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I started playing baseball almost as soon as I could walk.
Some of my earliest memories are of playing catch with my
Dad in our backyard during the long summer evenings in Toronto,
Canada where I grew up. The undying passion of most Toronto
sports fans is hockey. This was before the Blue Jays had won
their two World Series titles in ’92 and ’93, and
summer was seen as a time to train in hockey camps. Baseball
was something played in spare time with a few friends on vacant
lots in the neighborhood. But I loved to play catch with my
Dad, and I wanted to play baseball every chance I could.
When I was seven years old, my grandfather and grandmother
took me to my first professional baseball game, we saw the
Toronto Blue Jays play the Kansas City Royals. I will always
remember the impact the game had on me. For the first time
in my young life, I actually managed to pay attention on something
for more than 10 minutes.
Growing up as a player, I found that baseball was something
I was good at. I loved to play the game. The slow pace and
moments of intense action were a combination that I really
enjoyed. I loved to feel the air thicken as dusk set in, and
wait with anticipation as the lights came on before a night
game. I played every summer in leagues, and continued to play
with my friends whenever I could talk them into coming outside.
When I was fourteen years old, I started to loose interest
in the game as my time became more filled with school, summer
jobs and a social life with my friends. One of my coaches
had a few people involved professionally in the game take
a look at this 6 ft tall, 230 lb fourteen year old who could
smash the ball over the fence in full size baseball diamonds.
I had toyed with the idea of trying to play seriously, but
I was considered too slow of a runner to ever have a legitimate
shot of making it. I stopped playing in the middle of that
summer after having hit 21 home runs in 7 games playing in
a low level league in our suburb of Toronto. I knew I would
never play professionally, and thought that other things were
more important.
The spring of the year after I stopped playing, a good friend
of mine asked me if I was interested in helping him coach
his six year old nephew’s T-ball team. At first I hesitated,
but eventually Andy talked me into it. Andy and I spent the
next four summers helping the same group of boys grow into
great baseball players. That first summer ignited a passion
in me to help other players realize as much of their potential
as possible.
Once I started to coach, it became important to me to understand
the best way to coach. I started to watch other coaches, both
on the local ball diamonds and in professional games. I tried
to see what each one did, not so much in the strategy to win,
but in the way each one of them tried to motivate their players.
There are coaches that yell. There are coaches that plead.
There are coaches that cajole their players into trying their
best. There are truly special coaches that somehow manage
to inspire players to greatness with words. I found myself
becoming none of those classic styles of coaches. Rather,
I became a coach who watched his players. I try to get to
understand my players and determine what mades them tick;
what will motivate them to exceed their potential, and what
might push them to fail. For each player I have coached, my
style is slightly different.
My last year of high school, we couldn’t find a teacher
who wanted to take responsibility for coaching our team. I
managed to convince the school that I could take care of it.
Learning how to motivate players the same age as myself was
a new challenge. It was made especially interesting by the
fact that on our team we had six players who had played for
the national team and five others who had played for our province.
In the end I focused on keeping it fun. Laid back practices
and a lot of joking around was what kept this talented group
of players coming back day after day. We had a successful
year, and it was a great way to end my time in high school.
The summer after I graduated from high school, I was looking
for a summer job. My sister came home one afternoon having
signed me up for an interview with a new summer baseball camp.
What better way to pass the summer than playing baseball?
I spent the next 10 weeks teaching groups of girls and boys
the finer points of the game. Some of the kids were there
because they loved baseball, and far too many were there because
their parents didn’t know what to do with them for the
long hot summer. The kids started with a huge range of abilities.
Some played highly competitive baseball, while others had
never even played T-ball. What made it even more challenging
was the range of ages, everything from seven to fifteen years
old shared the same camp and were involved in the same activities
during the summer. Over the two summers I spent coaching at
this camp, I was able to refine my skills at getting the most
out of a wide variety of players. I learned to focus on making
it fun for the kids who didn’t really want to be there.
For the good players, the challenge was not only to improve,
but to pass on some of their skills to the other players around
them. The most rewarding part of these summers was molding
a team out of a disparate group of players, who not only played
well together, but had a great time doing it.
Later I would refine this ability by coaching at my University.
The Canadian Interuniversity Baseball Association had formed
in 1993, and we were hoping to put a team in for the 94-95
season. Two of us, both students, started on the long and
hard road of putting a team together. As the Association was
new, the University did not recognize us as an official sport
and we had no support from the school. Everything from uniforms,
to baseball, to renting the fields had to be paid by the players,
and out of our pockets. We managed to put a team together
in 1994, but did not join the league fully until 1995. Motivating
a group of University students who had 40 hours a week of
classes to drag themselves out of bed at 5 am everyday was
not easy. We had practices in the mornings and often in the
evenings as well. The players would arrive exhausted after
being up late studying, and leave even more tired. We played
on the weekends, two games on Friday and one on Saturday.
Road games were anywhere from three to seven hours away. The
time on the bus was spent studying or catching up on much
needed sleep. Watching these guys around me refuse to let
lack of sleep get in the way of playing baseball, helped to
remind me what I loved about the game. I would watch the grin
on the face of a player who had just hit a home run, or see
the spontaneous joy ignited by a great play or a win pulled
out in the last minute and it was infectious. That summer
was the first year I picked up my glove and bat to play competitively
again in over 5 years.
The testament to all of our hard work is that the team is
now officially recognized by the University and is still going
strong. Students still run the team, and continue to pay for
most of the costs associated with playing.
Through coaching I have been able to realize that the games
we love as children can be a way as adults to recapture that
unconditional joy that we thought was lost once we are no
longer “children”. In coaching T-Ball I learned
how to help unskilled players develop and grow to love the
game. During the summers at the baseball camp, I had to get
kids who often didn’t want to be there to listen to me
and pull in the direction the team needed to go. In high school
and University, I began to understand how to motivate and
keep the respect of others who were often older and more skilled
than I was. Each of these experiences has also helped me to
understand how to motivate people to exceed what they believe
to be the limit of their abilities. These skills have helped
me immensely in my professional career. I still offer my time
to coach any chance I get. And now when I jog out onto a baseball
diamond, I feel a little bit of the same happiness I used
to feel playing catch with my dad in our backyard when I was
a child.
Team sports not only pull us together, they help us to learn
how to excel and how to inspire others around us to excel.
Sports help us to learn the joy of winning and how to handle
defeat. It can be a great way to get to know people and get
to know ourselves. Whatever sport it was that we loved as
children, will still put a smile on our faces if we are only
able to play it with the same abandon and joy that we played
it with when we were young.
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