Continuing to yell at the players from the dugout, game-after-game "come on guys this is baseball!" Is not going to help the team field any better.

Next year please don't offer to "coach" if your work schedule is such that you cannot take the time to hold more than one practice a week.

Watching our team field is like watching the beginning of Bad News Bears. The team we are playing sucks, and we suck worse.

I don't expect great baseball at this age, but I feel bad for the kids. They can hit, but get blown out every game because of fielding errors.

Thank god for podcasts.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Ronin1069,

As a former coach, I can't condone the yelling from the dugout, but totally understand the once a week practices.

I would schedule 3 practices, and only get 3 or 4 kids per practice. Never had the entire team at the same time. This was AFTER asking parents for their availability so I could request the field.

Got to the point that I went to once a week, and if the kid want at practice, they didn't play in the game. Got yelled at by parents, but my "give a fuck" was all gone by that point.

I was the General Manager for an American Legion team. The legion head got a guy to coach who I knew, but never saw him coach. I acted as asst coach. What a fiasco.
We had mostly high school Juniors and Seniors and an occasional College Frosh on our team.
Since our team was new, we did not get the top area ballplayers. But, our coach would stand in the dugout and yell at a kid when he made a mistake. I never saw it help.

I know what you are going through, your kids are a lot younger. I would not do it to older guys, let alone the young ones.
I tried to talk to the coach about it, to no avail. He made more mistakes than the boys.
He would pitch a pitcher who was having on off day until he was down 8 or 9 runs and then pull him and bitch him out in the dugout.
He would only play 9 players a game unless he switched pitchers. We promised the parents that we would play all the kids.

I would easily get hot, but never at the kids.

After playing years of adult softball and having guys show up drunk, or not show up, or show up and not give a good effort, or not run a ball out, how could you yell at a kid who gives 100% of what he has that day?

Thanks for the replies, gents. I've calmed down some, now.

I get that it is lose/lose for the coaches. Too much practice and kids down't show and parents bitch, too little practice and the kids don't get any better and parents bitch. I am not the guy who would actually yell at a coach; so I'm glad I was able to come here and vent a bit.

The kid play hard; it is frustrating to seem them blown out game-after-game because they miss easy throws to first or drop pop flys.

Is the team 14 years old or are the players? I'm confused.

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Is the team 14 years old or are the players? I'm confused.

Sorry if I was not clear.

The players are 14 years old.

I would not expect a coach of 14 year old players to be the one needing to teach them how to throw and catch. Usually that is already there by now. Not saying they'll play error-free baseball or anything, but by 14, most kids should be fairly sound, fundamentally.

Might be that he assumed a higher proficiency and is not well-prepared to be teaching that sort of thing.

If he's angrily yelling from the dugout or belittling players that's another story, but that's not what I gathered from your post.

As for frequency of practices, when I was playing rec ball I think we usually practiced one night a week, played one night a week, and played on saturday. Sometimes there was another weekday practice.

Maybe volunteer to do another practice on another night and see if you get any takers. Only takes two guys to run a defensive practice. One hit ground balls to infielders and one hits fly balls to outfielders.

In my 7 seasons of coaching baseball and football as both a head coach and an assistant I have seen my fair share of coaches who don't belong on the field. There are a lot of guys who are in it more for their own ego than for the good of the kids.

But I've also learned that while extremely rewarding when dealing with the kids, it's extremely thankless when dealing with the parents. I'll never be a head coach again if I can help it because I hated interacting with the parents constantly.

Parents don't always think about the work that goes into coaching a team, especially for the head coach. Between practices and games for my sons football team I spent anywhere from 15-18 hours a week.And that's just on the field. Beyond that I had to attend weekly meetings, put together practice schedules, work on lineups, work at our home field during other teams games as a representative of our board, hold meetings with my assistant coaches and deal with multiple parent emails and calls. I'm not overestimating when I say 30 hours a week I spent doing something related to that team. And that's on top of my 40+ hour work week.

I get what you are saying about not taking the job if you don't have the time but in many cases guys take the postion because nobody else will. Some turn out great at it and some can't handle the extra workload. I will say that any help you can offer will be appreciated by a good coach. The first year I was an assistant I probably only made about 50% of the practices and the head coach was still extremely happy to have the help. Not because I was a good coach, but because I was another adult who could at least take a few kids aside and do drills with them.

quote:

I will say that any help you can offer will be appreciated by a good coach.

Thanks for that...I just sent an email to the coach asking if I could be of any use during practices to help with fielding drills. He sent an immediate reply of "HECK YES!" and asked me to call him in the morning.

Awesome! Typically that means he is not a total asshole. The guys who are in it for themselves and not the kids tend to be pretty much against "outsiders".

Baseball is my favorite to coach because I get to actually play as our teams usually only have 11-13 players so we always use coaches as fielders or hitters depending on the practice.

Enjoy!

My son played Baseball for a while in college.
He also ran fall track. He started coaching JV high school baseball. After his first couple of practices, he had an on field meeting with the players during a practice. He told them that most of them could not even hit the ball out of the infield, because they were not putting anything into their swing, they were just content with a little contact.
My son is only about 5'9 and about 160 then.
He later during practice heard some players mumbling about how they would like to see him hit the ball.

He then got a bat went to the plate and had a pitcher try to strike him out. He unloaded the second pitch over the center field fence.
He won the team over then and there.
They got better every game. That is really all you can ask is to get better.

The once a week coach is a volunteer giving his time.
How many of the parents practice basic skills any of the other six days with their own children?