By Praise Thorsen
This past year I transitioned from my playing career to my coaching career. Like every college athlete, my dream was to play professional baseball. With age and just not being good enough, I realized during my last couple of years playing that I needed to figure out a different career path. After a couple of internships working in a healthcare office, I quickly found that I wanted to stay in baseball. So, I decided to learn as much as I could to be able to help other athletes reach the dream that I once had. During the later years of my playing career, I spent hours in the bullpen with a couple of other pitchers on our staff just bouncing ideas off of each other. Some of them worked and some of them didn’t, however, I soon realized that I was falling in love with the process and making others around me better. After my last year of playing at Lander University, I had a talk with our head coach, Jason Burke, and mentioned the idea of getting into coaching. He sent me down to the Florida Baseball ARMory for an internship that summer where I was able to learn an exponential amount of information and then apply it to hundreds of athletes. My 10 weeks at the Armory expedited my learning curve. After the summer, Jason Burke added me to the Lander University staff as the head pitching coach. I thought the summer would have prepared me for anything that I would endure at Lander. However, I was completely wrong. Here are five lessons that I learned throughout my first year of college coaching.
1: The guys who you think are uncoachable just need someone to believe in them. I’m grateful I came into coaching knowing most of the pitching staff. I thought I knew which guys wanted to work and which guys didn’t. I spent some time battling this early fall thinking that some of these guys just don’t want to get better. The reality of it is, that they just need a coach to believe in them. As a player, not seeing results is pretty discouraging. Many people just want to get results quickly and be done with it, but as most people know it doesn’t work like that. Those guys want to work but just don’t know where to start. Laying out a plan for their career right in front of them quickly received buy-in while holding them accountable.
2: Training versus performing. Everyone knows that one guy who would sign a contract if scouts saw them throw their mid-week bullpen. The one guy who could sit low 90s and hit every spot in the pen but once they get in a game they look like they are completely lost. A lot of times this just comes from being stuck in training mode for the entire season. As a coach being able to determine which guys need to be focused on training versus which guys need to be focused on performing is harder than it sounds. Yes, utilizing tools like Rapsodo and Trackman can help transform a player. But it took me a while to realize that some guys don’t need better stuff, they just need to learn how to take that stuff into a game and they will dominate. Although there is a small sample size of athletes who need to only train in-season, having the ability to transform training into performance is the biggest key to a successful team.
3: It’s okay to not know. There were many questions I got when I first started coaching that I didn’t know but I tried to answer. This was counterproductive. At the end of the day, you aren’t going to know everything and there’s nothing wrong with saying, “I don’t know, let's try this ____ and see if it works.” You might learn something from a player that could benefit more guys on the team. Your athletes may be your best teachers and if you look around and just watch how your guys go about their training, you will learn everything you need to know about them.
4: Be the coach you needed as a player. Knowing what makes each player tick is probably more valuable than the information you give them. Being able to relate and gain trust from your players can speed up their training progress. There is nothing more motivating than knowing the people around you believe in you. Seeing guys go from under 10 innings in their career to becoming weekend starter 4 years later or seeing a guy who has zero innings in their career pitch in their first game as a junior makes you realize being the coach who believes in every guy is essential. As a coach you need to know what level your players operate at, some guys need to be hyped up and blast Metallica before they go in a game and others need to be calmed and listen to Mozart before a game to calm their nerves. A coach can’t be stuck at one level the whole time and think that every guy will respond well to that.
5: Less is more. A lot of coaches will try to give guys 5 different cues to fix 1 issue a player has. This will just lead to that player getting, even more, overwhelmed than they already are. As a coach, you are there to be a guide. Provide players with the right constraints to fix any movement issues, not verbal cues. The body will discover the right patterns as long as the environment is allowing them to explore movement options and they are mobile enough to get into those positions. Unless a player is obviously doing something that will lead to injury, it is better to just provide them with a constraint and let them figure it out on their own instead of coaching them through it. Many players are used to the 1 on 1 pitching lessons where the coach sitting on the bucket gives them a different cue every pitch, so getting them to understand that the environment shapes their movement patterns and not the verbal cues can lead to great progress. Give your players guidelines that allow them to explore different movement solutions and watch their progress take off.
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