As a young man, baseball was my passion. I managed to be able to make the team through a walk-on and play a little bit of college baseball. As a young teacher, I found myself coaching high school baseball. At a relatively young age I found myself being the head baseball coach. The first game I ever coached at that level was a very humbling and motivating experience. It was clear to me that I had been massively out-coached. My team had been hindered by the fact that, relatively speaking, I did not know what I was doing. On the way home from that game I set a goal for myself that at some point in time, my teams would never be a victim of the insufficiency of my coaching skills.
After that first varsity game where I felt so badly out-coached, I became obsessed with learning everything I could about how to coach baseball. I read everything I could find on the great coaches and leaders of all sports and all times. I studied the newly emerging field of the psychology of sports performance. I attended endless clinics. I listened to the “great ones” talk about their philosophies and experiences. I asked great athletes what made a good coach. I analyzed my own performance, especially focusing on those times when I thought I could have done better. I watched professional games looking for the small things they did that made a difference. I didn’t watch games for fun, I watched them to analyze and extract every bit of data that I could about how to play the game.
Slowly, I developed the awareness that our team was not being out-coached. We won some games we shouldn’t have because of our coaching edge.
My efforts seemed to pay off. Gradually, our teams became more and more successful in terms of wins and losses and became one of the dominant baseball programs in our region. I felt a great pride in knowing that many of our players went on to play college baseball. I got feedback from college coaches, and felt great pride about hearing that our athletes “really knew how to play the game.” These accolades served to feed my obsession with everything baseball.
Secretly, one of my goals was to be a baseball coach at a major college level. One week I found myself spending the better part of an entire week with a hero of mine, the incredibly successful head coach of a Big-Ten University, as we attended a national coaching conference together.
As was typical, I was like a sponge. I soaked up everything that came my way. We talked about the most technical aspects of the game for hours. He was one of the smartest people I knew.
One evening near the end of the week, my wife and I had dinner with him and his wife.
Gradually, I noticed, quite unexpectedly, that as long as the topic was baseball, he was engaged. When it went to any other area of life, he was strangely quiet and seemly distracted. His wife carried all of those discussions. We talked of politics. He was silent. We talked of hobbies. More silence. We talked of his kids, and ours. More awkward painful silence and distraction. At one point it became clear that he didn’t know even basic information about his children, such as when his their birthdays were, or even their ages.
I was stunned. In that moment it became crystal clear to me just what it was going to take to become successful if I were to ever hope to become a college baseball coach. It was clear to me I would have to continue in the direction I was going which was becoming more and more obsessed with learning about baseball, all the while shutting down the other aspects and other people in my life.
Remarkably, a sense of peace came over me. I said to myself, “I know now what it takes to get and keep a job like that. I am just not willing to pay that price.” I realized that my relationship with my wife and kids (which to be honest, had already suffered because of my compulsiveness around baseball) was more valuable than what college baseball coaching could ever give me.
I walked away from that meeting feeling grateful that I had been able to learn that lesson without having to lose the most important relationships in my life.
I continued to coach, for a few more years, but never again at the same level.
