BITS FROM OUR PHILOSOPHY:
- Building the best team is not about
assembling the most talented group of individual players. In youth baseball, as in life, teams win when they function as a single unit and not as an amalgam of autonomous parts, in other words:
assembling the team is not about finding the brightest stars in the sky; it’s about finding those stars that make the constellation work together as one.
- Always make your child’s youth sports
experience a winning one, regardless of the score at the end of the game.
- Winning is ephemeral and losing is never
fatal. It is OK to lose. Learning to deal with failure is a fact of life. One game is just that and baseball is a sport of many, many games.
- Never give up on your child, no matter the
errors, no matter the strikeouts always offer unwavering acceptance and see the positive in the fact that your child is trying, it will build his / her confidence.
- Literally, stepping up to
the plate, takes a lot of courage. Recognize your kid’s courage and bravery. Remember when he steps up to the plate he is already under a lot pressure (the pressure he puts on to himself, pressure to
deliver for his teammates and pressure to make his parents proud)
- When in doubt about how
to best teach your child, start with a smile
- Positive team chemistry
and culture is critical at all times, but especially when a team needs to be working in perfect synchrony, backing each other up and focused as a single unit on the task at hand.
- Baseball odds mirror
life. It's expected for most players to strike out seven of ten times at bat or even more than that. I'm not sure what the odds are in life for reaching goals but certainly lots there will be many
strike outs along the way to reaching any goal that's worth achieving.
- Baseball teaches players
the teamwork. Individual statistics are part of baseball, but no player can win the game without the whole team working together. Individual players have to be committed to improving their game,
otherwise the whole team suffers.
- Baseball is a game of
mental control. No baseball player ever loses or wins a game and knowing how to move beyond a good and bad play is essential. If a player can stay level-headed on the field they can learn to transfer
that evenness to manage life stress.
- Poor sportsmanship looks
really bad. Baseball has maintained a strong honor and therefore when a player kicks his equipment after being called out it's an embarrassment for the entire team and community. No one wants to
watch a player being a poor sport.
Baseball requires and teaches commitment. It's so hard to be good at baseball. A kid can be good at several
sports, and yet baseball probably is the one he / she struggles with the most. It's the challenge of the game that draws him / her in and that's fine because he's learning to work hard for what he /
she loves.
We follow Mike Matheny's Manifesto - Former Manager of The St. Louis
Cardinals
watch:
Print