- Jun 8, 2016
- 16,118
- 113
Suck was too strong a word but if you go position by position how many positions were you better at in those 3 losses? To take this to an extreme, how many teams that OU played this year and run-ruled, had players that were All-State players, players that played, and won, on HL TB teams? Those kids know how to win. Confidence is important for sure, but sometimes the other team just has better players..What kills us as coaches is that our kids don't actually suck. They've played some great games. They played their first game as a team this year (with four 6th graders starting) in tournament pool play against a pitcher and team from a catholic school that could slay just about any HS team I've seen in the area. An 8th grader clocked at the tournament at 61 with laser accuracy. Best pitcher I've seen in person at any age. She had 8 strikeouts and an easy put-out at 1B. They were animals. But we took almost everything they gave us. They beat us 15-0 in three innings, but never had to step off the base to get us out of the inning. That was huge for us. They played well that whole tournament, but ultimately lose three of four. But it's like 3/4 of the time they forget how well they can do. It's all mental with them. They're just so young that they haven't been able to just fight through mistakes. It's so hard to watch and we've tried everything we can think of to accelerate the process. They've won some games and those wins were a big help, but overall they just haven't lived up to the team we see in practice. They want to win, but still haven't figured out how to do it consistently against teams they should be able to compete with.
But hey...maybe the problem is coaching..lol