This much is clearly obvious when coaching, you will make tough decisions. What needs to be most obvious is that those decisions needs to be focused on what is best for the TEAM. When any decision is being made the coach must always be concerned with what is best for his team in the short term and try to balance it with what is best for the long term. I have faced this recently with the Legion program that I am coaching. As a coaching staff we need to narrow the squad down to 16 or 17 players for this summer. The difficulty comes from the process or narrowing this number down. First off tryouts were clearly more difficult than I had thought. Getting a good look at players in the field as well as at the plate is a difficult thing to do with only a couple of hours to spare. Decisions need to be made and I find myself dreading the idea of telling a player that he is not good enough to play on my team after only seeing him for 4 hours and potentially 40 swings again...
As much as the team struggled, slogged, and lost throughout the season I knew that if we played our best heading into the playoffs that we had a great chance to compete and challenge the higher seeds in the playoffs. It wasn't easy to get to this point in the season, but I believe that the team is peaking at exactly the right moment. After coaching for a couple of seasons I find myself being more and more honest with the ability of players on each of my teams. I feel that when the season breaks and the teams head into the grind of the year it becomes pretty clear whether the team has talent or not. From the get go with the Junior Legion team that the talent was there. The key would be putting it all together. One of the biggest obstacles that the team had to overcome was something that I did not anticipate at all, staying focused, positive, and alert. Throughout the season the team struggled to put together big wins sometimes falling 1-2 plays short of victory. Throwing strik...
Joe Maddon was nice enough to take 30 minutes out of his busy day in order to talk with my Sports and Social Media class about pretty mich whatever they wanted to talk about. The thing that struck me was how genuine he was as a person he was able to speak with students with the same tone and excitement as he would with a season veteran group of reporters. It was awesome to be able to talk with someone who is able to manage on the highest level of baseball. He talked about how a lot of what he is doing on a daily basis is simply managing a group of individuals who happen to play baseball. He talked a lot about good leadership, defusimg situation and having an open dialogue and be open to learn from anyperson who you come across. He also taught me that it is good to reach continue to try even though we might not achieve success right away. As a class we have tweeted at a ridiculous amount of players coaches and analysts. All of which have turned us down or ignored our request....
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