Playoffs and Building a Winning Team

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 strikes, and minimizing mistakes was going to be the key from the get go. The team never really got over both of those mistakes as some other teams that I have coached got over their biggest problems. What was exciting to see though was that the team got better at minimizing those mistakes to the point where we could compete to make the playoffs.

(Side note) The playoffs for the Zone 9 Junior Legion are really weird to be completely honest there should be no team that is below .500 making the playoffs. The system carries way too many teams from the regular season into the playoffs. Top 6 teams make the playoffs with the top 2 getting byes into the second round of the playoffs. Seeds 3-6 battle in a one game playoff to see who makes it. We made it as the 6 seed but won to face the 1 seed in the second round. 

The team has been a pleasure to coach for the most part with a lot of kids being coach-able. The biggest issue attitude wise had to be the total number of games and having players realize that they are going to make mistakes, going to strikeout, going to mess up. Young players especially can get anxious and want to get a hit every single time. A player actually  told me after I had mentioned to him that it is unrealistic for him to get a hit every time the player actually responded "Yes I can." which is just setting themselves up for failure.

Failure is a good thing. Failing means that you get to try again to complete the same task. It is ok to fail but for young athletes to realize that again is going to be unreasonable on my part. Thanks for checking in! Wish us luck in the playoffs.




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