Motivating the highly skilled and experienced athletes

[sluggers]

Jmingas wrote an interesting email to me about motivation. After thinking about it a little bit, there are two motivation issues:

(1) The most common for travel ball and HS coaches is how to get kids of varying levels of talent and skill to play hard on the field and to work hard at practice.
(2) The other problem is how to get "a little more" from elite athletes who are near the top of their game.

The situation I am not familiar with is the seond--dealing with elite athletes--those girls operating at the top of their game already. These girls are already batting .400, hitting 20 home runs, and strike out 19 or 21 batters. How do you get them to continue working hard and stretching themselves?

I'm a big Michael Jordan fan. What most people don't know about Jordan is that he was *not* the best basketball player ever when he came to the NBA. He worked every off-season on a facet of his game that he thought was sub-par. E.g., one year he decided that his defense wasn't very good. So, he worked all off-season on defense and won the "defensive player of the year" award. Another year, he thought his 3-point shooting wasn't good enough.

Motivation of athletes at that level is probably much more difficult. They are already among the best players--how do you keep them working and improving, especially in the senior or junior of college?

Any thoughts on motivation of highly skilled players?

 

[amanda_cake]

Wasn't Jordan the guy that didn't make his high school basketball team one year? Look at him now.

I don't have much to add to the conversation at this point but I am interested to see what others have to say. I've played with GREAT athletes. I'm not a natural athlete, I have to work for everything... They have it all naturally and don't really seem to care. It kills me that I put in all this work, can barely get the ball out of the infield some days, and they are up there spitting out home runs. A little exaggerated, but you get my point.

 

[druer]

Great idea for a thread.

I think elite athletes are no different than any other human beings in 1 regard ... we all work harder if we are pursuing a vision.

My advice for anyone is to write down what their "vision" is or what their "dreams" are and keep them handy. I tell my players to carry them in their bat bags as constant reminders whenever they get to practice/games that they aren't just playing softball today, they are pursuing their dreams through softball.

Important Step - If you imagine that you are plugging that "Vision" in to a GPS as your destination, and you also identify where you are now in that pursuit. Your goals are the directions/steps that are needed to go from where you are now to where you see yourself in 1 year, 5 years or whatever your particular vision is. All to many girls that I work with have written "goals" because their coach takes them a team get away and says "I need you to write down 5 goals you want to achieve this year." That is pretty vague and usually they can't even recall for me what they had written down. Some athletes want to accomplish goals if they are OCD like me and have to check off boxes that are next to action items. But for most it becomes a "well I only wrote it because the coach told me to."

The problem is that many of us don't even dare to acknowledge our dreams because we don't believe within ourselves that we can achieve them. Many that do believe they can do it, never write them down or share them, for fear that others would laugh at them. Again, stemmed from a lack of confidence. It takes a lot of confidence to say "I AM going to ......." then sit down and confess accurately where they are and take the time to go through the steps of goal planning that would get them from here to there.

Those that do have a dream, often end up with competing dreams. For instance I do an exercise with my teenage players where I show them that if they graduate college, live at home until they are 31 and save $20,000 per year at a reasonable rate of interest they are guaranteed to become millionaires. At 31 they never have to save another penny because their money will be working for them. As you can imagine nearly every single one says "no way I'm going to live at home until I'm 31." The problem isn't that they don't "dream" of being a millionaire, the problem is that they have a competing dream of "being free to do what they want and living by their own set of rules" and that dream takes priority over their dream of being a millionaire.

Your example of Michael Jordan is really no different than most travel ball players. They all dream of playing ball in college, but once they get to college that was all they were willing to dream about and work for and their careers have peaked at 18. Those that continue to grow, are the ones that didn't "just" dream of playing college ball and being in the programs for 4 years. They wanted to have their names in the back of the programs (records). They are the ones who "knew" they would make it to college, and they dreamed of winning a college world series, etc. Michael's vision wasn't to just play ball in the NBA and then sit back and just reap the financial rewards of doing so like so many others.

 

[SnocatzDad]

IMO the drive of the elite players to improve is something personal to the athlete and can be nurtured but not instilled if it isn't there. Given that you have athletes that have that drive one way to nuture it IMO is to challenge them at the limit of their abilities. If they don't find themselves challenged their enthusiam will suffer and if they do feel challenged they typically will up their intensity to meet the challenge. For example hitting off a tee becomes a challenge/competition when you add a goal of hitting one ball off a tee to knock another ball off a tee 10 feet away. As they get more skilled that might move to 30 ft away. We teach kids to play the bucket game from an early age. Two teams line up, one at first base one at third base adn try to knock a helmet off of a bucket at Home. As they get more skilled this can become a drill for outfielders throwing home from different depths. If you have the space you can set up team competitions for around the horn. I've also found that any drill that can be timed becomes more intense when you pull out a stopwatch. Kids will try to get the best time with 100% intensity if they know they will get an actual number assigned to their effort.

 

[Amy in AZ.]

To challenge these girls introduce 14 inch balls and then 16 inch. Then, a baseball. (You have to have a sense of humor.)

Also, warm up using 2 balls to play catch with. (Each partner throws at the same time.) The balls almost never hit each other.

You can throw around the horn with 2, then 3 balls, also.

Something that I don't see very often, anymore, is the drill with 2 coaches hitting to the infield. One is down 1st base line a little and one is down 3rd base line a little.

 

[mudbug]

I dont think you can motivate anyone. You can only help them to find their own motivation. It truly has to come from within.