Lessons Learned from Coaching Little League Baseball

Thirty years ago, I took my two sons to their first practice for youth baseball. The man coaching had the team all by himself but seemed to be doing well at the job. As practice was ending, he approached me and asked me if I would coach the team. Coach little league? Are you kidding? I am sure his only reason for asking me was the obvious. I was the only parent that stayed to watch the practice. It could not have been my extensive qualifications for the job. I found out the next week that he was president of the league. I agreed to take the job until he could find someone else, which never happened of course. My team won my only championship that year and I coached my last game twelve years later.

Quotes and Lesson Learned

The first lesson I learned about coaching was that the job can sometimes be more about parents than it is about the kids. Kids are easy compared to the parents. I was fortunate to have some great parents though. There were a few of my parents that should not have been out there though. I realized in later years that the reason some parents on the other teams were so much trouble for their coach was that the coach did not set the tone at the outset. There were generally three quotes that my players would hear often.

The first was "There is only one person on this team that is going to argue with the umpire and that person is me. Since I don't argue with the umpire we do not have to worry about that this year."

The second was "If you don't pay attention I am going to have you running around that outfield till I get tired of watching you."

The third was "You have got to play with class and throwing a bat down after striking out is not playing with class." Parents need to know that you have their sons' and daughters' (yes, I had some girls) best interest at heart and will not allow nonsense at practice or games no matter how good the player is.

Parents and Umpires

The worst parents I ever came in contact with were with a team on the other side of the county. We had to play them twice on their field. It was so bad in the first game that when the second game came up on the schedule, I told parents that I would not take the team over there without two deputy sheriffs present. We ended up not going much to my relief. That first game was where I learned that some "hometown" umpires think that they can call timeout while the ball is in play in the outfield and my runners are rounding second and third and heading for home. That community had its problems and I was delighted when we were not scheduled to go back the next year.

Running the Bases

Unless someone has had the benefit of some broad baseball training, coaching Little League can be a real experience. I had played Little League and summer league in high school. Since I was always a catcher, I never had a chance to play infield and only occasionally played in the outfield. To make up for my deficit in training I had to either pick up every technique I could from others or allow the boys to play at their own comfort level. I usually took a pitcher as I found him - especially lefthanders. I still don't know how lefthanders throw a ball. My first coaching lesson was in base running. I learned that teaching them how to run the bases was better than using signals to steal, etc. They fail to pay attention to the base coach many times and are slow to react but young kids are incredibly quick to learn when there is an opportunity at glory. Unless your playing a team with some incredibly well trained kids the base runner can get away with almost anything. We had many practice sessions at base running before they became comfortable with game situations but you can be assured that they learn what they practice. It is those situations that you did not prepare for that will give you ulcers. Remember to tell the runners that a catcher with the ball in his glove standing on home plate can be beat if the catcher does not tag the runner in front of the plate. We got away with that one many, many times.

Batting Practice

There were two situations in batting that I encountered often. One was the player who came to me batting "cross-handed". The player will tell you they cannot bat any other way and you can simply respond, "Well, I don't guess you will be batting at all because my players don't bat cross-handed." Remember that their moment of glory at the plate is what they live for and I never had a player who continued to bat that way. The other situation was the batter who moved his back foot around before the ball got to the plate. I would generally try to find someone to pitch batting practice (I know I am showing my age - my grandsons use batting machines now) and I would catch the entire practice so I could talk to the batter on each pitch. When I saw the back foot moving around before the ball got to the plate I would smooth the dirt and have the batter step back into the batter box and tell him, "Plant that back foot and do not track all over my nice smooth dirt". This technique usually paid off real well for the team batting averages by the end of the season. I finally quit coaching because my knees no longer held up for me to catch during practice.

Batting Order

My first game I learned that the coach has one major responsibility that just did not occur to me before the game for some reason. Nothing happens in a game until the coach hands in the batting order and I forgot to make one. It is not uncommon now for leagues to require that the batting order be consecutive through all the players on the team before any player bats twice. If you are coaching just consider this rule a "God sent". It takes many of the complaints away and makes your day go better. In official Little League the players have to coach the bases and you are not allowed on the field. You have to go to the third base line but not cross the line to have a visit on the mound. This too is a very good rule. Anything that keeps the adults off the field is good. Sometimes I thought that the adults wanted to show off more than the kids.

Having Fun

When you begin to determine how you did as a coach at the end of the year just make this observation. Are your players all showing up for the last five games and are they having fun regardless of your win/loss record? It would tickle me at the end of the season when we were playing a team that had no chance of winning the championship and we would have no chance of winning the championship. We would have all fifteen players show up and I would loan their team two players because they only had seven show up. This is the result of too much emphasis on winning and not enough emphasis on learning and having fun. The last team I coached came about because I had "retired" from coaching earlier and the board asked me to come back and take a team even though my sons had grown out of Little League. The board told me the boys had no chance to win and they did not have a single athlete on the team. I agreed to take the team and I knew that the only way the season would be a success was to make sure they had a good time. We did slip up and win two games that year.

Sometimes you may have a routine experience that seems normal in every way. I had a shortstop one year that was the tallest twelve year-old in the school. Somebody had trained him well at fielding a grounder because if he could reach it, there was a guaranteed out in the making. After the season was over I never saw my shortstop again and later had to relocate to another state. Eight years later I was having some tires changed and was watching a University of Alabama basketball game on TV. The announcers kept talking about this player on the Alabama team and were praising him on every play. The boy was my shortstop from years earlier. To make a long story short Robert Horry was not only my shortstop but also is now the proud owner of NBA championship rings from at least three different NBA teams. I like to tell young people that I know who Robert Horry is; that I taught him everything he knows - about baseball.