Like every college athlete, my dreams were to play professional baseball for my career. In my final year at Lander University, 2021, I came to the realization that I need to figure out a different career path. I decided I wanted to coach the program where I just spent the past 5 years of my life at. How hard could it be I thought. I already knew the coaches, I thought I knew enough about training to develop pitchers, I knew all the players, and I knew how practices were structured. However, I was completely wrong.
If anyone reading this has any experience with going from a player to coach, you learn to appreciate the efforts that your coaches, especially volunteers go through each day. As a graduate assistant, there was a lot more on my plate than I thought I could handle. With working a part time job in the mornings, graduate classes, and off the field responsibilities, there was little time to think about what each pitcher on the staff needed to fully develop.
Anyone who’s spent time as a college coach knows how valuable time working with your players is to you. No matter what role you have, whether it be a volunteer coach or head coach you probably dread any type of work that keeps you in the office when you know there are guys that want to get better out on the field. There’s also nothing worse than dedicating hours of your day to programming for your players only to find out that they haven’t looked at their sheet you printed out for them in 3 weeks. I knew that if I wanted to make my time as a coach worth it to the players, I needed to manage my time effectively. I wanted to make each player their own individual plans for them which included every detail of their day at the field, in the gym, and at home.When looking at the time I had each day, this goal seemed unrealistic. Also, with individual’s only being an hour each day, there had to be a way to plan out every pitcher’s day without me being there to watch their every move.
This is where Connected Performance’s platform changed my outcome as a coach. Our head coach, Jason Burke told me he had an interesting meeting planned that he would like me to be part of. In that meeting I learned that Lander would be one of the first programs to adopt the ConnectPlatform. Immediately I knew that this is what is going to save me a ton of time and effort that I could be putting elsewhere. The platform allowed me to create each individual plan for the pitching staff and plan out every pitcher’s week. I immediately got to work on creating videos demonstrating every drill, mobility, and arm care exercise I planned on using for the staff. That only took a couple hours out of my day, which was the longest part of the entire process. Once all the videos were uploaded, I started working on each pitchers’ plan creating a separate program for throwing, mobility, and arm care based on each pitchers’ assessment. I was able to customize everything from the plans, the data I wanted to collect, and their assessment. From there I could easily program out an athlete’s week in minutes, versus using excel or google sheets which took me much longer in the past. Instead of spending hours creating weekly individual plans for each pitcher, it could be done in 20-30 minutes for the entire pitching staff while making any day-to-day adjustments for each guy.With every drill and exercise having descriptions and a hyperlinked to video, it allowed the pitchers to watch the video that I uploaded for them, look at the notes, and go about their drill without having to ask any questions. This is a massive time and energy saver for any coaches who feel overwhelmed when having to respond to 5 or 6 different guys at the same time.
One of the most useful parts ofConnect for me was the accountability I had with my athletes. I could track every input they made and see the last time they logged in. When you’re around the players everyday this isn’t a big deal because you get to see each of them get their work in daily.But when you’re on winter or summer break and you are not around your players everyday, this is huge for being able to keep your players accountable.
Without theConnect platform, there was two routes I was thinking about going for my players programming. One was typing out each individual drill, mobility, and arm care exercise on a spreadsheet like Excel or Google Sheets. If I wanted to give each pitcher exactly what they wanted to do for the day based on their mechanical and mobility assessments, this would take hours. I knew I didn’t want to copy and paste programs for them. I also knew that as a player, having a sheet with your program could go one of two ways, the first being you keep up with it for a week and it somehow goes missing, or you just completely disregard the paper and do what you want to do. So, this was not a realistic option. The other option was just to tell each player everyday what they have for the day. With close to 20 pitchers on the staff, it would be impossible to remember what each guy needs to improve.
The Connect platform was an absolute must for my development with my players. The less time you spend typing out plans for your pitchers means the more time you get to spend on the field with them getting them better.