I know it’s been a while since I posted, but Coach Rich is a busy guy. I don’t seem to have more than a minute or two here or there to think straight, so I apologize to the readers for not keeping up.
Right now the Codgers stand at 0-5 on the season. That’s right we’re winless and I don’t see an eight-year old Kelly Leak showing up on a motorcycle any time soon, and we don’t have a pitcher with a heart of gold and arm of fire either.
Coaching is certainly fun, but the challenge is greater than I expected. I came up with a pretty cool motivational tool at our latest practice and it worked like a charm. Many college football teams give out pride stickers for good play that the players decorate their helmets with. Seeing that stickers wouldn’t work on wool hats, I bought a Sharpie and started to put silver dots on their hats when they do well. It seems silly, but the kids are eating it up and paying better attention and trying hard. You can’t ask for more than that, but it would be nice to get a win.
The other big challenge, outside of motivation, is dealing with parents. We’ve had a couple of situations already where parents’ expectations regarding their child’s talent was out of whack with reality, and another where we were criticized for sitting a player down — at practice — for hitting another kid.
This really is one of those thankless jobs a lot of the time. It makes you question your sanity. I watch a friend of mine that coaches at Falmouth High School, whose son is on my team, sit back and relax in a beach chair at our games and soak in the sun and he’s got a huge smile on his face at all times. He sees the stuff that goes on on the periphery, and he’s had to deal with it plenty at the high school level.
He giggles.
But there are rewards. One of our least talented players had one heckuva an at-bat the other day, before striking out. He fouled off like four pitches and hung tough. I was proud.
And our hardest worker is trying so hard all the time you’d think he was running for office. He leads the team in silver dots on his hat.
And then there’s my guy, Rye. He’s up there in effort, but a little low on offensive results. It’s coming. He’s getting better for sure and he’s played some great defense, including throwing out a guy trying to stretch a single into a double the other day with an-point throw to second base to get the out. It was awesome.
There’s the reward.
The views and opinions in the Enterprise blogs are those of the author and are not neccessarily shared by Falmouth Publishing.
