The Purpose of My Blog

I have been coaching high school baseball for the past 8 years.  One of the reasons I love baseball so much is because each practice and every game presents new challenges to the way I perceive the game, its tactics and it techniques.  This blog will sometimes focus on obvious issues within the game, and sometimes it will focus on the smaller nuances of the game that often go unnoticed.  All of the posts will be motivated by things I see in my coaching career.  I obviously have my own baseball ideology which some of you will agree with and some of you will disagree with.  I am a firm believer that there is more than one way to play this game, and I will do my best to explain why I believe that my way works well for me and my teams. 

In order to understand some of my logic, it may help to know a little background on me.  As I mentioned above, I am a high school baseball coach.  I also teach Algebra and Statistics at a medium sized school in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago.  As you might imagine, my statistics background fits in nicely with being a baseball coach.  I am not a slave to what the numbers say, but I do listen to them and consider their point of view.

In my 8 years of coaching, my teams have had very good records on the field, and more importantly I feel that we have turned out some very quality individuals off the field.  In spite of the success we have had on the field, I am often left with a sense of "we should have done more" and "we should have prepared them better."  I am hoping that writing my thoughts down and listening to what some of you have to say will help me figure out what areas I need to improve so I can give my athletes the best experience possible. 

As a part of my quest to become a better coach (and in an attempt to break of some of the monotony that goes with being a teacher and coach), I took a job as an assistant coach in a new college summer baseball league.  I would like to coach in college or at the professional level some day, so I thought this league will be a good way for me to build my resume, make some connections, and begin to learn how to work with college athletes. 

I hope you enjoy reading my thoughts as much as I will enjoy putting them on "paper.'"