Coaching Is Not Like Playing A Video Game

What's stated in the headline may seem obvious, but in the heat of competition sometimes the obvious is lost. It happened to me last year when I was coaching my 10U baseball team.

To prepare for our summer tournaments we played a series of scrimmages in the spring against other local teams. While we showed some promise, there was much more “room for improvement.” After one particularly harsh drubbing (where the other team made deliberate base-running “mistakes” to spare us more embarrassment) I decided we would take a break from scrimmaging to work only on practicing. I then received another invitation to scrimmage, which I accepted--and we were trounced again.

I gave the team the usual post-game talk, saying all the things a coach is supposed to say about not being discouraged, focusing on the positives, and believing in ourselves.

At least that’s what I thought I was supposed to say.

Later that night I realized the hypocrite I had been, because even as I gave that speech I was not following it myself. I was feeling discouraged, doubting myself, and feeling like a failure--but I put up a “brave front” and talked the talk without walking the walk.

In that pep-less pep-talk I really failed my team, because I was not honest with them. Instead of saying, “You know guys, I’m feeling bad too, and right now I’m not sure what to do about it. But we’ll get this figured out,” I put on an act, and told them to do something I wasn’t able and willing to do.

I came to some realizations that night about what coaching is, and what it is not.

It struck me that coaching is not like playing a video game. If I were to approach it that way I would see my job as this: I have to get this guy to hit a ball, this guy to field a ball, this guy to pitch, etc., and my success as a coach would depend solely on how well they accomplished these tasks.

But coaching is not like playing a video game, because my players are not video game characters for me to control. They’re young human beings, with different personalities and temperaments, different skills and levels of skill, different ways of learning, different paces of developing, different family situations, and with many other things going on in their lives, with baseball being one more thing they’re trying to fit in.

My success as a coach ultimately rests not on how well they execute on the field--though teaching them how to play the game is obviously a big part of this. But regardless of the results on the field, my success rests on something that is much more difficult to gauge: how well they personally deal with both success and failure, how they learn to give their best despite the circumstances, and how well I’ve taught them that their worth as a person is not measured in statistics.

I also realized an injustice I had done to my team during that scrimmage. As I watched the other team and how much better they played I thought “Why don’t we look like them?” The answer is so obvious, though easily lost in the midst of competition: “We don’t look like them because we’re not them. We’re us.”

From this I gleaned a piece of advice I gave to my team and continue to give. It goes like this: “Always bring your best, and don’t worry if your best doesn’t look like someone else’s. As long as it’s your best, that’s what matters. The only person whose best you have to try to beat is yours from last time.  And if you don’t, just get up and try again.”

Even an old coach like me can learn new tricks. Thank God!