Zach's Pages

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

The Struggle in the Age of Specialization

Confession's of a Travel Softball Coach
Part 1: About Me, But Not Really




We've always wanted Aubree to be well-rounded, so we have encouraged her to play other sports. Aubree is playing soccer and running track and that leaves precious little time to hit, but her mom and I had been on her that she needed to be in the garage working on the tee every spare moment she had. She wasn't doing that and we knew it. 

At the time I am writing this, AO1 has played three tournaments and will play our fourth this weekend. Our team has done well with an 8-6 record that included two second place finishes. As we looked over Gamechanger stats to make our line-up for the finals, it was impossible to ignore that Aubree was batting .000 through three tournaments. Everyone goes through slumps, but she wasn't even close. Most of the at-bats were bad and when she did hit the ball, she put it in really bad spots. 

To say I was frustrated is an understatement. She was just waving at pitches. She was watching good pitches. When she was slapping and did put the ball into play, her bad mechanics and timidness to really put the bat on the ball had almost every contacted ball going to the right side of the field. After each at-bat, I was on her, reminding her that the lack of preparation was showing. Bad mechanics, not seeing the ball, poor pitch selection, and timidness at the plate. These are things we can't fix at a tournament. We have to do these things Monday through Friday and she wasn't doing these things. Those daily excuses of why she wasn't hitting at home had built up in my mind and the anger and frustration was bubbling over. 

I have a very bad trait and I know it's there. I can't let things go, especially in situations like this where I feel it could have been avoided. I get angry and I yell. I have terrible body language and despite everything that may be going right for the team, I just can't let it go. I finally had that moment of clarity that I had to change something when I found myself yelling at her and kicking rocks before she was even out at first base. Literally, the second baseman hasn't even fielded the ball to throw to first and Aubree and I are arguing about it before she was even called out. We get a second place finish and play excellent and all I can do on the ride home is steam about her performance and how that makes both of us look. 

My sister came to our last tournament because the tournament was five minutes from her house and we were going to spend a couple of days over spring break with her. As she heard me lament on Aubree's preparation and performance, she said something to me that really made me just stop and shut up. Essentially, she asked how Aubree could be expected to play to my expectations when she was playing two other sports, struggling in school, and trying to just be a kid. It was also the way that she said it, without being accusatory or really even with the intent to make a point that was striking. It was just an observation. It was absolutely true.

As a coach, I want the best performance I can get out of every single player and that goes double for my kid. But what are my goals as a parent? Isn't that more important? Is it fair to expect her to be as good as the other girls when she is playing two other sports and they are not? Wasn't our goal always for her to be well-rounded? 

One of the things that I give my parents a lot of credit for is making sure I was a well-rounded person. I did just as many off-the-field things as I did on the field. When it came to sports, I played all of them. Did that come at a price? Certainly. I was  never great at any sport, but I was good at them all. Maybe that cost me a chance to do bigger things. Maybe not. We will never know. What we do know is that the focus on playing different sports put me around a lot of different people over the course of my life. I fostered different friendships and thus different outlooks on life that would not have been possible had I just focused on just one sport. I can promise you that the football team, soccer team, baseball team, and wrestling team was comprised of many different socio-economic and diverse backgrounds, which was influential in my upbringing to identify with all walks of life, for which I still believe I do. I wanted that for my kids, even if it meant they weren't as good as they could be at just one thing. 

There are a lot of people that will read that, who have a kid that just plays one sport, who are completely devoted to getting that kid to the next level that will disagree with me, here. That's perfectly fine. I know a lot of people who focus on one sport and they practice that sport each and every single day. I hope every one of them gets the reward they seek because they deserve it. Don't misunderstand me and think I am not trying to get my kid into college. I am absolutely trying to do that. Even if you do achieve your goal of getting your child on a college roster, college lasts only a few short years and there is a lot of life after sports. Now, think about that in terms of the relationships they will make with others. By playing one sport, they are around just one group of people and you limit their exposure to other walks of life. 

To bring this full circle, after thinking long and hard about what my sister had said, I sat down with Aubree before our last game in the finals of the tournament. I told her that I was being too hard on her to expect the same level of play of the rest of the team who were practicing every day when she was playing two other sports. I had started a vicious cycle that led to a lot of pressure on her, which was affecting her performance and my attitude as a coach. She needed to just go play her best and we would get back to working hard on her hitting when soccer and track were done. 

Lastly, while I want her to still hit when she could, I understood that when she did get home from a whole day of school and practicing another sport, that it wasn't fair to rob her of time to just relax and be a kid. If she wants to hit, she should. If she needs to relax, she should. Lord knows she needs more time to study, anyway. 

We live in an age of specialization. You don't even have to look at it in terms of specializing in particular sports. Even within softball we have a ton of specialization. There is no doubt that doing so produces terrific players and it is really, really hard to compete with that, as much as it pains me to say that as a coach. As a coach, I want to win every game. I want kids to fulfill their dreams of playing in college, especially my own kid. Yet that is such a small piece of the pie. 

We need to take a step back and realize that even the goal of every softball player out there is likely to end at college and playing in college should be an means to an ends to get a great education. Let's face it, life really begins after sports and isn't it important that these kids enter the real world well-rounded individuals? They won't work around former softball players for the rest of their lives. It is important to venture out of the world of like-minded people and experience the bigger world out there, even if it comes at the expense of not being quite as good as you would like in a sport. 

This is the struggle in the age of specialization. We, as sports parents, want our kids to be great for the sake of being great. We like to tell ourselves it's about the future and goals, but it's more about the pride of being the parent of a great athlete, of being the best player on the field. That's a problem with our society, I believe. Sports careers will come and go, some of them will last longer than others, but life goes on. Can we afford to shortchange our kids and limit their personal growth for the small amount of time they will play on the field? 


Monday, March 25, 2019

Fishing Report for Alabama Bass Trail on Wheeler

Follow me on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter!
Read about all of my Fishing Adventures!
Follow my Fish of 2018


How far is 62nd from a Top Five finish in a big tournament? About seven minutes

To some (or maybe most), this is going to come across as coulda-woulda-shoulda, but didn't. You will point out that our 11 pounds was literally half of what it took to get in that Top 5, so obviously we were't that close.  That's perfectly fine if you think that. I spent the 26 hours from Saturday at 4:30 to Sunday at 6:30 thinking that. And then I sat down to dinner with my partner and his wife and he shared just how close we had come to doing what we thought we were capable of doing when we blasted off Saturday morning from Ingall's in Decatur for the second stop of the Alabama Bass Trail North Division.

A couple of disclaimers, out of respect for the two boats who finished in the top five to whom I am referring, I am not going to say who they were, where we were or what we were doing. I am just going to say that two of the top five boats shared the exact game plan we had to the smallest detail. 

A quick history lesson: last year, we had almost the exact game plan except that we had more of a general idea of the pattern because Josh and I had split the lake in half with him fishing one end and me fishing the other. He found fish, I did not. But a blown powerhead kept us from fishing and we ended up having the DQ ourselves just to get home. 

This year, we decided that we would only fish above Decatur and we would combine notes later in the week and nail down our exact pattern on Friday. Most of you know how much we fish the upper end of Wheeler and this winter was easily the best winter fishing I've ever had on Wheeler. Going into this month, it wasn't about finding good spots, but finding what spots were great. You can read about some of these by clicking below:

Fishing Report for Wheeler 11/16-17/2018

Fishing Report for Wheeler 11/22-23/2018


Sunday, Josh had found the same school he had found last year and he had 16 pounds without beating on the fish. Basically, he caught a limit, weighed them, and moved. I took notes from the specifics of that spot and set out to replicate that on other areas that matched. The number one learning point from this spot was to not fish too shallow and to find the exact current breaks. 

Wednesday, I set out with my wife to add to the pattern. First, we fished similar spots, but one or two dinks aside, similar wasn't good enough. I ran to the spot Josh had found and treated it as the control. If I got bit here, I knew they could be caught and that it wasn't weather or bite related, it was location based. Sure enough, I quickly caught three fish on a jig. Two of the three were 2.5 pounds with the third at least being a keeper. The next identical spot was about 100 yards away, so I decided to just fish down to the spot rather than use the big motor. 

While drifting, I decided to fish while keeping in mind some of the pointers he had given me about the proper depth. We came upon another smaller current break that had the right features and I boated a big smallie. Interesting. Hitting spot lock, I pulled out the jig and caught two more fish off this break, both of which were more 2.5 pound spots. We kept moving.

We settled into the main reason I had chosen to come here, another break with all the right features. This spot yielded a five pound spot and a few other keepers. We ended the day with around 16 pounds, again, without sitting on any "good" spot for more than three fish or about 15 minutes of fishing.

Thursday, I brought the boat and I wanted to check one spot further down river that had all the right features. In less than an hour, I had caught 12 pounds in four fish, which was just catching two fish on two spots on back to back casts before leaving. At that point, we had two good spots and two great spots. 

Friday, we decided that we would go looking for largemouth, as we hadn't caught any measuring ones and we knew that if we wanted to win, we had to find a big bite. We ran all the way to the dam to fish one spot that we had won a lot of tournaments on last year. Within five minutes, we had caught three largemouth that included one solid chunk. Moving back down river, we fished a lot of different stuff, but couldn't get bit on anything that wasn't the exact right conditions. 

At blastoff, we were boat 140 and we knew that the chances of us fishing our top spot was low. Even if a boat didn't fish it right, someone was going to at least stop on that spot. We just hoped that we could get to our second spot. Sure enough, after the long ride from Decatur, there was a boat sitting on our top spot but no one on our second, so we dropped the trolling motor and went to work. Some good friends of ours pulled up behind us and we kind of shared the area. They quickly got a limit. 

But there was something we hadn't considered. It was the first nice Saturday of the Spring and every bank fisherman in Morgan or Madison county was fishing where we wanted to fish. Normally, we can work around two or three of these, but not five or more and that's what we were looking at. Still, we did our best, but we couldn't make the casts we wanted, so we settled for watching the boat sitting on our best spot. They moved in and out of the water column and that really worried us. Even if they didn't catch the fish, they certainly would see them on their graph. 

Around 10AM, both fishermen sat down after pulling the trolling motor up and firing the big motor and we assumed they were leaving. We quickly fired up the big motor to run, but about the time we came off plane, they cut the big motor, stood up and dropped the trolling motor again. Since they were there first, we apologized and let current wash us down to maintain the required 50 yards of separation. It became obvious that with both of us there, neither of us could fish what we wanted but neither boat was going to say anything for fear of giving something away. 

The issue was that this boat already had five fish and we had one. Josh and I had a sneaking suspicion that the five they had were good because they weren't fishing nearly as hard as we were. They were just watching us and waiting for us to leave, meanwhile, their boat position kept us from making the cast we needed to make. Had we held the position, we would have been where we wanted, but common courtesy demanded we let them keep that spot, even if they may have been leaving and then deciding to stay or if they were simply re-positioning the boat due to current. 

Around noon, we had to make a decision. We couldn't wait these guys out and they could afford to sit there and wait. We ran towards the dam to where we knew we could at least get a limit. Our largemouth spot had two boats on it, so we kept running. Fishing the dam, we caught our limit, but it was tiny. 

Eventually, we were able to fish the largemouth spot and culled up several times, but these were small culls. We had been watching boats fish, but none of them had fished deep enough. Yet, the fish had certainly been spooked by having a boat parked on top of them. We ran into our friends again and they had 15 pounds. We weren't surprised. They knew the same stuff we knew. 

We ran back down river late in the day.

Our second spot was clear of both boats and bank fishermen. At 2:45, the bite turned on and we began catching fish. They just weren't getting much bigger, though we culled five or six times. After sitting there all day, the other boat had to leave to make weigh in, which gave us about five minutes of fishing time on our spot. I made it pay with our second biggest fish of the day, but we didn't have enough time to do anything else. We weighed in 11.77 which just wasn't close to what we expected.

It was over dinner that Josh broke the news that the boat that played defense on us was a top five finisher. Our friends whom we fished along side were also a top five finisher. No hard feelings for them. I am happy to say that they are my friends and that we share a lot of respect with one another to the point that we can fish side by side and it doesn't bother either of the boats. 

Going back to how I started this post: you can work and work and work. You can find the winning bag, but if you can't get there first, none of it matters. About seven minutes was the difference between winning that tournament or throwing out a stinker. 62nd isn't all that bad, but it's a far cry from our expectations. It's reality and I don't want anyone thinking that I am surprised or mad about what happened. It's just been tough for me to personally reconcile my expectations and reality because when it comes to situations like this, no amount of hardwork is going to overcome the pure dumb luck of a boat draw.