Coaching for the Kids

By Tony Hicks

Afriend of mine recently took to social media, asking for input regarding coaching his young child’s baseball team. His chief concern was his own “old school” style (yelling) when it comes to lack of hustle, dumb mistakes, etc.

I heard that. My first thought was that they should make chew toys for adult humans who coach kids 10 years old and younger - something on which you can bite down when you’re frustrated to the point of wanting to gnaw off your own tongue.

I’ve been there. I’ve coached two of my daughters’ softball teams. I think I once actually ripped out some of my own hair in frustration, something a middle-aged man should never do, as he has no assurance that hair will ever come back.

I’ve also been that parent who’s ready to go headbutt one of their child’s coaches to let them know their excess aggression on his part is not acceptable.

Yes, irony can sometimes be so ironic.

My friend’s concern seemed to mostly be about how other parents might view his coaching style (yelling). Which I get (see above example of self-abuse). But what gets lost in that approach, I realized while aggressively being an example of it, is that it discounts the important part: how the experience affects the kids.

No, really … it really is supposed to be about the kids.

My daughter’s coach is a very nice guy. And he knows the game very well. On paper, he’s a great coach … for 18-year-old college players.

Some of his players haven’t hit five feet tall. Some haven’t hit chronological double digits. This is my daughter’s fourth season. She’s a veteran on her team. She’s also a bright kid who loves playing. And she still doesn’t fully understand that one team wins, and one loses.

Which is great. She’s having fun … despite the fact her coach has her doing drills you see in movies about marines struggling to get through boot camp. I keep telling myself that, as long as she enjoys it, it’s good for her. Then I take a leisurely eight-minute walk to my car and back, where no one will hear my teeth grinding.

It’s a classic dynamic, of which I’ve seen both sides. It’s a balancing act, trying to teach kids the game and that life, like it or not, is competitive. The harder you try, the better you’ll be. Theoretically.

But the chasm between I-know-something-you-don’t-know adults and easilydistracted children, who think a dugout is a place to hit each other on the head and make up new dances, is as weighty as ever.

One thing that has changed is the number of recreational choices kids now have. Recreation now comes attached to their hands, in the form of computerized multi-dimensional imagination factories called cell phones. When I was that age, many centuries ago, the biggest threat was those extra 11 channels from the regular three television networks –a problem that was remedied, my grandpa once demonstrated, by one angry yank on the cable line leading into the wall. As the choices move faster, real sports – especially baseball and softball – move slower. As a coach, I’m far more sensitive than my coaches were, to the possibility of doing something to turn a kid off to playing real sports. In the 1970s, quitting a sport wasn’t much of an option, when the only alternative was playing with other kids … most of whom are too busy playing sports.

I’ve found that a good rule to follow when running out of solutions is to read the room. Or, in this case, the dugout.

Tony Hicks is a newswpaper columnist and the father of four daughters.