How to Increase Your Coaching ROI

[Ken Krause]

If there’s one thing just about every coach complains about when talking about coaching challenges it’s that they simply don’t have enough time. It seems like there’s always a hundred things to go over in every practice and about 20 minutes to go over them. Hopefully things aren’t really that bad, but it can certainly […]

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[Orange Socks]

True stuff!

Back when I was a rec ball commissioner I had a beginning of the year meeting with the coaches. I told them if they want to do well this season, you are better off spending the bulk of your time working with the bottom half of the players. You will get way more gains with those players in a short period of time than you will with the top players. Why? Typical coaches like to spend their time with the better players, because it makes them feel good. I was a rec ball king. I drafted well and I worked the with bottom players. 1st year 12U season, we finished 4th place out of 8 teams in regular season and ran the table during the end of season playoff tourney. I told our team, I don't care about wins/losses during the season. I want you ready for the end of the season and they were ready!!!

It is fun to see light turn on when those bottom half kids get it.

 

[Ken Krause]

True stuff!

Back when I was a rec ball commissioner I had a beginning of the year meeting with the coaches. I told them if they want to do well this season, you are better off spending the bulk of your time working with the bottom half of the players. You will get way more gains with those players in a short period of time than you will with the top players. Why? Typical coaches like to spend their time with the better players, because it makes them feel good. I was a rec ball king. I drafted well and I worked the with bottom players. 1st year 12U season, we finished 4th place out of 8 teams in regular season and ran the table during the end of season playoff tourney. I told our team, I don't care about wins/losses during the season. I want you ready for the end of the season and they were ready!!!

It is fun to see light turn on when those bottom half kids get it.

Love to hear this story. You are obviously a very smart coach. Glad to hear the strategy worked so well.

 

[CoachCeetar]

told them if they want to do well this season, you are better off spending the bulk of your time working with the bottom half of the players. You will get way more gains with those players in a short period of time than you will with the top players. Why?

Not only that, the top half are already coming back next year. The bottom half? Maybe not so much and then you might have team size issues, or have to call younger kids up too far. But if those kids learn and get better and have fun?

 

[CoachJD]

This is interesting because I feel like we spend SO much time working with the weaker players that I'm not actually getting the most out of our better players. Or, more accurately, those players in the middle who have shown potential but need a couple fixes to be a really good player. We actually split our JV and Varsity teams more this year than we usually do because we felt we were spending too much time trying to get the JV players up to speed to the detriment of the varsity team.

I think the age/level matters here, and my thinking is that you want to spend more time with the weaker players at the young ages and gradually focus on the better players as they get older.

For our 10u team, I see a ton of value in making sure every girl can reliably throw and catch a ball as quickly as possible. So it makes more sense to work with the worst to raise that floor as much as we can. It may not even result in more wins this year, but having 13 girls who can all do the basics bodes well for the future.

But at the HS level, especially when you factor in our JV team, which often has a handful of girls with no experience, I think we get our best ROI in two ways: Spending a lot of time turning the OK (not bad) players into above average players, and identifying as quickly as possible which bad/inexperienced players are going to "get it." That doesn't mean we give up on players, and I'd never tell a weaker player no if she wanted to do extra work. But it does mean that when I'm planning out the scant individual time we have to work with players, I'm thinking about how Suzie, prone to strikeouts, just needs to fix X flaw in her swing and she'll really start hitting and how that is more important for the team than trying to get Betty to remember which hand the glove goes on.

 

[Ken Krause]

This is interesting because I feel like we spend SO much time working with the weaker players that I'm not actually getting the most out of our better players. Or, more accurately, those players in the middle who have shown potential but need a couple fixes to be a really good player. We actually split our JV and Varsity teams more this year than we usually do because we felt we were spending too much time trying to get the JV players up to speed to the detriment of the varsity team.

I think the age/level matters here, and my thinking is that you want to spend more time with the weaker players at the young ages and gradually focus on the better players as they get older.

For our 10u team, I see a ton of value in making sure every girl can reliably throw and catch a ball as quickly as possible. So it makes more sense to work with the worst to raise that floor as much as we can. It may not even result in more wins this year, but having 13 girls who can all do the basics bodes well for the future.

But at the HS level, especially when you factor in our JV team, which often has a handful of girls with no experience, I think we get our best ROI in two ways: Spending a lot of time turning the OK (not bad) players into above average players, and identifying as quickly as possible which bad/inexperienced players are going to "get it." That doesn't mean we give up on players, and I'd never tell a weaker player no if she wanted to do extra work. But it does mean that when I'm planning out the scant individual time we have to work with players, I'm thinking about how Suzie, prone to strikeouts, just needs to fix X flaw in her swing and she'll really start hitting and how that is more important for the team than trying to get Betty to remember which hand the glove goes on.

I hadn't really considered a scenario where some of the players are that bad. By 14 I would normally expect most of the weaker players to have self-selected out. But I know there are cases where a kid who has never played before decides she wants to play in HS, and even the better players on a HS team might not be as good as they should or could be.

In the end I guess it all comes down to the level of play your team is demonstrating. If your top players still have a lot of growth/upside to go it's probably going to pay off more to work with them. But if your top players are already pretty accomplished the lower level kids will give you better ROI.