Recapping a great weekend in Dallas, where almost 8,000 baseball coaches from across the country joined to learn, network and share ideas.
1) The role of coaches in a student athlete’s life
Coaches play an incredibly important role in an athletes development. They have an impact one way or another, some greatly positive and some greatly negative. Once a child gets to middle school and beyond, time spent with their teammates and coaches throughout a season is usually higher than anyone aside from their parents and siblings. Parents and student athletes are making an important decision every time they choose to sign up or play on a team. This is important at all levels of sport, and especially important if you are making a decision to play a sport in college.
Great coaches are the ones that build relationships, care about their players, hold them accountable and model their behavior in a way that positively influences their athletes. They also care about teaching sport skills, teamwork, how to compete and how to win.
2) Mental Toughness and Focus
A separator between athletes that compete at a high level and those that don’t is their ability to focus on what they have control over and reduce their limiting or negative thoughts. Great colleges and universities understand this and build a program around the mental performance skills needed to help their athletes compete at the highest level. At the college level, there is a much smaller gap between the top and bottom players on a roster, so physical skills aren’t the ‘lowest hanging fruit’. An athlete’s attitude, ability to focus, and mindset, are the areas most ripe for performance improvement.
3) Dealing with Adversity
In the world of instant gratification and social media influencers that we live in, children have unlimited ‘highlight’ reels and edited and curated content at their fingertips. But in the real world with real people, situations still happen that require a verbal or physical response. Sports have always been a great teacher of life lessons and dealing with failure and success. But now more than ever, being able to deal with adversity is a skill that requires training - from teammates, coaches, teachers and parents.
4) ‘Buy In’
A topic that came up many times over the weekend from speakers was the idea of ‘Buy In’ from athletes within a program. When someone fully commits to a program and all that it entails, the end result is a significantly better product than if a bunch of individuals have their own idea of what they should be doing and how often, and the committment level. At the college level, this includes every aspect of a program. From what they wear to practice to how they run plays on defense. It takes a well run and well organized program to even ask players to ‘buy in’ to the system, but if athletes have the opportunity to trust their coaches, the results will be much more rewarding than staying at arms length.
At the youth and high school levels, too many times players are on multiple teams at the same time, or aren’t fully committed to the one team they are on. ‘Committed’ means showing up to every practice possible, listening and learning from coaches, applying what you’ve learned, and looking for ways to make the team better. In my opinion, this is only way to show up for your team, and it’s very difficult to do if there are too many conflicting activities on your schedule. As difficult as it is, parents and players need to understand that anything less than 100% commitment to any given program each season will have diminishing returns to not only the player, but also his or her team.
5) College coaches want adaptable athletes
Specialization was another hot topic at the Conference. College and pro coaches unanimously support multi-sport athletes. The benefits of learning different skills from different types of coaches and the physical qualities needed for different sports provide huge benefits. One of the first qualifiers to gain the interest of a college sport coach is general athleticism. Athleticism can come in many forms, but as a whole, it means the way a player moves and reacts. While everyone is born with a varying amount of athleticism, it’s also a skill that can be trained via speed, agility and strength training. It’s why every college baseball program has a strength and conditioning coach, dedicated times for training, and a focus on movement and sprinting during their warmups before practice. The youth and high school teams and programs that take this training seriously have a leg up on their competition. And if they don’t, Ballplayers is here to fill in the gaps😉