Are you losing your mind over a call the umpire made? It's happened to all of us. But are we aware of the impact it is having on the game and the future? Let's talk softball with Coach B.

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Welcome to today's episode of Talking Softball with Coach B.

We've had some good conversations over the last couple of weeks.

We've hit on recruiting a little bit.

Last time we talked about player development and really talking about

the mental and emotional development and its importance,

along with the physical skill development of our players.

Today, I'm going to go a little different route.

I'm going to talk particularly to coaches and parents today,

because I think that we have to understand

that if our players are responding

a certain way emotionally, it's it's probably something that they learned

from an adult figure, because our players are young players,

especially the tens and twelve's and 14, they're very impressionable.

And, you know, I can look back and in growing up,

I would go out in the yard and and I'd want to be Pete Rose

or Mickey Mantle or whoever the great players were at the time.

You know, I would go out and try to emulate them

when I was when I was playing ball in the backyard.

So I think we have to understand that

we as adults are all role models

on the field, in the dugout, in the bleachers, during games.

And our our players eyes are watching.

And they are they are taking in what they see.

And hopefully they're

they are emulating the good things.

And hopefully they're not going to emulate some of the bad things. And

I'm just going to talk from experience what I've seen, what I've heard.

You're one of the first things I want to say is

I am not coming on from a situation

where I am sitting on a pedestal and talking down to people,

because I've had a long career in this game as a coach.

And I feel like there have been times I've had a positive impact

on the game and on my players.

But I also know there's been a time that I've had a negative impact

on on players and on the game because of my actions.

And so I'm not I'm not speaking from someone

who is saying don't do that, because I've never done that.

I have been in a situation where I've lost emotional control

based on the situation of the game and may have been with umpires,

may have been with an opponent or my players.

And I just I just look back at it now and go, yeah, I probably handled

that the wrong way and probably did not

put myself in a positive light for those watching the game.

And and that's one thing that that I've tried to

think a lot about through my career.

And now in my role

as an organizational director and coach in the 18 national team

is I want to make sure that our teams,

our coaches, our fans, myself,

that we we conduct ourselves in a way that if someone who's never seen

the game of softball walks up and is watching the game,

that they walk away and go, wow , that's a great game.

That's that's a great game that was played between two great teams.

Everyone used great sportsmanship.

Everyone competed hard.

And at the end of the day, they walked away with their heads held

high on both sides and everyone conducted themselves accordingly.

So that's that's where I'm going today,

is just the conduct of our coaches.

And our parents and the effect it has on our players and ultimately

could lead to their conduct potentially being

questioned in situations. So

now I've heard a lot lately.

I've had some people come to me

and share experiences and share what they've seen.

and it hasn't been good.

You know, I talked

earlier today with a friend of mine that that is a tournament director.

And we were talking about the the umpire shortage that we have

and why we're losing umpires.

And and I've talked to umpires in chief

and and umpire coordinators about this issue.

And I hear over and over again, it has a lot to do with the decorum

of coaches, decorum of players and in decorum of fans

that that are just driving umpires away from the game.

And that's bad for our game, because if we don't have quality

umpires, then the quality of our game is going to suffer.

You know, and and I don't know how many times I've been out

at a at a 12 U game or a younger age level game.

And, yeah, the umpiring hasn't been real good, but the umpires working

that game were probably young or early in their umpiring career.

And they're trying to learn how to umpire.

And there's a lot that goes into that.

It's a lot more than just balls and strikes, safes and outs.

Obviously, they have to be prepared for for every situation on the field.

But, you know, they're also responsible for a number of other

areas throughout the game and working with their partner.

They may not know the partner they're working with

and that that can create some stress and anxiety in the crew

that they have to deal with .

And all of that gets compounded when coaches and fans lose their minds

or lose their emotional control in situations in the game.

And and again, I think our coaches need to understand,

if they lose emotional control, their team will probably lose

emotional control and then players will be responding.

Right. And the fans start to feed off of their coach's emotional control.

And and pretty soon we just have a lot of chaos happening.

And I've been a part of that. So I know.

But, you know, it's it's the little things.

It's chirping about balls and strikes. Right.

You know, it's easy to call balls

and strikes from a bucket in the corner of the dugout.

It's difficult, sometimes behind home plate to be calling balls and strikes.

It's easy to call safe's and outs from the bleachers.

It's easy to call that safe or out from the dugout or the coach's box,

because we all we all have a stake in that in that call.

You know, if it's a bang bang play at second base

and I'm the third base coach and that umpire calls my runner out

and and it was one of those half-step plays ball.

I'm going to react now. She's safe!

We need that play. We need that call. Right.

And ha, I just run a lot of those through my mind right now.

And I think I've said that more than once.

But we lose emotional control.

And as coaches, when we lose our emotional control,

it begins to affect our mental approach to the game.

It affects how we're trying to to

to control strategies of the game.

And now we're so wrapped up

in the emotion of that call or that a series of calls

or whatever we think it is that we're really losing sight

of coaching and really losing our our our

our role and responsibility as a coach and directing our team in that game.

And yeah, there's times we go to bat for our team.

We're going to go out there.

We're going to argue that call.

We're going to go to bat for our team.

I get that, I've done that.

But I, I also believe that there's.

A time and a place in a way.

To do that without inciting an emotional

issue or creating chaos and,

you know, talking to umpires is it's an art, right.

How do we try to get our point across without being confrontational?

Right. Players. That's that's not a role we should ever be in.

You know, we never want our players to lose emotional control.

And when our players are reacting or responding to

to what they think is a bad call,

I think it's our responsibility

as coaches to to nip that as quickly as possible

so that so that we get our players back into a better emotional state

so that their mental state in the game is under control.

You know, I think any time we get anxious and create a lot of emotion,

our heart rate goes up and everything speeds up.

All of our body processes and everything speed up and we're put on alert.

And and sometimes that's a negative for performance

because we start trying to execute

at too quick of a pace and we're going to make mistakes.

All right. But I'm not just talking about umpires, you know, players,

coaches, parents.

We've all we've all responded to umpires in a certain way.

I will tell you this, and I do have a lot of respect for umpires.

I've never been on the field with a crew of umpires

that influence the outcome of the game directly.

Yeah. Some calls played a role in the outcome of a game.

But I've never been in a situation where at umpire cost us the game.

Now, there's too many things happened during a game to put it on one call.

If it's the strike zone, then we got to learn to adapt.

You know, those are those are all things that we have to learn to

to deal with and make adjustments with.

So I can honestly say I don't know that I've ever

had a crew of umpires cost me a game.

And, you know, there's

lots of stories out there about, oh, man, Coach B's hard on umpires.

Now, Coach B had high expectations of his umpires

to work as hard and perform at a level

comparable to what I did of my players.

Yeah, I've been ejected.

I think I can count on two hands the number of times

I've been ejected in 30 plus years of coaching.

Proud to say in the last four years it hasn't happened one time.

And, you know, I'm hoping it doesn't happen in the remainder of my career

because I feel like that's unfair to my team if I'm not there,

because I've been asked to leave because I lost emotional control

in times in the past when it happened.

I was fortunate to have a good, good, strong staff

that was able to take over and continue to guide the team through the game.

But it's not anything that I'm proud of.

And I don't think it's ever anything that a coach or player

should be proud of or brag about saying, yeah, I got kicked

out of the game the other day.

Boy, I really got my point across, blah, blah, blah. no.

It just means you lost emotional control

and you got asked to leave because you were out of control.

And that's not anything we should ever brag about.

Parents, same thing.

I mean, you hear stories every year

about parents calling umpires out into the parking lot.

Right. That's too much.

That's too much emotion.

We're putting way too much on winning or losing that game.

If it feels like it has to go to a confrontation in the parking lot,

you know, moms and dads, just relax , enjoy watching your kids play.

Good things are going to happen. Bad things are going to happen.

But enjoy the opportunity to

to to be at a game and watching your daughter play.

That should be enough right there that you don't have to get

so emotionally engaged in the game that you lose perspective of that.

And players, again, I don't think players should ever lose

emotional control. They they need to be under control.

Yes, their emotions can get high,

but then they got to bring them back down

because they need to continue to perform.

And if their emotions get low, they've got to find a way to reach back,

grab themselves by the belt loop and readjust and

and get back to a good, positive mental and emotional state.

You know, parents, coaches,

you know, I heard it the other day.

You know, our our coach just won't listen to us as parents or

I hear a coach say, I'm not going to talk to the parents

because I want to talk to their kids and.

You know, it's coaching is between me and the players, not the parents.

OK, at 18u I can buy into that

even 16u a little bit, I can buy into that.

But I think there's always an opportunity to talk to parents

when the time is right and the situation calls for it.

But at our younger ages.

Coaches, we need to make sure that our parents understand the plan.

And we need to make sure that our parents

have a good understanding of

of what the plan is for the group as a whole.

And what's the plan for their daughter?

Where do we see her fitting into this program and this plan?

And how can we improve her role moving forward?

Those conversations need to happen.

I was reading something the other day that said that

90 percent of conflict could be resolved with better communication.

I think that goes a long way in coaching, in how we interact

with our with our players and our parents.

It gives us an opportunity to explain ourselves.

But it also gives us an opportunity to get feedback.

And sometimes the feedback is good.

Sometimes the feedback is negative.

But all of it is feedback that we can use moving forward to continue

to develop the plan for the group and for each individual player.

So I really encourage coaches to develop

a good communication strategy with parents.

You know, some people have a 24 hour rule.

Some people say we can talk about anything except playing time.

You know, and that's kind of the way I leaned was,

you know, we can talk about whatever you want to talk about, but

Susie and I are going to talk about playing time.

Well, that was good because I was working with college

athletes or now I work with 18 and 17 year old players.

When you're working with a 12 year old or a 13 year old,

it might be difficult to rely on that level of communication

to be the tool you use to keep everybody informed about

what's happening on the team and what's happening for that individual player.

So I think that that, again, a lot of those conflicts that develop

and we hear about teams disbanding and in having issues because the parents

and the coaches aren't getting along or the parents aren't getting along.

It's all about communication.

It's all about being able to talk yourself through the situation

and explain your plan well enough that everybody understands having those.

Yeah, that's a good plan. Let's go. Let's make it work.

Well, we'll do what we need to do. You know, players.

You've got to be able to communicate.

You know, I find it really interesting that, you know, are 17

and 18 year olds that I work with on a regular basis.

If they can text you or send you an email or that's a communication

boom, I can get it sent out, say what I want to say.

But if we want to sit down and have a face to face conversation,

that's a challenge.

Lots of emotion and a lot

lots of stammering, lots of different responses.

And, you know, I think we just have to we have to get back

to being able to communicate. All right.

If a player doesn't understand their role

or doesn't understand what's happening, what the process is,

they need to be able to go to the coach and talk to them.

And they need to be able to ask and between the two of them,

They they need to be able to work that out, you know.

And I think that's critical. And coaches.

I'll speak to you also is

you need to be able to go to them and have a conversation.

You need to be able to approach

the people that need to have that conversation with you

and have a good positive conversation and really explain yourself.

The days of being able to say do this.

And then Suzy says, why?

And we respond with because I said so.

Those days are over.

OK, that's that that's not good communication.

I think we have to be able to explain why.

And we have to encourage our players to ask why.

OK. To me, that's baseline communication right there.

And for what I see right now and and I see all of this emotion

and I see these coaches screaming and hollering at their players.

And I'm like, that's that's not communication.

That's loss of emotional control.

And no one's going to get a positive response out of that.

I see players jump up

and respond to an umpire's call or something.

You know, I talked to one of my hitters the other day.

I saw a video of her hitting in a game and she struck out

and dad said something from the bleachers. Right.

And she turns around of the bleachers and throws her hands in the air

responding to him.

And I'm like, don't ever do that again.

Don't ever lose your emotion and show that kind of response on the field.

We shouldn't hear what's being said in the bleachers.

That doesn't matter.

What matters is what's happening between the lines.

But again, it goes back to what I talked about in a previous episode.

Kids have been through a lot lately and adults have been, too.

And everyone's trying to come back to grasp with their emotions.

And I think everyone is is trying to communicate with people.

But we have to remember that communication is based on,

you know, being able to share ideas,

being able to listen right?

Hear what the other person, saying and then provide a quality response.

And within that response, if there's resolution of a conflict, then great.

That's what we need to have.

So that's my soapbox today.

Just because I'm seeing so much of it on the field, I'm

seeing coaches that are out of control and screaming and hollering.

And I see players that are responding

and responding to the coaches, responding to the to the fans.

You know, I don't ever think

there should be an interaction between players on the field.

That's that to me, that's something that just shouldn't happen.

And there's a lot of that happening.

I'm hearing about that happening at 12u games and 14u games.

And I mean, I think we just have to understand that

sportsmanship is still a part of the game

and sportsmanship is still critical to competition.

And, you know, I would say that

on the flip side of that, for

those of you that are recruitable age as players and your families,

I want you to understand that your sportsmanship,

the way you communicate, the way you control your emotions,

that all plays a role in the recruiting process.

I'll share one last story and then we're going to wrap it up today.

I was out on the road recruiting, oh, four or five years ago,

and we were sitting in a ball park and good friend of mine

and I were sitting together and we were talking about how we evaluate players.

You know, he said, Kevin, I use the 110 method.

I said, man I don't know what that is.

You know, I feel like I'm

pretty up to date on stuff, but I don't know what the 110 method is.

He said, oh, it's real simple.

He said, I either stand behind the bleachers or I sit in the bleachers

so I can hear the conversation of the parents around me.

And I'll sit there and I'll take it all in and,

you know, just kind of try to be a silent observer.

And, you know, I hear mom talking about,

oh, her last coach just didn't do a very good job.

He she didn't he didn't understand her and didn't use her properly.

And her high school coach doesn't use her properly and he's not a good coach.

And he said, in my mind, I'm sitting there thinking, well,

if I'm going to be a college coach, they're probably

going to be saying that about me, too.

He said, so I just write a 110 next to that player's name.

I said, Really? So what's that going to do for you?

He said, well, number one,

if I'm sitting in the bleachers and mom looks over my shoulder

and sees 110, she's going to think that I think Susie's pretty good.

And, you know, she's going to feel good about herself and be able

to talk to all of her friends about it.

And he said, but it also gives me

a really good tool that when I get back to the hotel

and I'm flipping through all of my notes for the day, I see that 110

And then I can put the last slash

in between the two ones and make it no.

And no means I'm not recruiting this kid because there's too much baggage

that goes with this kid because of what

the conversations were that I heard in the bleachers.

So I think that we have to always understand people are watching.

People are listening.

And we don't want our loss of emotional control

to have a negative impact.

On what people think of us as individuals, what they think

of our daughter as a player or our player if I'm a coach.

And as parents, what they think of that team

or as a coach, what they think of that team,

you know, I just I think that we it's too impressionable.

People are very impressionable today.

And if we lose emotional control

and we we put ourselves out there in a negative light emotionally,

it could have lasting effects on everybody involved.

And it has an effect on our game because, again, it goes

back to what I said when I started.

What would a person who has never seen a softball game

think if they were standing there, sitting there watching that game?

And if they see a coach railing an umpire

about every call or every play, or they hear

moms and dads screaming and hollering at umpires or coaches,

or they see players showing negative emotional response in situations

in the game, what are they going to think about softball?

And what are they going to think

when they get up and walk out of that ballpark?

Will they come back and watch another game?

So I really think that that

that, you know, our emotional control and the way we communicate is critical

to the success of our teams and success of our players

and the overall culture of our team.

And I use that word culture, because you're going to hear me

talk a lot about culture in the very near future.

Well, that's it for today.

I want to thank everyone for listening, and I hope you're

enjoying talking softball with Coach B.

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