#WinThisPitch with Academy Baseball
18
Nov
2013
A case of the Mondays is always a little more severe following an Academy weekend, perhaps even more so today, after my first as the director. The good news is that I only have to wait two weeks before we’re back at Milton Keynes with the tone set for another great season of Academy Baseball.
I was nervous going into Saturday’s practice but it took no time at all for our tremendous team of coaches and support staff to get the wheels turning and provide, as always, a brilliant experience for the keenest youth players in the country. I’m reminded that if you surround yourself with great people, great things will happen. Building on the tireless efforts of Will Lintern, National Development Manager and former Academy director, the programme gets better and better, notably in that our workforce continues to grow to include more and better coaches. Further, it’s awesome to see a growing number of regions and clubs represented on our staff. The ratio of players to each coach continues to improve and with the support of Major League Baseball the equipment we have gets better and more plentiful, making everyone's time more productive.
To sharpen the focus of our players and coaches, each practice this winter will include a theme, which for the first practice was “Have Fun (Getting Better)” for the U13 age group and “Win This Pitch” for the U16, 18 and 25 age groups. For the younger players, our theme meant finding the fun in improving and in competing against themselves, their peers and against the game itself. For the older players, it meant treating every repetition as an individual competition. If they can focus and refocus for the hundreds of reps they’ll get in practice, our players will have an easier time playing their games one pitch at a time – a key to succeeding in our sport. Having fun getting better and winning this pitch requires practice to be fun and engaging; our coaches did a phenomenal job of bringing energy and creativity to make it happen. Just as practice can be a mental grind for players, coaching for eight hours can be too. Kudos to our coaches for their own mental toughness.
Thanks also to the parents supporting their children’s baseball aspirations by bringing them to Academy Baseball. You’re helping British Baseball to win this pitch, as well as the many more that we’ll face in the years to come.
Next practice: 30th November.
LC
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tagged under: baseball, coaching, academy, bbf
