"Coach's Corner" with Travis Beausoleil
Easter Sunday
Easter is one of my favorite holidays. The weather is much better than Christmas and there are fewer expectations. My Easter is spent at my grandmother's house surrounded by my family. We have a great Easter tradition of walking across the street (my grandmother lives across from the Plainfield Little League complex) and having a family softball game. I have some wonderful memories from my youth during those yearly softball games. After the game the younger kids in the family go out and have an egg hunt.
I have a number of younger cousins ranging from four to eleven years old, and it is so enjoyable to watch them search for the vibrant colored eggs. Grace, my four-year-old cousin, was entertaining to watch. I noticed that Grace would complicate the process and overlook the eggs sitting in the most obvious places, instead looking for them in the more inconspicuous places. There was a brightly colored red egg sitting right next to the mailbox that she walked by three times. She looked inside the mailbox, on top of the mailbox and behind the mailbox but failed to attain the egg that was in plain sight.
I thought during that exact moment that Grace's dilemma was a metaphor for our Mariner ball club. Our team is very young. We have 18 freshmen on the roster, we start six freshmen in our lineup, and our starting lineup is comprised of eight players who did not play college baseball last year (senior Tommy Derosier took the year off to focus on soccer and senior Ethan Graynor took the year off for personal reasons).
Our team is very "youthful." Youth is a word that has a lot of different connotations. When it comes to a baseball team youth is often synonymous with inconsistency. That is where I feel our team stands right now. There is no doubt in my mind that we are the most talented team in this conference. We had won two out of our three series, and even though we had a rough weekend against Daniel Webster I still felt we were one of the best teams in conference.
However, it is "Grace's dilemma" that is compromising our goals. Throughout this season we have had trouble taking the easy out. Routine ground balls are anything but routine. If we get a runner in a "pickle" we often fail to record the out. We lose focus on our timing mechanisms during our bunts. We are looking for our Easter eggs in much more inconspicuous places, and if we would just play catch and make routine plays we would keep our pitch counts lower and be winning more games than we currently are.
Last week I was sitting in my office working on our practice plan with SportsCenter playing on my television in the background. I stopped and caught a quick extract from John Calipari's postgame press conference after Kentucky's national championship win. Calipari spoke about how everyone doubted his team because they were so young. With the NCAA one-and-done rule for college basketball, teams and teammates do not spend as much time with each other. Bobby Hurley and Christian Laettner played three years together at Duke, and Rick Pitino's 1996 Kentucky squad had seven future NBA players led by Tony Delk, who was a four-year starter. UConn's championship run last year was led by Kemba Walker who was a junior. College basketball is now comprised of top freshmen who probably don't go to class because they know they will be entering the NBA draft at the end of the year.
Calipari spoke during his press conference and said it had nothing to do with youth. His players, although young, learned a great lesson that if they were willing to work hard, work as a team and give a part of themselves to their teammates, than there is no limit to what you can accomplish. Here is an exert from his press conference:
"But more importantly, what a lesson for these young people, that if you share, you give up some of yourself for everyone around you, if you care more about the teammates than yourself, it's amazing what you can accomplish. It doesn't matter your age. That's the lesson in this."
I hope we can learn from Grace's lesson and from John Calipari's national champion Wildcats. We are still going to go out and compete every day, and we are going to go out and prepare every day. Once we can stop searching for those elusive Easter eggs and just take the ones that are sitting in plain sight we will compete at a much higher level. Calipari showed that youth is not an excuse! Congratulations to the Kentucky Wildcats -- you have accomplished something truly remarkable.
Until next time ...
Keep the correct perspective!
TMB
Coach's Corner Archive
March 16 - A Lesson in Perspective
