Development vs. Winning

Hello readers. I want to start this post off by saying thank you for all of the positive feedback I have received. Honestly, when I started this I really had no clue how many people would check out the blog and read it, but I admit I was shocked when my last entry about velocity received almost 200 views. Thank you, I'm humbled and I hope you can continue to gain some information and insight through my entries.

Today I want to talk about a debate I see online all the time on baseball pages on Facebook, and I've heard many conversations at ballparks from parents and coaches alike. I've even had the conversation internally with the coaches on my staff as to what the right approach is and how to go about it.

That topic is "what should youth teams (when I say youth I'm defining under 14 or below high school) be about?" Meaning should teams be more concerned with winning games or tournaments on the weekend for those $2.00 rings or more focused on "developing" (whatever the hell that actually means) players individual skills and not worry about winning.

I'm sure if we took a poll of everyone reading this that we would get a pretty good split about what everyone thinks. Here is my response to that question though.....why can't we do both? Shouldn't we be doing both?

To be honest, I've never really understood this debate in the first place. I've mentioned before, I enjoy winning and I believe our staff's have always coached as hard as anyone out there game in and game out with the mindset of we want to win. We want to be competitive and we want our kids to compete. There is NOTHING wrong with wanting to win and trying to win, despite some the changes in our society over the past few years that seem to be to the contrary. I'll tell you this right now, you damn well better teach your kid how to compete because if you don't you are going to have a 28 year old unemployed adult child still living at home with you! See the fact is, almost everything meaningful that we do as adults is a competition. Wanna get into the college of your choice, better be the best. As you all know, my favorite university is the University of Georgia. Guess how many high school seniors applied for admissions at UGA for this fall? Over 25,000!!!! Guess how many were accepted? Only 5,000!!! Say what? Only 25% of those who applied got in? Yep, that's right and it's not like UGA is Harvard or Princeton. They are a great school (IMHO...lol) but come on it's not like they are Ivy League, and it's that hard to get in. So yeah, you better be good, you better have the best grades and you better have club activities in your background and you better write some great essays or you aren't going to be a part of that 25%. Same goes for that job you are wanting. I'm not going to bore you by looking up a bunch of statistics but I will tell you one that I do know. My first teaching job in Texas was with the Frisco ISD, which at the time was the fastest growing school district in the country. That year they had hired over 1,000 new teachers to work in the district. Do you know how many applications they had? They had received over 10,000 applications. That's right, only 10% of the people that applied were hired. You wanna job? You gotta be the best of the best! You know what you also better be first and foremost? You better be competitive and you better want to win because if you don't you aren't likely to do all those things you need to do to be a part of that 25% or 10%! Bottom line, we dang well better be teaching our kids to be competitive and to want to win and teaching them how to win, the right way!

But Coach Trout, they are only 9, 10, 11, 12 year olds, they need to learn the game first. I absolutely agree! I believe that teaching the fundamentals from the very extreme basics of how to hold and throw the ball and how to catch it are crucial. I also believe it's important to teach kids higher level fundamentals of the game. Turning double plays, exactly how to make a diving catch, hitting behind a runner, driving a runner in from third base with less than two outs and bunting and bunt coverages. All basic fundamentals of the game, all crucial things to learn and all development of the individual player. Additionally, I believe it's important to not lock kids into one position too early. They need to know how to play different positions. Not one player on any of my teams at the youth level has played less than three positions on the field both in practice or in games. That's just a fact!

But why is it that people believe that those two things in the above paragraphs can't coexist? Here is where I believe we take a different approach and have a different opinion. There are many people of the opinion that you can't be developing players and trying to win because trying to win ultimately means that you are putting your best players in the most important positions in the field and at the top of the line up and then the worst players bat last or they don't bat at all and sit the bench.

That is where I disagree. And I have several different points about it. First, personally, I believe learning how to sit the bench and how to be a good teammate and how to cheer on your fellow players is a part of that development that kids need. Kids (and some adults) need to learn how to fail. They need to learn that they don't always get what they want. Life isn't always fair. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes you get left out, sometimes someone else gets that promotion at work that you think you deserve. That's part of it. Learning to deal with those things IS development. It is part of baseball and sports. It's one that our culture and society is losing and I won't get into what I think the effects of that are here, but I can tell you they aren't good.

The alternative to that is that we have to also develop the skill and the will to win games. That's a huge part of development. I can't tell you how many times I've watched an MLB game that has a young team make it to the playoffs and ultimately lose the division championship or league championship game and analyst, players, and coaches alike talk about the learning curve for young teams and how they have to learn to handle the pressure of the playoffs or the big games. Well, if they are still learning that at the big league level then the same is true with the youth level. Countless times and teams I've coached I have seen and said the same thing. I recall a team of ours when my son was just 8u we had three tournaments that we made it to the championship game only to see us lose to three different teams in the finals. It wasn't that those three teams were all better than us, they weren't, in all three cases they were more experienced and accomplished teams that had been there before and knew how to win. We had to learn how to win those big games, from knowing the mentality it took, to learning how to deal with the pressure, to learning how to deal with the fatigue at the end of the tournament. We had to develop in our players the ability to handle all of those things and break through and win. After the three straight finals losses, we went on to win the next 4 championship games we played in that spring, because again, we developed in our players the knowledge and ability to win. It has to be taught and if you focus on development exclusively and never make that a point or priority your kid or your team is missing out.

The next piece of this whole, my kid can't sit the bench and if they do they aren't getting developed is also wrong in my opinion from this standpoint. I don't believe that the majority of "development" comes in games anyway. For me, where we break it down like a fraction for our players is during practice. We take the time to do things right, we tell, show, practice and repeat. And we repeat it a BUNCH. We get 10, maybe even 50 or 100 times more reps in practice per player than any one player could get in a whole weekend of 5 or 6 games. Anyone that has seen us run a practice would agree that we run as efficient of a practice as anyone out there. It far more like a college or pro team practice than your average little league practice. Our kids get a ton of ground balls, fly balls, and game situations. When hit we get kids 70-100 quality swings in an hours time. This is where they get developed. This is where they get better. Think about it like we do a school system and our education. Does anyone think that our educational skills are developed by taking a test only? Or is it more that we learn, grow, and are developed during the lesson and then the practice sheets we do in class and the practice homework that we do at home? The test is just to make sure the understanding has come from the practice. It's the same thing with games. Practice in baseball is just like the lesson, we explain, we practice, and then we send kids home to work on their own, and then game day is the test. It's there to test the learning. So can a kid still get developed by sitting the bench a game or two in a tournament or even a few innings in a game? Absolutely, with the right coaches (read teachers) they absolutely can!

So you might say, ok Coach Trout, does that means games aren't important? No, I didn't say that either. Games are important! Just like test are important in school. Are they end all be alls? No, but they are of significant importance. Here is my response to that though. First, I'm of the opinion that in youth baseball especially there just isn't that wide of gap in talent on teams. What I mean is, most teams don't have 9 players that are just soooooooo much better than the 10th, 11th, and 12th players that those three kids never get to play. If they are then those three players are simply just on the wrong team. All of the teams I've coached and most of the teams I've seen usually have 4-5 kids that are clearly better than the other 6-7 kids on the team and they end up being "regular" starters and rarely come out of the game, especially in bracket games. But the other 6-7 kids aren't separated by much. There might be 2-3 that go on a hitting streak and will be in the lineup for 3 or 4 games in a row but then someone else comes on and they go on a streak and they deserve to be in there. Typically, it does, or it should, shake out that those kids get roughly equal playing time so they are still getting "tested" in games. They are getting at bats, and having to make plays in the field etc. When they aren't getting tested, they are getting developed on the things I mentioned above around being a good teammate, dealing with not getting what they want, etc.

Now, you might be saying to yourself, that all makes sense, so where is the problem? Why is there so much conflict about this in baseball (and I'm sure other sports as well)? The problem isn't with the fact that you can't develop and have a focus on winning and playing to win. The problem is that there are too many coaches and too many parents focused on just one or the other. Of course the ones focused on winning get the most attention because people who are focused only on development or simply aren't that good tend to get loud and vocal about those that go hard at winning. They complain when teams only bat 9 (THE WAY THE GAME IS SUPPOSE TO BE PLAYED), or when they throw a pitcher 75 or 80 pitches, or they don't play every single kid on the bench. They complain and say they only care about winning, usually because they are the ones losing. The trying to win isn't the problem, it only becomes a problem with the coaches that aren't developing the players in practice and giving them at least some opportunities in tournaments. And parents, you don't get off the hook free either. Sometimes it's the parents fault that they don't allow both of these things to happen together. They get their feelings and emotions hurt because their little Johnny didn't get to play in the championship game and he goes home crying that "baseball isn't fun" etc. No, baseball is fun! Baseball has always been fun to play and it will always be fun to play. Not playing is what's no fun! That answer then is, what are you going to do to make sure the next time you get to play and have fun? That answer is NOT what so many parents do nowadays and that's switch teams a thousand times until they find one little Johnny doesn't have to sit the bench on! Dear god, what the hell does that teach the kid? Parents don't let their kid sit the bench because god forbid they might not be able to post a 1,000 action shots of their kid playing SS on their Facebook page. I mean think about it, how many times have you seen one of your friends post a picture of their child standing as the 10th and only player standing in the dugout cheering on their team? You know why they don't do that? It's not because they aren't proud of little Johnny, it's because they somehow think their own self worth as a parent is tied to the fact that Johnny is sitting the bench and not the star pitcher. God forbid someone admit that their kid is on a good team and he's working his way into the starting line up by working hard in practice and being a great teammate and here's a photo of him being the loudest most encouraging person in the park! Why can't we celebrate that with a post on Facebook? I wanna see that post! I'll be the first to click the heart button!

I apologize I got a little sidetracked there as it's something I'm clearly passionate about. Bottom line is, you can do both. You can have a focus on winning and teaching players how to win and you can develop - ALL - of the players on your roster while keeping that focus on winning.

So for those of you that are coaches my advice to you is this - make both winning and developing a priority. Make sure you are hosting fundamental based team practices weekly. Don't let kids get away with just fielding the ball, make sure they are fielding the ball right. Make sure they know where to throw the ball during certain situations, not just that they got an out somewhere. Be disciplined and demanding of your players playing the game with fundamentals and playing the game "the right way". Develop your team in practice. Then when it's game time (and I don't mean meaningless pool games) and the game is on the line, don't be afraid to play for the win! Don't worry about if Johnny gets into the game or not and if that's going to piss off his parents - if they don't understand what you are doing and what you are about, you don't need them on your team in the first place! Stick to your guns teach the whole game, the fundamentals, being competitive, knowing how to win, and the life lessons like everything isn't given, it's not always easy, and you don't get everything handed to you. I promise you those things are MORE important than anything - more important than winning and MORE important that "having fun" and making sure everyone gets equal time.

For those parents out there reading, don't be a team hopper just because your kid isn't the star SS or stud pitcher or has to sit the bench. Don't be afraid to let your child sit the bench for a couple innings or even a couple of games. He may learn more than he would playing. I'll write about this more in another entry, but the the season I learned more about baseball as a player than any season was when I was 14 and I had to play up with the 18 year old American Legion team and I sat the bench 90% of the summer. Parents, do hold your coach accountable to doing both. If you aren't on a team that is teaching the fundamentals and holding your child accountable then that's the time to leave. When searching for the right team for your child, go to the tryouts, look for coaches that are teaching the game even at the tryout, who's instructing and who's just checking boxes on a sheet looking for the most talented kid? Talk to other parents on the team, talk to past players on the team, find out what type of coach they are...go watch one of their practices or games and see how much instruction is given. You can see all those things and help prevent getting on the wrong team. It'll be worth your effort.

I apologize this is a little long and for rambling on this time, but this is important stuff. This is potentially make or break stuff for your child or players in my opinion. I'm happy to discuss this more with anyone that would like to chat because I know many people have vastly different and varying opinions. I always enjoy the conversation so reach out and as always, let me know if there is anything I can do to help you! Have a great week!