When the opportunity to manage was presented to me, it was a chance to have more of a leadership role and one that offered me a great way to grow both personally and professionally with the responsibility of coaching more players, and in a bigger picture.    

Hindsight being 20/20, when it came to actually being prepared to do the job I had just been promoted to do, I didn’t have any idea what I was doing.  While I am sure there is a handbook on how to manage a baseball team, much of learning how to best navigate through a season comes from trial and error more than anything else. Like most, I did the job the only way I knew how at the time and did it to the best of my ability. At various points of the season, I mishandled everything from game strategy, discipline, communication, schedule logistics, and probably a lot in between.

But there was one thing I didn’t mess up: the details to teaching the game where EVERYTHING mattered. At one point during that summer, a player lamented to a coach on our staff his frustration. “Fenster is on us about every little thing,” he said. “Why can’t he just let us play?” Looking back, that may be one of the best compliments I have ever received as a coach.

For the last two and a half years, the following tweet has been pinned to my profile on Twitter: “Hate that coach who works you too hard, always on your ass? Wait until you play for a coach who doesn’t care. You’ll realize how lucky you were.”

Those 140 characters are at the core of who I am as a coach, thanks entirely to the influence that Fred Hill, the coach I played for and coached with at Rutgers, had on me; it was the foundation of who he was as a coach. I have always held my players to a higher standard than they hold themselves to because that’s exactly what Coach Hill did for me.

As a player, I learned the hard way how valuable this approach was for my own personal development. About ten games into my freshman season, we were getting crushed by UCF, in large part because of what seemed like 15 pull-side hits down the left-field line. While playing shortstop, Coach Hill put the responsibility on me to tell our third baseman when off-speed pitches were coming. I didn’t relay one all game. And got completely ripped for it after the game in front of half the team. I was literally in tears, ready to transfer.

When we got back to the hotel, he called me into his room. It was there where he said this: “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but the reason I am riding you so hard is that I think you have a chance to be a great player for us. You shouldn’t be upset when I get on you; you should get worried when I’m not.” From that day forward, I was completely transformed in my ability to handle criticism, no matter how loud that message was communicated.

Over the years, I’ve had many conversations with my own players similar to that one Coach Hill had with me back in the spring of 1997. 

Thanks to the many coaches that I’ve had the privilege of playing for or coaching with, I’ve come to realize that a team will always, in some way, shape, or form, take on the personality of its coaching staff. That goes not only for the positive elements but also just as much for the negative aspects as well. Our teams have always had a good sense of being aware of the countless details that take place over the course of a game because we make them a consistent part of what we teach. There is no doubt that many players don’t necessarily like a coaching staff that consistently gets on them about not doing some of these details right. The devil may very well be in the details, but that devil wins a ton of games.

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It may be just as important for coaches to be who they are and to do what they do to enable them to help maximize their players’ and their teams’ full potential. Last winter, HBO aired a documentary profiling the relationship between two football coaching legends, Bill Belichick and Nick Saban. Unquestionably, coaches across America watched intently with pen and paper in hand, feverishly taking notes and fully prepared to be the next Belichick or the next Saban by the time credits rolled. Unfortunately, that is impossible. There is only one Bill Belichick. There is only one Nick Saban.

And there was only one Fred Hill.

In the spring of 2006, upon the sudden end to my playing career, Coach Hill created a position on his Rutgers staff for me because, 1) he thought I would make a good coach, and 2) I had nothing better to do and no plan B in life. At the time, I thought this would be a simple stopgap as I figured out what I wanted to do with my life. Little did I know that this would be the start of my second life in the game.

Assistant coaches are the unsung heroes of a coaching staff. They are the epitome of the behind the scenes worker who gets little reward and even less recognition for the job they do. An assistant coach has to be an extension of the head coach. In order for the relationship between the two to thrive, both must be aligned in their organizational standards as well as their strategic beliefs so that their players will get a single, consistent message. With all that in mind, when I entered the coaching profession, I thought I had to be the next Fred Hill.

Being able to work under the guy I played for in college — and who immensely helped me develop as a player- made for a pretty natural transition at the start. I knew his sayings. I knew how he coached. I knew what he believed. But as I began to find my own voice as a coach, I quickly learned that it was impossible for me, a new coach with NO experience as a coach, to be the same as an ABCA Hall of Famer with more than 1,000 career wins. 

The process of finding yourself as a coach can be as long of a journey as it is to find yourself as a player. The funny part was that baseball was the least of my worries, as I was pretty confident in my foundation of knowing the game. It was actually the coaching in general where I was all over the map. It was a challenge at times to understand how to handle players on the field and off, how to create cohesion on a staff, or how to disagree with something without causing dissension.  

By the time I left Rutgers to join the Red Sox in 2012, I had grown leaps and bounds both personally and professionally over the previous six years. But as the new guy in the organization as an A-ball hitting coach, I was much like a rookie in the clubhouse, unsure exactly of my place in this new environment. The general rule was the same in professional baseball, where hitting coaches and pitching coaches are not only an extension of their club’s manager but also a vital branch of an entire organizational philosophy. I was hired to coach hitters in Greenville and I needed to figure out the best way to do that. How hands-on did I need to be? Could I implement different things with different hitters? What would our daily routine be? 

There was no handbook to answer all of my questions, but it was clear that experience through trial and error would be my best teacher, along with leaning on my colleagues who had been in my shoes before. Slowly but surely, I started to settle in. The more comfortable I got in my own skin, the better I become as my own coach. But I wasn’t entirely me. I wasn’t THAT comfortable. I was getting there, but I wasn’t there.

Then came the ground out that marked my arrival.

About one month into the season in early May, one of our best hitters came up with a runner on third and less than two outs. His job, plain and simple, was to drive that run home. We preached situational hitting and the value of getting the job done when it came to developing into a productive hitter. The result of this particular at-bat was a roll-over, ground ball to the second baseman. The run scored. The job was done. And I was pumped. Our hitter… not so much.

He sulked off the field. Banged his helmet on the bench. Slammed his bat back into the rack. If there was one thing that always got under my skin both as a player and now as a coach, it’s playing selfish. As I’m watching him come down towards me in the dugout, my blood is starting to boil. By the time he was standing next to me, he started complaining to himself. I snapped. “WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM,” I politely asked. “You just did your job. You helped your team. Now stop being a baby, grow up, and pick up your teammate who is hitting right now.”  

What I didn’t realize at that impulse was that Chad Epperson, one of our roving coordinators from Boston, was in the dugout at the time. Had I been conscious of his presence, I would have been much more guarded with my words, as I had been to that point, if I said anything at all. I was still the new guy. Still finding my way.  Still finding my place. After the game, Eppy came up to me and said that if I didn’t address that situation in the dugout, he would have himself, and he absolutely loved the way I handled it, reassuring me that sometimes players need some messages louder than others. 

That meant everything to me, and not because he was ok with me getting on a player who acted unprofessionally. But rather because that was the moment when I knew I could truly be who I was as a coach. I didn’t have to be cautiously filtered like I had been to that point. Eppy gave me that freedom to be me. That moment, yet so small in the grand scheme of everything, baseball or otherwise, was, still to this day, one of the most defining moments of my entire coaching career. A coach who knows who he is and does what he does is in the best position to help his players do the same.

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Spend enough time in sports, and you’ll discover that some players just have a knack for making the big play at just the right moment. Sometimes it’s the superstar, but other times it’s the less-heralded player who seemingly comes out of nowhere to carry the team to a title.

Many have tried to figure out what makes some players perform under pressure. The number crunchers who analyze every move of every player insist that the idea of clutch doesn’t even exist, simply because it cannot be measured. But despite that we cannot see it, clutch is a real thing. I surveyed 563 baseball and coaching-minded followers on Twitter and asked, “Can you teach clutch?” The results were interesting:

• Yes: 15%
• No: 50%
• It’s not that simple: 35%

Defining ‘clutch’ 

It can be argued that clutch is the ability to get a job done under pressure. Pressure is a relative term, different to each athlete as to when and where they feel it. Pressure isn’t just with the game on the line in the ninth inning. For some, pressure may be laying down a bunt in the early innings. For others, it may be getting three outs in a blowout game in a pitcher’s first varsity appearance.

Regardless of those circumstances, pressure requires a calmness to be in the best position to overcome it. It’s the calm that enables the focus and competitiveness required to get that job done.

Clutch looks like David Ortiz. Ortiz not only retired as one of the best hitters of an entire generation, but arguably the game’s most clutch hitter of all-time.

On top of his Hall of Fame résumé, Ortiz was a .289 hitter with 17 homers, 61 RBI, and 51 runs scored in 85 postseason games. On the game’s biggest stage and pressure at its peak, Ortiz found a way to consistently perform at an MVP level. How did he do it?

In the spring of 2013, while managing the Gulf Coast League Red Sox, part of my responsibility was to make sure rehabbing players were given enough reps so we could assure them a healthy return to action. One of those players was Ortiz.

Coming off of an Achilles injury, Ortiz gave me the opportunity to observe him from a vantage point very few have the privilege of seeing — behind an L-Screen, flipping him soft toss, throwing him batting practice. The way he worked made it easy for me to understand how he turned himself into the all-around hitter that he became.

  » RELATED: Coaching athletes to keep calm under pressure

Without ever seeing Ortiz go through his daily routine, I expected a player who would swing as hard as he could, pulling just about everything. I expected him to put on a show in the batting cage. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Ortiz’s work in the cage and on the field held three distinct traits:

• He always worked with a purpose and a plan.
• He mentally put himself in game situations.
• Ortiz made his work competitive.

Ortiz’s day started in the cage with front toss, a drill where a protective screen is set up about 15 to 20 feet from home plate and the ball is tossed underhand on a line. This is his warm-up but not to get loose, rather to perfect his swing with the right feel. Out of roughly 60 swings, I’d bet that 40 of the hits either went the entire length of the cage or off the screen, and another 15 or so went to the back half of the net. No more than five were mishit as weak ground balls to the right or left side. The most impressive thing was not a single batted ball went off the top of the cage. With every swing, his focus was on two things: balance, and a short/direct path to the pitch where he stayed inside the baseball.

Imagine having a plan for everything that you do, having purpose behind every minute of every practice. It’s impossible not to get better. Ortiz’s career résumé is the byproduct of his focused and purposeful work.

Putting in the work

Ortiz’s batting practice routine consisted of far more situation-specific hitting than it did mindless swings. He would practice the hit and run, advancing runners and later driving them in. He would work on a distinct approach with two strikes and again in a hitter’s count. And, he would practice hitting the ball back up the middle or the other way.

Every situation that could arise during a game, Ortiz would practice. Just like with anything in life, the more you do something, the more comfortable and confident you become in doing it. That’s especially true in sports, and it’s that comfort and confidence that breeds the calmness needed to overcome pressure.

Ortiz managed to add a competitive element to complete his day. One day, we ended his time in the cage with a simple hard hit game. He would get one point for every pitch hit hard to the back half of the cage, and I would earn one out for every ball that wasn’t.

The next day we played a different game. “I need you to be Mariano,” Ortiz said. Dumbfounded, I reluctantly agreed to throw the ball in the 6-inch slot on and off the inside corner of the plate where Mariano Rivera became the greatest closer in the history of baseball. I was somehow able to do so without beaning Ortiz.

I noticed that he had a different look on his face, but I couldn’t pinpoint what it was until a few minutes later. In a batting cage in Ft. Myers, Florida, against a no-name minor league manager, with no one watching, Ortiz was mentally putting himself in the ninth inning of a game against the Yankees facing Mariano Rivera, competing in what was likely a game-on-the-line scenario.

  » ALSO SEE: Productive practices start with a purposeful warmup

Over the course of his 20-year career, Ortiz faced Rivera just 31 times. But how many hundreds or thousands of times did they face off in his mind? Without question, the comfort created by mentally hitting against Rivera during batting practice helped Ortiz become a .310 hitter against a sure-fire Hall of Fame pitcher who held opposing hitters to a minuscule .177 over his career.

Life is about competing. Those who can will be successful, and those who can’t probably won’t. Baseball is no different. There is a stream of talented players who enter the professional ranks every year, but one of the things that separates one from the next is their ability to compete to win. Countless players find themselves out of the game very quickly not because they weren’t good enough, but rather because pressure got the best of them.

Ortiz taught me the value of building a plan around everything we do. It showed me how we can practice ad nauseam those things we encounter in a game, even when we aren’t in a game. And by practicing those parts of the game regularly, we can build a comfort and a confidence that produces the calmness needed to become clutch and have success when the pressure is on.

So, can we teach clutch? It’s still not that simple, but we can assuredly put our players in pressure-filled situations that develop their fight or flight skills. We can force them to focus, with specific plans for their work. We can put them in game-like environments, with an endless list of circumstances they might experience when the lights are on. Everything needed to become the player we want with the game on the line, we can provide by the environment we create.

We can guide athletes down the road to clutch, but at the end of the day, it’s up to them to actually follow it.

Darren Fenster is the minor league outfield/baserunning coordinator for the Boston Red Sox. He’s the former manager of the Portland Sea Dogs (Maine) and former manager of the Greenville Drive (S.C.), both Minor League affiliates of the Boston Red Sox. Find him on Twitter at @CoachYourKids.

The post The Clutch Gene: Can you teach performance under pressure? appeared first on Coach and Athletic Director.

Baseball is very much a game of routine. And those routines are an integral part of a player’s individual development, not to mention the team culture and environment. Hitters spend time in the cage every day to get their swings right. Pitchers work in the bullpen to perfect their delivery. Teams take batting practice, emphasize defensive work, and run the bases.

Every. Single. Day.

Those routines become a habitual part of the professional player’s day. Over the course of my six years managing at various levels of our minor league system, I saw the value of using the previous day’s game as a teacher for our players. When reviewing the games in my own mind, I saw the countless coaching points that could be taken from each contest. But after discussing those points, almost like a teacher lecturing a class, I became curious as to what the players actually saw. So, I changed my approach.

Prior to offering my own thoughts, I’d survey the group: “Alright guys, what do you got from last night?” The first few times I did this, I scanned the room and found nothing but blank stares. Heads down. Crickets. No one saying a word. No one wanting to be called upon.

At the time, our team environment was not one that encouraged input from players. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that these players — all of whom we had good relationships with — were apprehensive to speak in front of the group. Some were timid out of fear that they would say something wrong.

   » ALSO SEE: Challenging players to be competitive in practices

Slowly, as we changed the approach, we were able to create an environment where giving our players a voice became the norm. They became more comfortable talking the game, and they used one another as a way to get better. This even took place in A-ball, with those inexperienced kids who truly didn’t know the game.

In 2018, I managed the Portland Sea Dogs, our Double-A, Eastern League affiliate. Coming on the heels of my experience working largely with inexperienced players, this presented my first opportunity to work with players who had a career under their belt and knew what it meant to be a professional. We had a good sense of what made them tick, and they had a pretty good feel for the game. Additionally, the majority of them had played for me at some point and were familiar with my style of engagement. This level of comfort, and their understanding of our organizational standards, helped them embrace my style of coaching as a conversation.

   » ALSO SEE: Showing appreciation to your athletes

Part of managing at the Double-A level meant spending a week with our Major League team in September. This allowed us to get a feel for how our staff and players were doing things in Boston, and it helped us figure out what we can mirror in the Minor Leagues to prepare our guys. What blew me away far more than anything else was the interaction between players and the manner by which there was non-stop communication about the game. Coaches would start our advance meetings, and the players would essentially take over. Later — in the cage, around the dugout, in the bullpen — there were constant player-driven conversations, a clear part of the culture that helped us win the World Series in October. Some of our most inquisitive players, not coincidentally, were also some of our biggest stars.

For players, it’s OK to ask questions. It’s OK to give feedback, and it’s OK to talk the game. It’s all, in reality, a necessary part of development. We need to embrace input from our players to understand what they actually know, which in turn helps us learn what they don’t know. By encouraging questions, feedback and game-talk, we can make coaching a conversation, not a lecture. For coaches, it’s up to us to help our players find their own voice so they can develop in their own game.

Darren Fenster is the minor league outfield/baserunning coordinator for the Boston Red Sox. He’s the former manager of the Portland Sea Dogs (Maine) and former manager of the Greenville Drive (S.C.), both Minor League affiliates of the Boston Red Sox. Find him on Twitter at @CoachYourKids.

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It’s a hot summer day, and you just finished mowing the lawn and washing the car. With sweat still dripping from your forehead, you head into the house and sit down on your favorite recliner to relax.

With the remote in one hand, you turn on the TV and discover your team is playing an exciting afternoon baseball game. All that’s missing from this becoming the perfect day is that ice cold, frosty beverage in your other hand. But at this point, you’re way too comfortable in your Lazy Boy.

Your son saddles up next to you for some quality bonding time, cheering every time Derek Jeter comes through with a clutch hit. An idea pops into your head.

“Hey son,” you say. “Want to do your dad a big favor and get him a drink from the fridge?”

Crickets. Not even a flinch to indicate that he heard you. And if he did, that 7-year-old of yours has learned the fine art of selective hearing that took you decades to perfect. So you ask again, this time making sure to grab his attention.

“Hey buddy, daddy is really thirsty. Can you please grab me a drink from the kitchen?”

In an annoyed tone, your son moans, “no.”

Suddenly, you get an idea.

“Hey son,” you say. “I’ll bet that you can’t bring me a drink in less than 10 seconds.”

Like a lightning bolt, you watch your son race into the kitchen and a mere seven seconds later, there’s a drink in hand. You’ve now discovered a way to quench your thirst without moving an inch. The simple challenge of time just completely motivated your kid to enthusiastically do something that he originally wanted no part of.

The same rule can be applied to your practices, often times garnering a similar result.

  » ALSO SEE: ‘Thank you:’ Showing appreciation to your athletes

Any successful coach will tell you how much they love the competitiveness that comes with playing games, and the desire they have to do whatever it takes to beat their opponents. That same coach, however, will likely tell you how much they live for practice, because it’s during practice where a coach can truly leave a mark on his or her team, seen both collectively in wins and losses, as well as individually in their players’ athletic development.

One of the greatest challenges in coaching is getting our players to embrace practice as much as we do. While there’s no cookie-cutter way of doing so, if you find creative ways to make your workouts competitive, things will start moving in the right direction.

By consistently putting together practice plans that force the players on your team to go up against one another and against themselves, when it come times to go to battle against a true opponent with one another, their inner fighter will likely elevate to another level. The reason is they have been practicing the competition even though they haven’t actually been playing.

The minor league baseball season consists of 140 games played in a matter of about 150 days. Add a month or so of spring training, and then another few weeks for fall mini-camp, players spend well over 200 days on the field, honing their craft, trying to get better every day in an effort to get to the Major Leagues.

It’s every bit of a grind physically, and maybe even more so mentally, as players work through the many ups and downs of the year. Keeping guys just as engaged on a sweltering July day as they were the first day of spring training in February is not an easy task, but it is an achievable one.

In Greenville, South Carolina, we work with a group of 19 to 24 year olds, many of which are experiencing their first full professional season as members of the Greenville Drive, a Class-A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox. One of our primary points of emphasis is teaching these guys how to get into a routine and work properly where they are getting something out of every rep they take every single day.

A daily routine helps create the consistency in their day-to-day business that allows them to develop their skills. It is within their daily routine where our staff is challenged to find those ways to keep guys enthusiastic about the work necessary to get better. We do that by varying our drills in addition to adding some kind of game within those drills that forces competitiveness and focus.

The different aspects of baseball give us some pretty good flexibility to allow our creativity to take over in all of our pregame work, which is done as many as five hours prior to the first pitch.

Here are a few examples of how we try to get the most out of our guys both competitively and developmentally. The general concepts from these examples can be applied to any sport.

10 Means 10

Infielders take ground balls every day. They are as much a part of the daily routine as batting practice is for hitters or playing catch is for pitchers.

As we get into the grind — months into the season or several weeks without a day off — the day-to-day work can get monotonous. It’s up to coaches to keep that work productive. This concept we use with infielders has a number of different variations. One can entail 10 ground balls for the player, with the stipulation that each is taken with 100% focus and technique.

Another variation pins two infielders up against one another at the same time to see who can cleanly field the most of 10 grounders. By keeping reps at a minimum, you can ensure a player’s best concentration to do each rep right, since they are not being asked to lock in for a prolonged period of time.

Target Practice

Over the course of our season, hitters can take upwards of 20,000 swings. That’s not including all of the work most do at home during the offseason.

With that much of a workload, and with the goal of keeping guys strong for the entire year, we need to find a balance between making sure they are getting enough reps to improve without completely wearing them down. To do that, we set up various drills that force a level of concentration that breeds development, with a side of competition.

We take two protective screens and stand them up in the middle of the field, one on each side of second base about 50 feet from one another. The goal is simple: Get players to hit the ball between the screens.

We don’t speak a word of mechanics, yet by putting the emphasis on a specific result those mechanics of the swing have to fall into place. This is a drill that is done in small groups, with each player striving to beat the next. By the end of the drill, the result is often three or four players that just made their swing better through competitive work.

Game on the Line

Baseball is such a unique team sport because of the fact that a single individual has a disproportionately large impact on wins and losses.

That individual is the pitcher. They control everything.

With that kind of a burden on one person’s shoulders, there is a natural pressure that comes with the position. In between outings, pitchers work in the bullpen, throwing to a catcher with no hitter in the batter’s box. That in itself does not simulate a game-type atmosphere, but when specific game situations are presented to the pitcher, they are now practicing under pressure to execute a certain pitch in a certain location. That way, when the game does come along, and that specific situation just practiced in the bullpen presents itself, it will be easier to work through.

For whatever reason, practice carries a negative connotation amongst athletes. While most in sports love to play, the best also love to practice. Allow your players to stay in the comfort of their daily routines, but enable them to grow each and every day by making those routines more productive with the added element of competition.

No matter the sport, and no matter the level, the competitiveness of an athlete will always come into play. We’ve long believed that if a guy is not willing to compete, then his natural ability does not mean a thing. Some players innately have that gene to battle, and for the others who don’t, it’s our job as coaches to ingrain it in them, and we can do that every single day in practice.

Darren Fenster is the minor league outfield/baserunning coordinator for the Boston Red Sox. He’s the former manager of the Portland Sea Dogs (Maine) and former manager of the Greenville Drive (S.C.), both Minor League affiliates of the Boston Red Sox. Find him on Twitter at @CoachYourKids.

The post Practice with a purpose appeared first on Coach and Athletic Director.