They’ve valued winning the game and salving their ego over developing the players*.

So your catcher and pitcher agree on a first pitch fastball to the biggest guy in the lineup and it gets hit 400-feet. If the kids are competitive and smart, they’ll learn from that. The next time the big dude is up, I’m sure they’ll work a different sequence. One bomb can give them years of learning. All it cost was a run or two. Who cares?

That said, this plague is more than just providing insight into the intricacies of the game and trusting your players to learn from mistakes.

In order to perform well, our athletes need to be engaged in the game. The brain has to be functioning. If they’re thinking along with the opponent and trying to outsmart them, they’re more likely to be in the moment. Thinking through the next pitch prevents them from dwelling on the importance of the outcome two-hours from now.

If someone is telling you what to do at every step, your ability to anticipate will suffer. Your mind will have plenty of time to drift and potentially obsess over the result which amps up the anxiety.

Worse, the player can’t take ownership of the ultimate outcome. A needed requirement to learning. After all, if a bad outcome occurs, it’s not the athletes fault. Coach told them to do that.

Focus. Anticipation. Responsibility.

All important factors in success that coach’s remove by moving the chess pieces instead of telling the chess pieces how they can move.

(*In defense of coach’s, this is also a by-product of the for-profit youth sports industry where winning $2 plastic rings is seen as a marketing channel. But that’s a rant for another day.)