We had our “baseball recognition banquet” this past Sunday. Each of our three children went to their respective team’s table. I went with my middle child to the table for the 2nd-3rd grade Braves since I was the head coach of that team. I really had no idea what I was supposed to do at the banquet.
To be honest, I had no idea what I was supposed to do for much of the season. Although I knew baseball, I’d never been a head coach. It’s one thing to be able to explain how a force-out works. It’s a totally different thing to run a practice, create a lineup, make a snack schedule (very important), and take care of all the tiny little details that go into running a team.
I must have done something right. Several parents went out of their way to thank me, not only for coaching their child, but for my level of communication with them throughout the season.
Why write about coaching a youth baseball team, other than to add another tally to the “Etc.” column for this newsletter? Great question, glad you asked. While this post is ostensibly a high level guide to how to approach coaching a youth baseball team, it’s really about how to jump head first into leadership in something you’ve never done before. Let’s dive in.
Deciding to lead
There were really two things that (more or less unconsciously) I needed to have to be able to make the decision to coach:
Time
Ability
It doesn’t always make sense to step up and be a leader. I totally get it. When I was deep into my MBA at Georgia Tech and also starting a new job, I didn’t have the bandwidth to think about coaching one of my kid’s baseball teams. I wish I did, but there was no way. That’s just reality sometimes.
But this Spring, after I had signed up my kids for baseball in a local church league, I made a mental note that if the league said they needed a head coach, I would volunteer. I’d never coached baseball before, but I know enough about the game to be able to teach it, and I had lots of time on my hands to figure it out.
Connection to business: The world needs good leaders, and not just for the “really important stuff”. If you have leadership skills that can be of service to people, see if there’s an opportunity to step up.
There have been lots of moments where I probably did have the time, but I talked myself out of stepping up by saying that I didn’t have the ability when that wasn’t true. A lot of times we talk ourselves out of leadership opportunities because, frankly, we don’t like to think about what it feels like to be a little more tired at the end of the day. But it isn’t always because we don’t have the ability.
You don’t have to be the boss/manager/director/etc to step up and provide leadership. A mentor of mine once said “‘You’re a leader insofar as you lead.” You don’t need to be in an anointed leadership position to provide good leadership to customers and coworkers in your current environment. If you have the time, ability, and opportunity to lead, make the decision to step up.
Communication
I just wanted to say that you are the most organized coach ever!
Thanks so much for keeping us all in order!
When I received the above email from a parent, I joked that what I lack in baseball coaching ability on the field I try to make up in organizational skills.
Look, I do not consider myself an expert in coaching baseball. I know the basics of the game, but you wouldn’t hire me to e.g. give one-on-one lessons to your nine-year-old in hopes they’ll make the travel baseball team.
What I do know is how to get organized and communicate effectively with others. As a parent myself, I know how frustrating it can be to figure out where to be, what to wear, etc., especially when details aren’t entirely clear.
I kept to one simple rule: Err on the side of over-communication.
One of the first things I did was send an introductory email to parents to kick things off, share details about our first practice, and start collecting contact information. As I gathered information, I put it together in a Notion page. I mostly did this for myself so I could stay organized, but Notion makes it relatively easy to share pages publicly, so I was able to share it with parents as well.
Oh, important Pro Tip™: When making a snack list, just randomly assign names and trust your parents to trade amongst themselves if they can’t be at a particular game.
Here are the key parts of my communication plan for the team:
A public Notion page with the team roster, parent contact information, game schedule, and snack list.
Email sent the day of practice with reminder about practice, details about the game that weekend, and who was on the hook for snacks that weekend
Reminder email sent the day before the game
A group text with my assistant coaches for coordinating practice details, etc.
You’ll notice I’m communicating the same thing in multiple places. Yes, it was all in Notion, but I know what it’s like to be scrambling to get your kids ready for games and you’re yelling across the house to ask your partner what color jersey they’re supposed to wear that day. Knowing that the information is at the top of your inbox helps.
Connection to business: For those of us who have managed teams, how often have we relied on team meetings and one-on-ones as the default (and sometimes only) form of communication with the team? To be sure, some things need to be said synchronously, but think about how high of a service it is to be able to communicate clearly in writing about expectations for the team on a regular basis. Even if it’s as simple as “these were our numbers last week and this is what we’re going to focus on at our next meeting”, that can be a big help.
Communication is also critical when communicating with customers. Good sales reps know this intuitively and the very best sales reps have systems to ensure the exact right communication always shows up at the exact right time.
A very simple rule for giving presentations is: “Tell ‘em what you’re gonna say; tell ‘em'; tell ‘em what you said.” You can also apply this to async communications with customers if you have a meeting coming up: “Email them ahead of time to clarify the agenda; run the meeting according to the agenda; send an email to recap the meeting afterwards.” Important things are worth communicating over and over and in different formats.
Add structure, even if it’s wrong
I really had no idea what I was doing during the first practice. I had communicated to the parents where to be and when, but I really hadn’t thought through all of the details of how practice was going to run. I knew that I would start by having the kids throw the ball, but even that wasn’t as simple as I had thought because several of the kids didn’t have much experience with that.
We eventually transitioned to having the kids do batting practice. In this particular league, the kids were hitting off of a machine, so at least the pitch would be more or less consistent when it arrived at the plate.
When the first player stepped up to bat, one of the parents shouted from the stands, “Wait! Shouldn’t he be wearing a helmet?” Oops. Yes, he probably should. I was embarrassed that I had completely forgotten wearing a helmet at the plate is standard in youth baseball. We got the kid (and all subsequent players) a helmet and practice continued.
Practice devolved into disorder towards the end because everyone had had a chance to bat and I didn’t have a plan for what was next. The kids started goofing around and I had trouble reigning it in. I quickly realized that if I wasn’t going to provide the structure, the kids would fill it in for me. I determined that the next practice would have a lot more structure.
The next practice did have more structure, but it still wasn’t perfect, and that was okay. I had created a general outline of what we were going to do during practice, texted it to the assistant coaches, and then mostly followed the practice structure when we got on the field. That practice was much smoother and the kids followed my lead.
The key with the kids was that if you didn’t provide the structure, the kids would fill it in themselves, often with things you didn’t intend. Having a plan made for a good practice.
It took a few practices to really figure things out. By the end of the season, we had settled into a routine that looked like this:
Throw the ball to warm up (5-10 minutes)
Base-running drills (5-10 minutes)
Simulated “game” broken up into three four-person “teams”, each player taking 2 or 3 at bats (40 minutes)
(Optional, if time) More base-running drills
Connection to business: Was it frustrating when my first practice devolved into chaos and the kids started goofing around? You bet. We should be so lucky if that happens with adults. With the kids, at least it was clear I was missing something on my end. I need to add more structure.
Adults feel the same things as kids, but we deal with it differently: we mentally check out of meetings, send messages to coworkers, and complain when the meeting is over. And if you were the one running the meeting, you likely had no idea it was a bad meeting, seeing smiles and nods over Zoom.
Whether it’s running a meeting for our team or meeting with a client, it’s important that the meeting has structure and purpose. Attendees should know why they’re there and how the meeting is going to run. It’s okay if the meeting isn’t perfect. Just make sure there’s structure.
To be continued
As I was writing this newsletter, I had several additional sections I wanted to add, but when I added the “Connection to business” sections, the post started to run long. Rather than cut these sections entirely, I’ll save them for next week.
Before we close things out for this week, I want to circle back to something I mentioned at the very beginning of this post: I had never coached a team before. I started off a bit scared, but very quickly leaned into “I got this” as the season got underway, trusting that I would be able to adapt.
That’s often how leadership works. There are situations we don’t exactly know how to handle—and maybe we’re even scared—but when we reflect on it, we realize we are qualified for the job. We just need to jump in.