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By: Adam Sarancik Author of: Coaching Champions for Life "Face toward the problems" Baseball is a wonderful sport to teach life lessons within the game for beyond the game. The first step in this endeavor is to connect with, validate, and support the players as people to earn their trust so they will be willing to adopt the coach’s philosophy and to learn from them. Today, before coaches can empathize with their players as people, they must recognize that the players have been raised with some difficult challenges that may be far different than those faced by the coaches when they were children. Traumatic events in the world (e.g. the pandemic, wars, etc.) and in American society (e.g., mass shootings, the disintegration of the family unit, etc.) have caused many parents to overcorrect by wanting to snow plow life for their children to be sure there are as few bumps in their road as possible. These parents tell their children they are “special” and that they can “have anything they want in life”. In school, too often, low standards, weak competition, and parent “advocacy” to teachers and administrators delude their children into believing they are “honor students”. In sports, sometimes they level up their children through politics and bullying. The truth is the children are loved, but are not special or entitled just by existing. The children have abilities and talents which, if developed and utilized properly, make them capable of achievement. These misguided parenting strategies cause children to grow up with very low self-esteem. Youth learn very quickly when they enter the working world that they are not special and they do not get rewarded or promoted just for showing up. Their parents can no longer advocate for them; they must self-advocate. As a result, their self-image becomes shattered. Many youth today seek to cope with the stress caused by all of these things through quick, temporary means such as tobacco, alcohol, and drugs. Youth suicide and death by accidental overdose are at an all-time high. Technology brings children tons of information, but not necessarily facts or truth. The information may come very quickly, but it is merely consumed by them with very little independent thought or creativity. Youth become impulsively dependent on instant gratification. They seek solutions for their problems from devices, not people because they have never learned that the truly important things in life such as love, joy, marketable skills, self-confidence, real friendship, and an appreciation of the beauty and joy of life itself are obtained through a long, arduous process and journey. In sports, many coaches and leagues enable these same behaviors by doing such things as: micromanaging every step and thought of their players during games, participation trophies, speaking to parents before the player when disputes arise, not admitting that high batting averages are the result of using aluminum bats and facing mediocre pitching, and that wins are the result of weak competition, over-using technology at the expense of teaching personal communication and mindfulness skills, and allowing teams with losing records to make the playoffs. In short, they prioritize winning, numbers, and short-term gains rather than growth for a lifetime by achieving results and character through persistent hard work. As teachers, coaches must reward the process and not just results and prioritize life skills more than sport skills. They must not rescue players from tough situations and protect them from failure by quickly pulling them from a game when things go bad or by being afraid to change a player’s mechanics for fear of disrupting what they have always been comfortable with. As role models, coaches must demonstrate that the “get better every day” mantra begins with them and that they can stay in the “this pitch, this moment” state of mind at all times too. As mentors, coaches must have the hard conversation that while the personal challenges described above are not the fault of the players, they are realities which must be retrained to achieve success in life and maybe to even survive.
Adam Sarancik is the Author of Four Amazon Top 100 Best Selling Baseball Coaching Books:
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A Hard Conversation
