Opening Weekend is Upon Us! Charge On!!

A week from now, the Hillsdale College Baseball Team will be on a bus, riding back from a weekend of four games in Louisville, Kentucky in our season's opening weekend.  We have had five good weeks of practice, with another five practices left, to prepare not just for next weekend, but for the entire season.

One of the major goals for next weekend is to return with four wins.  Among some of the other goals, or sub-goals, will be to do what it takes to win those games.  An easy explanation for stating the goals of the pitching staff is simply to execute pitches.  We need to execute pitches during every at bat, in every inning, in each of the four games, in order to give the team a good chance to win games.  Ultimately, each game's starting pitcher has the job of giving his teammates a chance to win each game.

How do we do that?  Well, as with pretty much every pitching staff in the country, we will need to be able to throw quality fastballs inside.......and outside.  We also need to throw quality fastballs at the bottom and top of the strike zone.  The goal on each pitch is to get the hitter to swing and make an out.  Though each pitcher is unique, in addition to throwing quality fastballs at many edges of the strike zone, each guy will need to be able to execute their off-speed pitches.  Curve balls, sliders, cutters, changeups, and other varieties of off-speed pitches also need to be thrown for the purpose of getting hitters to swing and make outs.

When pitchers can get batters to swing, especially early in the count, it becomes a game of nine versus one, in the sense that the pitcher is letting the hitters get themselves out by hitting the baseball to the defensive players, who will execute the plays they have practiced and envisioned for weeks.  It is a simple formula that is sometimes easier to complete than at other times, but a formula that requires confidence, intelligence, and emotional control as well as physical execution.

This will be my first season with all of these guys, but since September they have all made great efforts to be on the same page, to get stronger and more athletic, to buy in to what the coaching staff is trying to do, and to be the best teammates they can possibly be.  They have built their pitch counts up to 80-100 pitches and have improved the overall health of their arms in the process.

On the pitching staff, we have one guy returning from injury and will throw his first inning off the mound this week, and we have another who had an unfortunate injury when he was kicked in the hand by a horse while volunteering to help a local elderly woman with some chores.  He had surgery on a broken finger and will have pins removed from his hand after our spring break trip.  The rest of the pitchers who had some arm tenderness in the fall or in January are now feeling great, so we are ready for next weekend's 28 innings and feel confident in the quality and depth of the staff.

As happens every year at this time, I can't wait to get on the field and watch these guys give 100%, 100% of the time.  It will be a privilege for me to witness them compete and win games, and it's going to happen a lot!!

The same, only different--2014

We have completed the first of our six weeks of indoor, pre-season practices.  For those of you who have been reading my blog posts in previous seasons while I was Adrian College, now that I am at Hillsdale College, our pre-season practices are the same, only different!  I didn't look back to see what I wrote the last couple of years in January, but I'm sure there are paragraphs I could copy and paste here in 2014.

So, I can at least write about what things are the same, and what things are different.  Let's go with the differences, first.

During my nine seasons at Adrian College I was working part-time there, and my full-time job was in the local public schools.  At Hillsdale now, I am on campus full-time, as I had previously been in my sixteen years at Siena Heights.  There are several differences when we compare a full-time job to a part-time position, most notably the fact that being on campus all day, every day, allows me to be in contact more often with our players, my fellow coaches, and the rest of the college community.

Another difference is that I work with different coaches now, and though I enjoyed all of the coaches I have been privileged to work with before, I now get to work with my son Eric, who as the head coach is my boss. Eric and I share an office, and that means that now I am with him usually for eight hours or more every day, at least during the winter months.  Unless you have had this sort of opportunity to work with your own son, you can only imagine how awesome every day is for me!

I also have the opportunity to work with our hitting coach Brad Kocher for the first time, and though we don't share the same office, he is right down the hall.  Working with Brad has proven to be an easy and comfortable thing to do, both personally and professionally.  We also have a new volunteer coach who is working with our catchers.  Joe Dubina is a former Adrian College catcher with whom I was able to coach for four years.  He is a public school teacher, and he brings a special kind of passion to coaching catchers. He is already helping our team get better every day.

There are several other differences as well, and perhaps we'll get into those in the future.  Some things included in a list of differences include my additional roles as part of being full-time, the different indoor practice facilities, the number of players in the program, being in a different division of the NCAA and a different conference, and the beauty of my 35 mile drive to work on the country roads of southern Michigan.

What is the same?  That's easy, and awesome.  In January and February we continue a plan of action to prepare for the spring season.  As pitching coach, I get to prepare the pitching staff in an aggressive yet patient manner to pitch against opponents by the first of March.  We are following the same plan of preparation that I had been following during the pre-season in my previous seasons at Adrian.

Physically, the pitchers will gradually work their way up to throwing at least 80 pitches live before we play a game.  Mentally, they are learning our philosophies of pitching by working toward achieving a set of goals that are designed to give the team the best possible chance to win games and championships.  Everything we do at practice is determined by our team and pitching staff goals.  Statistical goals, strategic goals, fitness goals, goals of attitude, emotional control, and the progression from pre-season to the regular season and into the post-season are part of the entire plan.

In practicing with repetition and progression, including the practice of visualization and self-talk, the understanding of sacrificing for teammates and for a common cause, our players (and thus the team) are improving every day, like many others across the country.  Improvement doesn't just happen, it is done intentionally as individuals and as a team.  That does not change.

And of course, our main objectives as a pitching staff are still the same......throw first pitch strikes, get leadoff batters out.

Improving performance with TRT

We finished our fall practice season last Wednesday with game three of the Black vs. Blue Fall Classic at Hillsdale College.  The three game series was won by the Black team, which won two of the three games.  All three games were decided by just a run.

After using our full allotment of 24 practices, we move into the next part of the college baseball cycle, which allows us eight hours per week to spend with the players, no more than two of those hours being devoted to baseball skill work and development.  Fall practice has given us a pretty decent view of the talent we have on the field, along with an idea of our strengths and potential weaknesses.  This allows us to plan the rest of this semester to prepare for Christmas Break and the start of pre-season practices in January.

For me, as the new member on the coaching staff, I was also able to get to know our players much better on a personal level and to gain some grasp of their work habits, their expectations, the way they think about themselves and the team, etc. This has also been a time for me to learn how to work with the rest of the coaching staff, both on the field and off the field.  I can say with complete honesty that the coaches I'm privileged to work with are hard working, knowledgeable baseball guys with great expectations regarding the direction of the Hillsdale Charger baseball program.

There is no doubt that there is enough talent on this team to achieve some goals that have not been reached in recent seasons.  Part of achieving goals is setting those goals and making plans on how to achieve them.  There are many things necessary in achieving the goals of getting into the GLIAC Tournament, winning it, and advancing to the NCAA DII Regionals, and then some, in 2014.  Some of the plans concerning 'how' to achieve those goals are obvious:  get repetitions in the cages and defensively, increase arm strength and improve strike throwing, get everyone completely healthy and stay healthy, increase overall strength and conditioning.  Those are things that our guys do a great job of working on.

Sometimes there are not so obvious things that need to change or be improved.  For some of our guys and for so many college athletes around the world, the way they think, their self-talk, their expectations, their ability to control their emotions during practice and competition.......these are important pieces to the puzzle that influence on-field success just as much, and often more than their athletic abilities and skills do.

Through group dialogue with the pitchers, and group and individual interaction with all of the team members, the thought processes, self-talk, belief, and expectations are important things that we all need to work on and improve between now and the spring in order to give the team a better chance of achieving its goals.  Each player needs to practice his mental skills and ability to control his thoughts in order to maintain the optimal emotional levels to compete at the highest levels possible.

Understanding that our thoughts have a huge influence on our emotions can provide motivation to improve our practice of controlling our thoughts.  By recognizing any negative thoughts before they adversely effect our emotions and performance, we can eliminate some of the potential for hurting ourselves during a game.  As for how to eliminate the negative thinking, we have come up with some terminology to achieve that objective.  We need to replace any negative thought with positive ones.  This is what we have now named 'Thought Replacement Therapy' (TRT), and it will hopefully be an efficient way for us to improve the way we think during practices and games.

This Thought Replacement Therapy is something that we can use when trying to sweat the small stuff as well as when looking at the big picture of moving the program in the positive direction of becoming a championship program.  The guys we have will be able to look back and say that by changing their thoughts, they changed the program.  They became champions in their minds, and thus executed on the field and became champions there, too!!

The more things change, the more they remain the same

After spending the last few months in my new position at Hillsdale College, I'm long overdue in sharing some of this wonderful experience.  I may repeat things I've written before, but most coaches (and parents and teachers) are good at repeating things, again and again.

I have to say that I absolutely love going to work every day.  I have always tried to have that attitude and it has always been the truth, but with my own kid as my boss, working on a beautiful college campus with so many fantastic people, enjoying work is an easy thing to do.  Every day truly is Saturday!

After I passed the NCAA Recruiting test in June, I began hitting the recruiting trail for the first time since the summer of 2003 at Siena Heights.  While at Adrian College for the past nine years, I benefited from the recruiting of the full-time coaches and was blessed to work with the outstanding players who they brought to campus.

For the first 6-7 weeks of recruiting this summer, I have to admit that I often experienced information overload.  There were so many tournaments, games and showcases to see.  At each of those there were seemingly endless lists of players, along with their school info, academic achievements, positions, graduation years, and so much more data for me to try to consume.  Other coaches, including my friends, Eric, guys I have coached with, and even people in the stands, knew so much more about all of these potential college athletes than I did.  It seemed to take forever for me to get it all compartmentalized in my mind.

Some of that information started to sort itself out, and eventually I felt like I at least had a general grasp of the recruiting landscape.  The recruiting process and the way it is done is much different than it was when I recruited in the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s.  What has not changed though, is that it takes legitimate effort to do a good job of recruiting, to seek out prospective student-athletes who may be a good fit for our program and our institution.  Successful recruiting still requires leg work, so to speak, and travelling, some late nights and many weekends on the road.  It is still necessary to actually see guys play the game on the field, to interact with teenagers and their families, to be genuine and honest.

Recruiting doesn't end when the fall semester begins, and we have had two successful recruiting events on our campus in the past few weeks.  We couldn't have had those without the selflessness of our current players, though.  These guys have been tremendous every single time I have interacted with them.  We have now finished a week of practice and they seem excited to play and make sacrifices for their teammates and for the program.

The foundation for success had been built by our current players and the other two coaches before I arrived. I am happy to be a part of strengthening that foundation and for the opportunity to be included in the achievements of the current Chargers and future Hillsdale College baseball players who we have seen in our travels.

If you believe, you can achieve!

The Next Page

As my players and most of my friends and family already know, I recently accepted a position as assistant coach at Hillsdale College.  For me, it is an opportunity to get back to full-time coaching, something that I have not done for the past ten years.  Even better than that though, is the opportunity to coach with and work for my son, Eric.

I will fondly remember the nine wonderful years at Adrian College.  I had the privilege of being able to be a part of a program that played in eight NCAA Regional Tournaments in nine seasons, has won five consecutive MIAA Conference Championships, and appeared in a DIII World Series (finishing 4th in 2008).  More importantly, as any coach will tell you, I had the opportunity to develop and nurture relationships with so many fantastic young men who I can call my friends and who will be my friends for a lifetime.

One of the beauties of coaching is that we teach, we push, we nurture, we care, we compete for and with, and we love the student-athletes we get to be able to spend time with during their college years.  We see them grow from kids into men, we see them work through their own personal struggles, we support them and they support us, we benefit because they allow us to share in their glories.  And no matter how much we sometimes think we are doing to help them live their dreams on and off the field, they are doing so much to fill our lives with pride and joy.  Our players ultimately give us so much more than we ever really give to them.

To my players at Adrian College.....the ones who have gone on and graduated and those of you who are still wearing your Bulldog uniforms in the next year or three, you have provided me with a lifetime of memories and a heart full of gratefulness.  Your willingness to accept me as a part of your college years and your lives has been such a huge part of my daily life.  You have helped me to remember that coaching isn't just something that I do, but it is what I am.  You have given me an opportunity to improve myself as a coach and as a man.  As much as any coach could ever be a part of a student-athlete becoming a man, you have all been the most important part in me evolving in the same ways.

I am also grateful for having the chance to work with my fellow coaching brothers Nate Sarkissian, Aaron Klotz, Luke Harrigan, Xander Younce, Phil Lawrence, Rob Heumann, Curtis Fischer, and of course Craig Rainey, the guy leading the ship to the promised land who first asked me on board nine years ago.  In addition, I enjoyed working with and learning from each of the Athletic Trainers who helped keep our players healthy enough to compete at high levels.

For people who have not had the privilege of coaching hundreds of players, the relationships that can be developed can come close to parenting and being a part of a family.  We aren't exactly fathers, and don't necessarily bounce the next generations of the guys' families on our knees during holiday gatherings, but nonetheless the ties that bind us together never really break.......they go on and on in various shapes and forms.  Twenty-five years of coaching college baseball players (at both Adrian College and Siena Heights University) have given me enough fabulous experiences for a lifetime!

And now I get to coach with my own son, who is a new head coach and now my boss.  I can't really adequately explain how amazing that is yet, and of course, how thankful I am to be able to do so.  It isn't necessarily the beginning of a new story; just the next page!

The Day After

A college baseball season, unless your team plays in the National Championship game, just ends.  You don't expect it to end because you anticipate winning every time the team steps on the field.  You expect to win and advance, but when that doesn't happen and you are a day away from a chance at advancing to the World Series, all of a sudden the season is over.  You shower and get on the bus, and when you get home and wake up the next day, there is nothing you have planned, because the plan was to win and play again another day.

So the next day becomes a day to reflect on the season.  What do I need to do better?  How can I do that better?  How can we do a better job at getting leadoff batters out? Can we get more double play balls early in the count? What do we do to attack the running game better?  How do we avoid giving up 0-2 hits next season?  What sort of drills or mental training can help us to take care of damage control more effectively?  Can we do a better job of mentoring our upperclassmen so they can be better leaders for the young guys?  Did we do enough over the years to help the graduating seniors be prepared for their next roles?  Did we prepare the younger players to expect to play for a National Title next year?

How do I improve at communicating to all the players, not just the ones who give me genuine feedback, but also to the players who are more challenging to communicate with?  How can I help them all to improve each day, and to be aware of their strengths and weaknesses?  How can we get each guy to give 100%, 100% of the time?  How can we do a better job of coaching in practice so that the guys are so prepared for and need very little guidance in pressure game situations?

We accomplished a lot again this year at Adrian College, and all of our players are to be congratulated!  Our seniors won championships in each of their four years and the program has won five consecutive league championships, including the first two conference tournament championships in league history.  The team has advanced to NCAA Regional competition in eight out of the last nine years, including one trip to the World Series.

When you experience success, you want more.  It is important though, to appreciate and enjoy success, analyze what you are doing right, and improve some things that need to be improved.  We all know that each player can improve himself through off season strength and conditioning, and they can make improvements in the mental and emotional aspects of being athletes on their own during the summer, on their own during the fall and winter, and with teammates throughout the year.  Coaches are no different.  We need to get better at many things as well.  Learning the game, understanding the players, knowing the opponents, setting our egos aside, continually trying to become more selfless, etc.

When we all do what we can do to improve, the team and the entire program also gets better.

I want to congratulate the graduating seniors for their enormous successes, and thank them for their selflessness, and encourage the returning guys to check that mirror daily and take this another couple steps in 2014.  I am forever grateful to be able to have so many outstanding young men who share their success and passion with me.

Peak in May

The post-season is here.  This is what we have practiced for and visualized since we exited the Regional Tournament last year.  During my years as a head coach, I had a sign in my office that said, "Peak in May," and that is an important thing to try to do when a team has the privilege of playing in the post-season.

During winter practices (and several times in the spring) I repeat to the pitchers each year that we have to go from point A to point B, and during the steady uphill climb to point B there will be some peaks and valleys.  This is a year that as an entire team we have gradually improved from the first week of March until now.  Our offense, defense, and pitching have all gotten better throughout the season, as has our awareness of game moments.

Our last couple of weeks were very good, and though we are the number two seed entering the MIAA Tournament, in tying with Hope College for the conference championship we have now won five consecutive MIAA regular season championships.  That is an accomplishment that none of us take for granted.  Now, it is a privilege to again compete for the MIAA Tournament Championship and the honor of advancing to another NCAA DIII Regional Tournament.

In order to achieve our next goal, we have to do several things.  As a pitching staff, I'll repeat what our pitchers hear several times each week.  We have to throw first pitch strikes, get leadoff batters out, close out innings, manage damage control effectively, attack the running game, and give our team a chance to win.  There is no reason not to believe that one of our pitchers will be on the hill getting the last out of the tournament on Friday!! If we can imagine it, it can happen.

Of course, there is more to winning the next championship besides the goals of our pitching staff.  We know that our hitters are going to get more at bats in these nine inning games against quality teams than they did in the seven inning games during our conference season.  We also know that our hitters are going to enter each game with the confidence of champions, because that is what they are.

In winning any kind of championship in the post-season, the athletes must believe in themselves and believe in each other.  In addition, it is important for each individual player to check his thoughts, to make sure that any thoughts this week about themselves on the field, their teammates on the field, and the performance of the team are positive thoughts.  Practicing positive thinking and positive body language are crucial, especially when the potential for intense game situations in the post-season can possibly bring a little more stress to each pitch and each inning.

Ultimately, our players know that they have been there before, whether it was this season, in previous seasons, or in their visualization, and they have executed successfully and come out as champions when they have kept each other united.

I have already been picturing the field in Holland, Michigan, the green grass, and the confident demeanor of our players as they focus, execute, and compete for 250 or so pitches each game.  When we visualize success in crucial situations, it is easy to execute it again on the field.  I love seeing our guys walking like champions!