This weekend in Kentucky we were 1-2.  We did some good things, made some first time outdoor mistakes, and found out what we needed to get better at.

Our pitchers threw well only giving up 3 hits in the first two games.  Our bats came out a little cold and then picked up in game two, and even more in game three.  Defensively and on the bases we made some mistakes that hurt us and cost us would be runners, and gave the other team a few too many extra outs.  We competed in all three games and played hard all three games, but like all teams we have to get better and we have to get better at the little things.  Too many base running mistakes, popped up a bunt, and made some errant throws.  Details win championships and those are big details when it comes to baseball. 

I expect the base running will get better the more we get outside and get in those situations because it is hard to practice live reads indoors. 

We also did some great things like turning 4 double plays in a double header one being a diving catch by our 1st baseman on a bunt who threw to 1st base from his butt for the double play.  One of our pitchers came off the mound, made a bare hand play and cut down the lead runner on a bunt, and our catcher was a wall all weekend long.  We covered bunts well and we were very strong holding runners on and even picking off two guys. 

Besides the one bunt our situational hitting was good as we executed two hit and runs and did get the job done on the other SAC attempt.  We were 1-1 stealing 3rd and took extra bases on throws that missed the cutoff man. 

It is hard to tell too much from the opening weekend but I think the initial shock is  out and our hitters timing was better in game three than it was in game 1.  We are off to Florida for a week starting Saturday and if our pitching is as good as it was we should be fine.  Although we did walk a few too many hitters the pitchers competed and we got out of some potential big innings with double plays and strikeouts with the bases loaded.  I am looking forward to our trip as I think the consistency of playing outside everyday will be huge and I expect big things from the guys once we get rolling. 

Things we will work to improve before the next game:

Base running, Finishing plays, Having quality at bats, and getting ahead of more hitters.  If we can improve on those things we will put pressure on the defense, and put up more runs, while limiting the amount of hitters counts we allow them to get into. 

Looking back on the trip I am happy because our guys made no excuses for mistakes, picked each other up, played hard, and competed every inning we played,  If we continue to do that we will continue to get better and the more games we play the better our team will get.

Great teams learn from mistakes and work hard to get ready for each game.  We already do the latter and this week we will work on correcting our mistakes. 

http://www.dupanthers.com/index.aspx?path=baseball

The season starts Friday in Kentucky so I will be very busy, but I hope to be able to contribute game notes, stats, and things that happened on the field that we may be able to discuss.  I have never tried this but I hope to be able give examples of plays or rulings that happened and see if you have ever heard of them or they have happened to you.  I hope this becomes very interactive.  I will also be putting up game notes in hopes people will follow our team through the season.  You can check out the schedule, results, and stats at:

http://www.dupanthers.com/index.aspx?path=baseball

I will not share private team information, locker room talks, or any other team only information, but rather general game information and wacky and weird things that happen like the ball hit the right fielder in the head and bounced over the fence for a walk off grand slam to win the world series. 

I will still be posting about coaching, hitting, fielding, and any other topic that hits me so please stay tuned and if you have any feedback on things you would like to see on the page please let me know. 

Oftentimes when I ask a player what his goals are, he rattles off a bunch of numbers like hitting .350, hitting 10 home runs, having an onbase% of .500, etc., problem is he never tells me how he plans to reach these numbers.  This is because I have asked for goals and the player gave me results.  It is important that both players and coaches understand the difference.  I will just list a few because I want players to be creative and set goals to their style of play.

Goals:

Have a good mental approach for each at bat.

Understand what the pitcher is trying to do and what he has. (approach changes for each pitcher) this is where using charts comes into play.

Know the strike zone, (this changes sometimes with the ump so be prepared to adjust, remember complaining does no good because you are still out, so adjust)

Take 100 swings minimum per day.

Prepare everyday and master the fundamentals of the game.

Results:

Hit .400

Hit 10 HR

Have more Walks than Strikeouts

Win a state, national, or world series Championship

It is important to understand that “Your Goals Should Get Results.”  This means your goals are to prepare and be mentally ready to playe everyday.  Preparation will be different for each player and each team but the goal is to understand yourself and understand what your coach expects you.

Results are what you get when you have prepare properly.  Although these results are not guaranteed even if your preparation is perfect, they are almost guaranteed to not happen if you fail to prepare.  So understand the difference between Goal and Results and remember to “Set Goals That Get Results.” 

By setting goals that get results you will be able to better understand if your goals are on track or if they need to be tweaked.  You can always look back and say if the left fielder didn’t make those two diving catches I would have hit .400 but you forget about the end of the bat bleeders that dropped, therefore your view is skewed because you forget to put those in the category of hits that maybe should not have been.  Either way this is not a good way to look at the game and will drive you crazy trying to count all the outs that should have been hits and hits that should have been outs because they should have been what they were.  You must give the other team credit and understand they are prepared as well.  The left fielder made the catch because the scouting report told him to shade the gap, the bleeder dropped because the scouting report said for SS to shade middle and you hit a ball just out of his reach in the hole. 

If you are prepared, have a good mental approach, understand what the pitcher is trying to do, and understand the situation you will be setting yourself up for success.  Have fun, play hard, and set goals that get results.

When you are working hard, running, lifting, swinging, taking ground ball, working on your blocking, or throwing a flat ground bull pen, the questions are who are you trying to impress and where is your drive coming from?

The answers to those questions should be yourself and within.  If you are doing extra work to get praise from someone else, for example a coach, teammate, or scout you are doing the work for the wrong reason and setting yourself up for disappointment.  Hard work is a trait and it will stick with you forever in anything you do as long as the work is being done for to get internal praise because the outside praise and fanfare will one day be gone, but there will still be things to work on for the rest of your life. 

Being a good human being is something that needs to be worked on everyday of your life whether you are a super star athlete or a 9-5 marketing manager.  It is of the utmost importance to practice doing things for the right reasons because your actions off the field and to the people you come in contact with will make impressions that go far beyond your athletic prowess.  Give yourself a little test.  When you hold the door open for someone to walk through and the do not say thank you, do you get mad?  If so you are doing it for the wrong reason, you should hold the door open because you want to help someone not because you want to be thanked for helping someone.  Now think about this, are you the guy who lifts early in the morning to get it out of the way and start your day or are you the guy who lifts when there is an audience so they can see how strong you are and tell you how great you are?  This matters because your  intentions are important.  Your intentions should be to do whatever you can in order to get better so you can help the team.  If you are doing the right things for the right reasons people will notice because it will show up on the field, but if you are doing things just for show then chances are that will also show up on the field. 

Your drive needs to come from within.  I say this all the time and I will keep saying it until it is not true.  You should be able to push yourself to be great and you only need the praise of the person looking back at you while you are brushing your teeth at night.  That praise is what matters because he will not lie to you and you cannot lie to him.  If the person in the mirror is content with your work ethic then chances are you are doing something right and you are doing them for the right reasons.  So keep working hard and playing for the love of the game.

People who are successful have one thing in common.  That one thing is failure.

Failure is the best teacher and people must embrace that failure.  Notice I did not say love the failure, I simply want you to embrace it.  Feel it, understand it, and most of learn from it.  Nobody wants to fail but everybody is going to fail, so get used to it and learn how to move on from failure because you never truly fail until you quit, so as long as you keep pushing you will not fail.

You can have all the talent in the world and know the game inside and out but you are still going to fail.  I love the word, because it hurts so much, but it is there and if you are not able to bounce back and be persistant you will quit and then you have truly failed. 

Once you quit nobody will know how talented or smart you were because you will no longer be able to prove to them you are those things because you quit.  Why did you quit? because things got too hard and you struck out too many times or you made a few too many errors so instead of practicing and being persistant you just gave up.  This is what a lot of people do and it has become the norm.  I call it video game syndrome, because if you do not like how the game is going you just hit reset.  Problem is in life you can’t do that, you have to push through when you strike out, you have to take more ground balls when you make errors, you have to move on and be persistant because life and sports do not have reset buttons.  Persistance is what seperates the bad from the good and the good from the great.  Why?

because players who are bad at first will be done before they can be good if they are not persistant, and players who are good but lack persistance will never give themselves the chance to be great and the great players are the bad and the good players who pushed through and made things happen while everyone else moved out of their way.

One thing a lot of people do not understand is that the competition at the top is far less than the competition in the middle because people usually settle for good enough.  Push through, dare to be great and you will find that if you are persistant you will do things that may even surprise you, but don’t stop to long to think about those things because to get to the top it takes a lot of work.  Are you persistant enough to be great?

As a high school player or even junior college transfer the most important stat is your GPA.  I know this sounds like something you may have heard before, but the higher your GPA the more looks you will get.  Test scores come into play as well but the GPA is the first indicator that will attract the attention of schools. 

What does a good GPA do for you?

Allows schools who have higher academic standards to recruit you thus opening up the door for a free or more than likely partially paid for college education because you have more options of colleges to attend.

Why is this important?

Because you may not be good enough to get into LSU or Arizona State as a player but you might be good enough for Columbia or Yale and the better your GPA the better your chances to get into these schools are.  Also, if you are good enough athletically to get into Michigan, Stanford, Northwestern, or other prestigious academic schools the better your GPA the more you will stand out, and the more you stand out the better chance you have of getting recruited.

What else can a GPA do for you?

It can show your work ethic or character.  As a college coach I have asked kids about their GPA because I thought it was a little low.  I have actually had kids say to me that school is too easy and does not challenge them.  Immediately I think the kid is lazy and not driven to succeed.  If school is that easy than you should either take AP classes or get your homework done without a problem.  If you are a person who does not do well when things are easy, I have a hard time believing you will do any better when times get tough.  Your character is an important part of recruiting because players with average tools and great character will help a team a lot more than a player with above average tools and below average character.  This is because the player with below average character is not usually a good teammate where the player with good character is a good teammate and will buy into the system.  This helps a team win more than the talent of one individual. 

Another reason your GPA is important is in order to play when you get to college you have to be eligible.  Why would any college recruit a player who is having a hard time passing at the high school or junior college level.  Why do you think your GPA/ACT/SAT scores go into scouting books at showcases?  This happens so a coach can know if they can even recruit the player before they watch them.  With as many players as we have to see each year the more information we have to weed out some guys the better.  Our goal is to find the best student/athletes and then recruit them.  We will not go to a high school game to watch a kid who hit 25 HRs and hit .500 if he has a 1.1 GPA and low test scores.  Why? because he is going to have to go to a Junior College and if his grades do not improve we still won’t watch him because he is going to have to quit baseball or get drafted.  See with bad grades you have two options, quit or get drafted.  These are not very favorable options since quitting is not what you want to do and getting drafted means you are one of the best in the world.  If you have solid grades your options increase because now you can go to college and even if you do not play at a major college you can still get a discounted college education, and that is what it is all about.

Your GPA is the most important stat you will have and just like your batting average and on base percentage, the higher it is the better chance you have of playing at the next level. 

As important as I feel a player’s GPA is, I feel the graduation rate of a program should be that important to the coaching staff.  Our job is to get you a degree and win games.  Notice I feel my priority lies with getting the player a college degree then winning, and if you get drafted great but that is out of either of our control.  Players need to graduate because a coach who does not graduate players is setting his kids up for long term failure. 

Another Key stat to remember is 1% of division 1 athletes go pro in their sport.  And of those 1% it is far less that actually are able to make a living to support themselves for the rest of their life. 

Go to college, get a degree, have fun playing the sport you love, but by all means your main goal should be to graduate.

“Respect needs to be earned and you earn respect by proving yourself as a leader”

Coaches and players need to understand this principle and then put it into action.  I tell my guys all the time, I do not want your respects unless I earn it.  Just because I am a coach does not mean you should respect me, but I am going to work hard and bust my butt to earn your respect.  I am also going to treat you like men.  All I ask is you earn my respect in the exact same fashion I am going to earn yours.

“Coach” is a title, it does not command respect it simply puts you in charge.  Coaches must get their players to play at the highest level all the time and the only way to do that is have their respect.  A player might not like you everyday, just remember they do not like their Mother or Father or best friend everyday either, but if they respect you the same way they respect them then you are doing something right.  Players will get upset when they get disciplined or aggravated when they do not start, but it is how they handle it that matters.  Also, how you handle both of these situations will drastically improve the reaction from the player.  If a coach is up front with a player and handles each matter correctly the player does not have to like the decision.  As a matter of fact I do not want a player to like not starting, but I want my players to understand that every decision that is made is made with the team in mind.  

I let them know from the very start it does not matter if one of you make All-Conference or All-American, all that matters is the success of this team.  Our goals are what matter and winning is our goal, more specifically preparing ourselves to win is really the goal and a win is the result of proper preparation.  If each one of us prepare each day and play the way we can on game day, then we will win and all the other individual rewards will come too, but if each of us focus on individual awards the team goal will not be achieved.  Team above all.

In order to have a great team you must have a team that cares about each other and is accountable to themselves, teammates, and coaches.

When it comes to athletics most people will live up to the expectations that are put upon them.  This is a good and bad thing all at the same time because some coaches have high expectations for players and not so high for others.  This is when people over achieve and under achieve. (two terms I despise)

Lou Holtz said: “Humans are capable of far more than they realize and each individuals performance is predicated on what’s expected of him”

He also said: “Perfection is possible if you accept nothing less”

This is why I am a firm believer in the fact there is no such thing as overachieving because if a player achieves a level of play that was not expected of him that is the coach’s fault for not expecting more from that player.  In this case I wonder if the player would have achieved more had the coach expected him too.  A coaches expectations set the tone for the team and if your expectations are anything less than perfection you are setting your team up to fail. 

Under achieving happens for two reasons.  One is a coach over estimated a players ability in the recruiting process and the other is, the coach failed to help that player reach his or her maximum potential.

When it comes to expectations a coach must demand perfection.  This may seem unrealistic and it may be, but it will make your players strive for perfection and if they come up short of perfection they just may be great.  As a coach you must clearly define what you expect from your players and then clearly define what it is going to take to reach those expectations.  Some people might walk out right there and you may even lose your most talented player, but the players that remain are the ones willing to win a championship.  It is my belief that all players want to win a championship but there is a difference between wanting to win and being willing to win.  Being willing to win means you will do whatever is expected of you as a part of the team to help win a championship.  Wanting to win is simply a statement anyone can make, it holds absolutely no value in championship culture. 

My players know that I expect them to get every bunt down, make contact in every hit and run situation, and move a runner over every time the chance arrives.  I am not OK with 9 out of 10 because the one that does not get down could be the one that cost us the World Series.  Since my expectations are so high our preparation sets us up to achieve those expectations.  I do not tell the kids I expect this of them and then send them on their way.  I work hard with them, and practice these situations in live situations as to give them the opportunity to be perfect.  Set your players up to succeed and demand perfection of them and you may be surprised how much better your team is in comparison to outside expectations.