The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
For those of you that don’t live in/around the state of Georgia. King of the Mountain is a tournament that is held every year in about 12 different locations just to ensure that I have to drive hundreds of miles in 1 day trying to get from location to location to see as many of my players as I can.
So yesterday from sunrise to sunset I got to experience all that is King of the Mountain. I got to see The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
The Ugly: While you are on your own in the batters box, this game is most certainly a team sport. So the ugliest aspect of the game is definitely a bad attitude. Because the bottom line with a bad attitude is one player saying “I’m upset about something and I want you other 10 players on the team to focus on me, instead of my helping you.” Unfortunately I got see this first hand yesterday.
The Bad: While I don’t expect every at bat to end with a home run, I do expect players to go into the batters box and attack the ball. Yesterday unfortunately I saw a lot of girls that looked like a deer in headlights in the batters box yesterday.
The Good: One of the things that I love about the game, is that there are players out there who do things that you just can’t coach, and they just leave you in awe of what they’ve done. One young lady, KB, is such a player. She came into a game as the pitcher after the starter walked 4 straight batters to start the game off. So the bases were loaded, no outs and 1 run already on the board. She didn’t walk onto the field in dread of the situation, she came onto the field full of energy, took her warmup pitches and then backed off the mound and looked at each player on the field 1 at a time and breathed life into them. It was amazing. She talked them through the situation and left them with …. “It’s a new ball game. It’s zero to zero. Nobody on.” She turned an awful situation around with her attitude. Pitched her way out of the inning by getting 3 outs with nobody else crossing the plate. The players all charged off the field, now pumped up and instead of taking the glory that they wanted to bestow on her she reminded them “zero to zero … lets go win this game.” She wasn’t playing the same game that 99% of the other girls out there play. She was playing the game in her head instead of on the field, and in her head she was winning, not losing.
So as a coach I can share what you shouldn’t do, I can provide advice on what the right things to do are, but what I really want to do is learn how to clone the KB’s of the world. But until that is possible, we’ll all have to just watch in awe together as they demonstrate how the game should really be played and remind us all that it never involves the expensive bats, fancy bags or costly lessons. It’s about attitude and effort, and the girls that can control it, are the ones that win despite the score.