Last week I held a tryout for the team I'll coach next spring. All-in-all it went okay for my first attempt at organizing one of these assessments, but I underestimated the amount of orchestration and thought required to support the process flow. It may have looked fine to the participating families, but to me it never felt easy, comfortable, or the way I thought it would.
I imagined having a clipboard in hand, calmly making notes about each player that would magically develop into a numerical analysis of the perfect four or five players to select. Maybe that happens in Hollywood, but not in Denver. At least not last week.
I got to the field 20 minutes early to set up. I had registration forms, stickers with numbers on them, a box of pens, several evaluation sheets full of columns of numbers aching to be circled, a bucket of balls, bases, a pitching rubber, my glove, and my wood fungo bat. I'm sure I resembled a miner's pack mule as I gathered up this pile of gear in the parking lot. It was quite a load. As I slammed the trunk closed, I met my first participant and his dad. So much for the head start.
The dad started talking and, frankly, wouldn't shut up. Empty-handed, he watched me juggle the equipment load, never offering to carry anything on the 150-yard trek to the field. He told me his hitting philosophy and which pro players also used that strategy. He gave me the behind-the-scenes tour of three camps his son had been to in the last six months, providing dirt on at least one major leaguer. I think I only got in two or three words by the time we got to the field, and the chatter box kept talking as I started to set things up. He was oblivious to every non-verbal and verbal cue I was sending: shut up and let me get organized!
Seemingly unaware that I would soon have at least 25 kids and parents descending on the field expecting order and instructions, he proceeded to tell me what a tremendous athlete his son was. Hands down he was the best player on his previous team. Dad wasn't sure if it was this kid's exceptional talent or his own expertise as a pitching coach that now enabled a 11-year-old to throw a devastating curve ball. Apparently a former pro-player had seen him pitch and was convinced that he has a real shot at playing college ball. Tragically, the only devastation I could envision coming from the curve ball of any 11-year-old was going to be the poor kid's shoulder and elbow by the time he turns 15. College ball is a long, long way off if you can't straighten your arm.
I put down my bag and the bucket of balls and began to make piles of the registration forms, numbers, pens and other materials we'd soon need. Dad, meanwhile, continued the monologue, describing in detail five awful things about his previous coach and why they decided to leave the team. I was about to gnaw off a limb to get away from this guy when my assistant coaches Robert and Sam unwittingly came to my rescue; I was elated to introduce the three of them and quickly escape to the other side of the fence to finish setting up. Sam kept shooting me, "What did I ever do to you?" looks, but at least one of us was free.
Despite the pain of this conversation, I realized my job was already a little easier . . . I had just made a decision on one of the 25 kids. Thanks but no thanks, dad. I didn't even need to see the kid put on his glove to know that this wasn't going to work. Nothing I did would be good enough for dad. No matter how much we might talk about equal playing time, the first time his son was rotated to the bench, I'd get a visit from the stands. The ensuing conversation would make the one I just had with the guy seem pleasant by comparison. It's better to remove such a landmine immediately than try to maneuver the other 10 kids around it.
In the nick of time I got the registration process underway and had each family complete a one-page questionnaire asking about their goals for the upcoming season. Some of my more hardened, old-school coaching colleagues might have considered the survey a bit dorky, but I'm realizing it is difficult to pin down people on their priorities. I've talked to about 30 different parents and coaches in the last three weeks, and left to their own devices, adults are all over the map in terms of what they want from a youth baseball experience, what they value, what they expect from a coach, and what they're willing to sacrifice to make it all work.
I'm also realizing that people define terms very differently. To some, competition and winning are synonymous, while others see them as completely different ideas. Some rationalize winning by saying that it's a lot more fun to win than it is to lose, therefore if you focus on winning, you kill two birds with one stone. Most haven't thought much about any of these issues in any depth, and will, like lemmings, nod their heads in apparent agreement with whomever is talking.
To make families draw their own lines in the sand, I asked the following open-ended questions on the flip side of the registration form: "It will be a successful season if [fill in the blank]," and "I/we will be disappointed at the end of next season if [fill in the blank]."
I also had them rank their top three priorities from these six:
As the parents and kids worked through these answers, each kid applied one of the large stickers to his chest with a number between 1 and 30 on it so we could easily identify him on the field. I felt a little like a clerk at a governmental agency, processing paperwork and trying to keep things organized, but, fortunately, Robert and Sam were there to help and get the kids warmed up. This was turning out to be an excellent process, at least until a wind gust blew half of my forms and stickers across the diamond! I'm no gazelle to begin with and there's just no graceful or dignified way to chase paper in the wind.
Eventually we found a rhythm, Sam and Robert hit balls while they made mental notes, and I wrote down what I saw. But it was difficult to quickly refer back and forth to my list of player numbers and rate them on their performance. By the time we were done with a certain drill and had the timing and sequencing figured out, it was on to the next one. After 15 minutes I ditched my numerical rating system in favor of three columns: yes, no and maybe. That simplified my world and the goal became to move the "maybes" into one of the other columns based on what I saw.
About 30 minutes into the tryout I discovered there was a set of identical twins. They were sporting their uniforms from the previous season, and obviously, had the same name stitched on the back. The only way I could tell them apart was the numbers 34 and 36 on the back . . . close enough to confuse the heck out of me! I was panicked! I couldn't tell which was which! They somehow slipped through a flaw in my registration process. I struggled for about 10 minutes, missing a whole group of kids catching fly balls while trying to sort it out. I was then hit with a blinding glimpse of the obvious . . . it really didn't matter . . . I'm sure their parents considered the kids a package deal. I couldn't offer just one a spot on the team . . . duh!
Near the end of the tryout I had one kid inform me very matter-of-factly that he was by far the best player on the team. He proceeded to tell me what the other kids were doing wrong and why he was a better player as he shagged balls in left field and we watched others take batting practice. He had talent, but sadly, I saw that he wouldn't be fun to be around - for me or the other kids. Nope . . . wasn't going to work. I didn't need that dynamic on my team, even if he was the second coming of Babe Ruth.
Ultimately Sam, Robert, and I got a good look at 25 kids who loved baseball and just wanted to play. We saw some kids who have talent and others that have relied solely on their passion for the game to get them this far. Hats off to both groups and all in between. A tryout is a scary thing - there's nowhere to hide and it's difficult to soften the sting of not making the cut. We realized there's plenty of talent to choose from and there will be enough kids to form at least one other team.
Although it was stressful to organize, the energy, excitement, and hope of a tryout is a pretty cool thing. Until, that is, you have to start making choices and explain your decisions to parents.
Over the next 48 hours I flashed back several times to the classic baseball movie, Bull Durham. Twice in the film, the manager of the Durham Bulls Single-A minor league team had to tell a player he was being released and that his services were no longer needed. Each time, he would start the conversation the same way, with the same speech: "This is the toughest job a manager has . . . BUT, the organization has decided to make a change . . ."
It's no fun telling parents that it isn't going to work. I don't like being the guy who breaks the news that they need to keep searching for a team. I tried to be honest with parents, but at the same time give them hope and encouragement that they'll find the right situation. There were, however, a couple of exceptional cases that didn't come down to talent, numbers, or position alignment, but rather to problems with parents. Although I wanted to run fast and far from these people, I still had to be careful how I delivered that message.
It's unrealistic to expect a volunteer coach to tell a parent, "Yeah, I thought your kid has talent and he'd help us win a lot of games. You may be right: we might be a better team with him. However, you and your husband are complete whack-jobs. Including you on my team would lead to conflict, anger, division, and eventually, outright rebellion of either the 10 sets of sane parents or the coaching staff or both. From the little I've witnessed, your presence would be a cancer that would eventually kill the spirit of this team. I'm not willing to endure nine months of that kind of torture. All of this means, unfortunately, that your son will be penalized because your ego, dysfunctional personality, and/or misguided expectations for the kid, team, coach, and other parents is a hornet's nest I'm not willing to stir."
Yeah, right. Some things are better left unsaid.
I'm happy to report, though, I had only two sets of parents fit that mold. The worst of the two conversations started with mom. Upon hearing the news that I didn't have room for her son, she asked me no fewer than 15 questions about the other kids on my team, what their qualifications were, why I had selected them, and why they were better choices than her son. Of course I didn't provide answers, but it certainly didn't stop her from asking. Woodward and Bernstein were less thorough while interrogating sources as they broke Watergate. But I held the line.
Her suggestion was that, since she wasn't satisfied with my explanation, I call her husband on his cell phone. Although he was on business travel, she assured me he would have questions she wasn't able to think of on such short notice. She actually gave me the number believing I'd call.
Most of my conversations though, were short and to the point. My explanations were about skill levels and numbers. And those parents, while disappointed, understood the situation and accepted the news, ready to move on. I genuinely wished them well.
The biggest eye-opener in this whole tryout/selection/notification process was how terrible parents are at assessing the talent of their kids. They can do a pretty good job of determining skill levels of players if their son or daughter is not on the field; put the kid in the mix, though, and the parent becomes incapable of objectively ranking ability. They lose perspective, they rationalize, and they include their hopes, dreams, and the voices of their egos in the assessment. I'm now a believer that tryouts are helpful, if not essential. It's critical that coaches help determine the level at which kids should compete.
With the tryout behind me, I can toss aside the general manager's hat and focus on the baseball part of being a baseball coach. We have 11 kids and their parents ready to make a journey together. Opening day can't get here fast enough!
Adapted from the book, A Perfect Season: A Coach's Journey to Learning, Competing, and Having Fun in Youth Baseball (Quiet Path 2010) by Dan Clemens. It is available at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and other bookstores.
Dan Clemens is a leadership and communications consultant, and has been a youth coach for 10 years. You can email him at Dan@CoachClemens.com [1].
Posted July 24, 2011
Links:
[1] mailto:Dan@CoachClemens.com
[2] https://momsteam.com/successful-parenting/tryouts-and-cuts-advice-for-parents
[3] https://momsteam.com/successful-parenting/pre-season-meetings-open-lines-of-communication-coaches-parents-athletes