The Process

Hello again everyone. It’s absolutely insane to me that as I write this that somehow the calendar is about to turn to May. While the continued pandemic has made things difficult and has been seemly going on forever, 2021 has also flown by. We are now heading into our third month of a “normal” baseball season and before you know it the big week long summer tournaments will be here.

Just a quick update on our season – our team started the year in late February and played tournaments for six straight weekends. Something learned – that’s too many in a row for 12 year old kids. We looked tired and not engaged at times, but we took the next two weekends off for spring break and came out of the break and went 5-0 and won our second championship of the year. I share that because there is a fine line between lots of reps and playing lots of games and making sure that kids are rested and mentally prepared to play. The time off was better for us than pushing through and doing more – lesson learned.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. I want to share a little bit about how I believe I have changed and grown as a coach over time. I’m going to share some things that I believe have made us successful. In sharing, I may come off as being confident or even arrogant and that’s ok. I promise you that’s not my intention. I 100% believe in our “process” (I’ll come back to that later) but there are two very important things here that I want to qualify that with. One is that there is more than one way to skin a cat so to speak. Just because something works for us doesn’t mean it is the only way to get to the same point. Two my “process” includes trying to always learn and develop and adapt. While I certainly have core values and principles that I likely will never change, good coaches are always learning, always trying to adapt to the physical and mental needs of their players, and making sure they are staying up with the ever changing times.

When I first started coaching, as a head high school baseball coach at the tender age of 21, I can remember that I had only three main focuses. One was that I wanted to show everyone how much I knew and how good I was at the game. Two I wanted my players to like me. I wanted to be the cool coach not the “mean ones” that I had when I played. Three, all I cared about was winning! My first year as a head coach – I was TERRIBLE! All of those things were the wrong things to be focused on.

After a couple of years, as I moved to softball from baseball, I morphed as a coach. I stopped worrying about if players and parents “liked” me and I didn’t care if anyone knew how good I was when I played or what I knew. I still focused on winning. I desperately wanted to win. I’m competitive right? What person who has played in college isn’t competitive. What I began to focus on though was teaching the fundamentals of the game. Initially, what I had success with, almost immediately as I took over a high school softball program that was talent rich but was packed with a bunch of kids that hadn’t played much and didn’t have an emphasis on practicing, was teaching them the basics of the game. We focused on exactly how to field a ground ball, how to properly throw, and the expectations of where they should be on defense and the execution we wanted on offense, especially our short game. The improvement we made was immense.

The success we had that first year (30-7 record and a trip to the state tournament) really was the beginning of me changing completely as a coach. When we went back and reflected on how we took a team that had played about 12 games the previous year with a record of something like 10-2 and an early first round playoff loss, to a team that played 37 games and made a trip to the state finals, we found that it was because of everything we had done to prep for those moments. It was the “process”, if you will, that we created. It was the fact that we started morning open gyms for our pitchers in January. It was the fact that we started evening open cages for our hitters at the same time. It was the fact that rain or shine, we practiced. It was the fact that we taught the fundamentals from the ground up inside the gym the very first week of practice in early March when it was too cold and wet to go outside. I didn’t know exactly what it was at the time, but it was our dedication, our commitment, our discipline to do things the “right way” each and every day. It was the forming of our “process”. Basically, the same process or guidelines we still use to this day.

Fast forward to now something like almost 25 years later, and I think what makes us good is that we have eliminated all focus on winning and we only care about the “process” we have created. A lot of what I talk about now when I talk to other guys about my coaching thoughts and philosophies is actually stolen from Nick Saban, the well decorated head football coach at Alabama. He is the one the coined the word “process” when it comes to coaching and I like to use the same concepts and beliefs in my own coaching philosophy.

See I never get pissed off and angry because we lose a game anymore. That may be hard for many of you who know me to believe, but it’s true. Don’t get me wrong, I HATE losing. It sucks! There is NOTHING good about it. But that’s just not what drives many anymore. What drives me insane, what makes my blood boil now, is when we don’t do things right. When we don’t execute a play that I know we have gone over and practiced over and over again. The mental mistakes that we make because we either weren’t focused when we covered it, or we lost our focus during the game. The mistakes that just cannot and should not happen are so hard to take. And frankly, that doesn’t matter if we are winning by 10 runs, losing by 10 runs or if the score is close or tied.

There is both good and bad that comes with that mentality. In some ways, it’s easier to take a loss. Say what, you may be asking? Yeah, again, I hate losing as much or more than next guy, but if we play a “clean” game and we are on point so to speak, but just get beat by a more talented team or they played just as clean, and things broke their way I can deal with that without losing my mind. Fact is that most times there is someone out there better than you. And in baseball it seems true more than any other sports, but you might lose just because they were better than you that day.

What it also means though, and this is the bad that comes with it, is that at times we can win, and I don’t enjoy it at all. At times, we may just be bigger or stronger or more athletic and we win in spite of the fact that we didn’t do things the right way. Coaching youth baseball, this can be especially difficult. Not all kids, even at 12, understand why “Coach Trout is so upset” even though we won. It feels to them, like they can’t ever be good enough, so we must be careful about how much we let on that frustration at times.

Overall, though, we believe this is the best approach. Something else I’ve always liked to say is “control the controllables”. Meaning, don’t worry about things that are out of your control and focus on the things you can control. By focusing on our process, by making our execution the most important thing, by doing things the right way, we eliminate tying what we determine as success to things out of our control. Things like the weather, or the umpires, or the 6’2 lefty that’s throwing 82 mph at 12 years old.

Where this becomes difficult boils down to one simple word though. That word is “discipline”. If I could give one piece of advice to any coach that I have learned over the years and that has helped us be more successful than anything else, it would be discipline. We haven’t always been perfect at it, but when we have been it’s made all the difference. As a coach, find your “process”. You must find your non-negotiable things. Find your core fundamentals that everyone has to do, and it has to be done that way every time no matter way. It could be anything from simply showing up on time, to always being in the right spot bon bunt coverages, or how you expect your fielders to call the ball on a pop fly. Find what you believe in, teach it, and then be disciplined enough to insist on it every single time. Get it right, practice it repeatedly until it’s second nature, and then hold those who don’t do it accountable.

Nick Saban described discipline like this…you know that thing in your mind that you know you should do, but you don’t want to do it? Discipline is doing that because you know it’s right despite no wanting to. It’s also like this… you know that one thing you really want to do, but you know you shouldn’t? Discipline is not doing it, no matter how much you want to.

I’ll leave you with this…think about that just one minute. I can go back and look at that first-year coaching softball. There were days when it was literally freezing cold, and the field was too wet to practice, and the basketball team had our gym. I didn’t want to go outside and freeze my butt off at practice on a blacktop parking lot any more than our girls wanted to, but it was discipline that allowed me to make sure we held the practice and it was our girls discipline that not only had them show up, but work while they were there and get better. Most of the time we worked on our bunt defense. You know what we were really good at executing all season? Our bunt defense, because we put in a process, we practiced it until we got it right and it was second nature. We were disciplined to our process. I always say, “we aren’t smarter than anyone else out there, we are just better at setting our expectations higher and holding our kids accountable to those high expectations”. If you do that, your teams will get better! Good luck, and as always, feel free to reach out anytime. I’m always happy to talk baseball!

Check out this video for further explanation of what I’m talking about and additional insight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwSaS9geI1U