The spring thaw, don’t you love it? waiting for the crocuses to appear and the grass to turn green. For over fifty years, this was the time of year I lived for. The boys of the summer, 162 games in 180 days, what fun? I am no longer a participant, just a spectator. Yet every summer from the time I was eight to thirty-five, that’s what I did, I played baseball. As a child, the dream was to become a professional baseball player and earn a living. I’m sure kids today have those same dreams and can see themselves hitting the World Series-winning home run or throwing a no-hitter. It was a fantasy festival and we all fantasized, but unfortunately none of us made it. We played in and out of uniform, we organized and got up, we honed our skills, we practiced hitting, and we all thought we were really good, but not good enough. There were some guys in the town I lived in that were so good that we thought we’d be watching them play for the Yankees one day. Not so.
I started doing math many years ago and finally calculated the numbers. There are about three thousand professional baseball players in the United States and that includes minor league teams. I don’t include Japan or other countries that play in the World Baseball Classic every four years. There are eight billion people living on the planet. The chances of a child being struck by lightning are greater than the chances of becoming a professional baseball player. Professional baseball players are the cream, cream, cream of the crop and have certain physical abilities that are innate to them and only them. When scouts talk about a five-tool player, they mean a player’s ability to run fast, have a strong throwing arm, can hit for average and hit for power, and can defend his position well. These are all God-given abilities that improve with practice, but they are really just natural talent.
I’m not too concerned about teens understanding those numbers, I think they do, but I don’t think parents have a clear understanding of those statistics and furthermore believe that their child will be the next Mickey Mantle. It’s not the belief that worries, it’s what parents do with those beliefs that can make life miserable for many people.
Let’s be clear, the coach of the coach, the father of the father and the game of the player, any time these three things get mixed up and start stepping on your toes, it’s a recipe for disaster with the player losing and I don’t mean to the game. Let’s take a look at what happens when each person in the above group doesn’t know how to do their job, creates unrealistic expectations, and starts telling everyone else how to do their job.
Trainers Trainers
Training can sometimes be more difficult than teaching. When a teacher teaches, he is in a classroom with his students, and unless an administrator is watching, no one is watching. A coach during a game and sometimes during practice can be watched by a large part of the community in which he works. Sometimes they do this job for little or no pay, spend hours of their time trying to help improve the athleticism of someone else’s child, and can be mercilessly belittled and criticized by parents and sometimes by their own players. . Parents, I might add, who have unrealistic expectations of their own children’s ability and talent. I realize that parents need to read and sign the handbook that lays out the rules for participation and realize their place during games, but too often in communities where sports are the centerpiece, parents continually argue. about the coach and, unfortunately, they keep these conversations inside their children’s ears. The coach becomes the subject of rumors and gossip and is placed under the microscope in the community with parents impatient for the coach to provide them with the evidence to back up their belief. This all started due to the schedules of some disgruntled parents who believe their child should play every game, even if their child isn’t the best pitching choice for the game that day. Teachers are hired for their expertise in a subject area and are left alone to deliver content to their students. When they are allowed to use their own creativity and are not intimidated by parents and potentially administration, they feel more confident and relaxed while doing their work. Coaches are hired to train and need to be left alone to bring their expertise to their players. Parents who interfere with the coach while he is doing his job put undue pressure on him and rob players of the joy of competition and camaraderie. So if you’re a parent, do your child a favor and leave the coach alone. He was given the job by a school district or community that believed in him and his abilities to teach a sport to kids and bring out the best in its players. Let the coach; train and let him/her do what he/she likes to do.
Parents Parents
Your son may be good at his sport, but unless he’s the next Bryce Harper, he’s not going to go pro. So why put all kinds of performance-related pressure on this kid? By the way, if you ask any professional baseball player what his parents were like when they were in the minor leagues, he’ll tell you that his parents said to just go out and have fun; for the love of the game and nothing else. In fact, that’s why they became professionals because of the no-pressure, no-expectation attitude. Parents need to be parents and that means encouraging and nurturing natural talents and balancing rules and regulations with compassion and understanding. Parents are their children’s life coaches and should guide them in the right direction by instilling lifelong values and character building to help them succeed in the future. By the time baseball or any other sport becomes the benchmark for success, any failure related to the game will cause the child to feel like a failure in other areas of his life and lose the confidence to continue. forward. So, be a parent, not a coach, leave the coaching to the coaches, and work with your child to be the best he can be as a person, not a player. If they are good people, they will be good players. Use sport as a vehicle to help your son/daughter show who they really are; someone with character and values, who respects his teammates and opponents, and understands that there is only one person in charge during games and practices and that is the coach.
the players play
The players play; Think about what we call those who participate in sports teams as players. Not workers, players. What does play mean? It means you’re having fun, you’re doing it willingly, and you can’t wait to start doing it. You enjoy it. Is that what our children experience today when they participate as players on a sports team? I don’t know, what I do know is that I have seen many kids forced to go to Tuesday night soccer practice and Saturday morning games. Many children today only play in organized teams and for them once the game becomes organized by adults, the word game does not enter the equation. Besides, the children don’t know how to play today. They don’t know how to organize and play pick up games. Often some leagues are in townships and the kids live miles away with no one to play with and hone the skills they’ve learned in practice. Kids need to run together on their own and learn to problem solve on their own with adult coaching and not adults hovering over them offering correction because their swing wasn’t right or they don’t know how to catch a fly ball. So let’s let the children play, if we don’t play we won’t play anymore, it will be work.
So what do we do?
The solution is quite simple, let the children play and not disturb each other; Easier said than done. Both teachers and parents have asked me for solutions to problems. My response has sometimes been “I’m going to tell you what to do, but you probably won’t.” They either can’t or don’t want to. Egos are too big and when there are people who have some power, they use it to get what they want, even when it is not the best for the team or the group. School districts and communities are controlled by a minority that does not always want what is best for a group. Sometimes parents don’t always want the best for their own children and live vicariously through them in the hope that they will somehow complete their own unfinished life. As a society we have lost some real professional and personal wisdom and want to dismantle the playground because a kid fell off the monkey bars. Our children look to us for answers, but we are too busy arguing with each other. They then look at each other and have their friends proxy raise them, creating what Robert Bly called “The Society of Brothers”, where the ground is level and no one is in charge.
As adults we have created this culture in a very innocent and unintentional way, and now we have to dismantle Frankenstein’s Monster. We need to stop telling parents and kids what they want to hear and be honest about their academic and sports-related ability, regardless of unrealistic parental expectations. Billy Beane of Moneyball fame was drafted in the first round by the New York Mets right out of high school. The scouts identified him as that five-tool player we talked about earlier. He played for a short time in the major leagues and then went into scouting. He never made it as a player, but he did become a successful general manager for the Oakland A’s. He did succeed, but not like the player everyone thought he would be.
When Bryce Harper turned professional as an outfielder for the Washington Nationals, Davey Johnson, the team’s then-manager, asked him how he felt, Harper replied; “This is the most relaxed I’ve ever been in my entire life.” Harper knew that he had been struck by lightning and that he was one in eight billion who became a professional baseball player. He really did it. Everyone else will have to keep trying, but really all kids have the potential to be great people, just not professional athletes. Even if a child gets a scholarship and is quite the state in their sport, they will always be a big fish in a small pond, so let the child have fun, let the coaches train, and help the parents understand how expectations unrealistic can do more harm than good. .
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