Make Sure to Read All of My Confessions of a Travel Softball Coach
There was only one option left, a surprisingly local team that had a ton of girls that Aubree now went to school with. I can remember going to that tryout like it was yesterday. There were some decent players on that team, but by and large, it was not a good team. They were a step above rec. Instead of Aubree showing out, she played down to that level and the coach told us we needed to come back.
It wasn't a yes, but it wasn't a no.
I explained to the coach that she was better than she was showing. Alyse tells me, to this day, that she was clearly better than that team deserved, but I....as usual....expected too much out of her. So when he said he needed to see her again, I thought "this is it." And, to be honest, I told Aubree that too. I realize, now, that was way too much to put on a little girl.
We came back the next practice. She played well, or at least well enough. She made the team. Crisis averted, momentarily. Expectations for her future were tempered severely after the stress of trying to find a team.
Life was good, at least in terms of convenience. The practices were five minutes from home and the girls all went to school together. Aubree immediately made good friends with several of the players and they are currently good friends, despite what will transpire over the next few posts.
Travel ball life began. Of course, I wasn't a coach and I was now fishing two clubs and becoming very competitive. Between the fishing tournaments and ball tournaments, I would be lucky to show up at the park with raccoon eyes, smelly, and dead tired.
I would help a little bit with practice, but the coaching staff was pretty much set and they didn't seem interested in my thoughts. I accepted that and I understood that this team had been together before we got there and it wouldn't be fair for the new guy to show up. In this case, as in a lot of teams' case, this began as a rec ball team and they had been together for several years.
Still, the practices still weren't what I was hoping to find. It sure wasn't what I had seen on the better travel teams that we had tried out with. It was a lot of the same thing I have seen over and over: setting a defense and hitting grounders, sticking the weaker players in the outfield and essentially ignoring them. That didn't mean they weren't used. They were a stop-gap to hits, not to get outs. To be fair, there weren't a lot of fly balls getting hit, anyway.
Hitting seemed to be secondary to the game. That was fine with me, since Aubree was in hitting lessons and I was working with her some at home. She needed work with her arm and her fielding.
Hitting seemed to be secondary to the game. That was fine with me, since Aubree was in hitting lessons and I was working with her some at home. She needed work with her arm and her fielding.
The team was winning some games, but to be fair, they were playing C-Class tournaments. It was a nice break-in to the world of travel ball and we were doing it at our pace and there is something to be said about that. So, when asked to commit after the fall season, we didn't think Aubree had any prospects, so we agreed. It certainly helped that the team would be doing off-season workouts two minutes from our house.
I became invested when none of the other coaches came to the winter workouts except me and the head coach. I believed that this meant I was going to become a field coach and I saw enough from the players to believe, with some tweaking, we could have a solid team. While the other players played volleyball, or didn't come, or whatever, Aubree made every practice and she got better. It didn't hurt that I was pushing her harder than any player there, perhaps in excess.
When we hit the field in the spring, it was immediately clear that I was not considered a coach and I was pointed to the stands. The low tempo practices started again, with essentially no focus on hitting. The base coaching wasn't great, and it got us a lot of bad outs. Outfield was a black hole, largely because no one ever worked with the outfield. It was just a place holder for three players.
With that said, the defense was pretty solid, at least in the infield. With that D and some streaky hitting, the team managed to get a few tournament finals appearances, which always seemed to happen on the coldest, rainiest nights in the spring. At least we were staying close to home, never driving more than 30-45 minutes. I would come to find out that this was a bad thing, in terms of the level of competition we were playing.
Aubree did have some highlights. She had a walk-off hit in a bracket game. She was constantly throwing people out at first from shallow right field. She played well at second, but there was another player entrenched at that position and there was no thought of moving either. They simply shared time.
It's about this time that I came to the revelation that Aubree wasn't going to play in the infield other than second, but she could play three outfield positions, so we really began working at home on outfielding. I found it funny that while I wanted to have a daughter who was a better player than me, she was going to end up just like me: a natural outfielder who could also play infield well, which I still do.
One thing was becoming clear: she has a great eye for the ball and pitchers could not pitch to her. She was almost automatic to get on base. She was showing promise as a lefty, just not enough to use in a game. What this meant was, she was walking a lot, watching a lot of strikes, and not improving as a hitter. Even at that time, I understood that it would be a good thing in the long run for her to switch hit, but it was frustrating to not see immediate improvements. Walking was just fine for her coach, who was happy with just having base runners. It began to dawn on me the true importance of aggressive hitting.
Issues, which all travel ball teams experience, began to crop up. It began when the coach began to pickup players, despite having enough of our own players to play a tournament. Then, it became a weekly occurrence. Then it became multiple players every tournament. When this happens, someone has to sit. It wasn't always Aubree, but it was unnerving.
Eventually, we made the decision to move on from this team, though we made connections that didn't seem particularly important at the time, but would be vital to us down the road. Some of these were the very players that picked up with the team that caused us to leave. It just goes to show that sometimes we make assumptions about people that couldn't be further from the truth, but we may judge them guilty by association.
Lesson's Learned
- There's a home for your player, somewhere. It may not be forever.
- You can outhit bad defense. He can't out defense bad hitting (this is my mantra, to this day).
- Don't wait too long to develop defense. It takes just as much time to develop as infielding.
- Build on strengths, pick up weaknesses as you go.
- Roster management is a full-time job and everyone will not be happy. Accept it.
- Get to know parents and make no assumptions, especially due to the situation in which you meet them.
