The Sacrifice Bunt

At our Oregon Blaze Fastpitch practice on Wednesday, my goal when developing the practice plan was to emphasize the importance of the sacrifice bunt. Because we’re transitioning from 10U to 12U, I’m trying to teach the girls that we need to be able to score in a variety of different ways, and playing “small ball” has to be one of them. So in practices, I like to create challenges. Challenges not only break-up the monotony of repetitive drills, but it puts them in that “pressure-cooker” state like in a real game. So I divided the girls into 2 different teams and each team had 2 of our hardest-throwing pitchers with them. Keep in mind that these hardest-throwing pitchers didn’t have enough time to warm-up, so the bunters AND the pitchers had no idea where the pitched ball would go (a little fun twist I inadvertently added…..heehee!). Each player had 2 at-bats and their overall goal was to get the bunt down. They got positive points for successfully getting the bunts down: higher points for bunting it into specific areas of fair territory. And they got negative points if they didn’t do their job: striking out, missing bunts, etc. When it was all said and done, the final score was negative-19 to negative-29. Yes, you read that right: NEGATIVE-19 was the winning score. I’ll admit, in the moment I was extremely upset. I made it clear to them that I was not happy and THEY all had to do a better job. But after reflection and sleeping on it, I realized that I didn’t do MY job in preparing them. I texted my assistant the next day and told her that I need to do a better job of putting them in positions to be successful, even during practice. I easily could’ve continued pointing fingers at them for stinking it up, but like they say, for every finger you point at someone there are three fingers pointing back at you. I’ll save the team-concept of finger-pointing for another blog post.

The reason why I want all 12 of these girls to understand and appreciate the art of the sacrifice bunt extends well beyond just diversifying our offensive repertoire. The metaphoric “sacrifice bunt” in life is the willingness to give yourself up for the sake of the greater good of a team. When I have given the sacrifice bunt number sign to my hitters over all these years of coaching high school baseball and now youth softball, I can tell right away who is wiling to do what’s best for the team, or who gives me the proverbial middle finger with their body language. Are you willing to put aside your personal stats and glory, for doing the LITTLE THINGS that will benefit the entire team? You have to love the life lessons softball and sports can teach you……

The other day I had yet another great conversation with one of our football coaches here at Linfield. We got to talking about specific players and the current state of athletics. We talked about how society seems to be emphasizing athletes as an individual more so than celebrating the team. More and more athletes are hiring personal coaches outside of their team setting, which inadvertently creates separation from the entire team. You have a roster of 15 on a basketball team and 10 of them are seeing outside shooting coaches. Among those 10, 4 different shooting coaches are being hired. See the separation? And some of these personal coaches use the individual athletes for the sake of promoting their services for marketing reasons, therefore pushing these players to get the individual stats, glory, awards, etc. This creates a very individualized approach to sport. We are in this time where it’s all about “you do YOU” and “get YOURS.”

What’s great about the softball team I currently coach is that out of my 7 pitchers, 5 of them see the same pitching coach. So it actually works out well that while they’re seeing a “personal” pitching coach, it actually creates more of a team atmosphere as girls will have pitching lessons with this coach together (and bring along our catchers). Can’t say that I purposely planned that as the head coach (I wish…..)

There’s the old saying that, “there’s no ‘I’ in team.” Well, there actually is in “I” in team! Every team has one. On all the teams I’ve been on as a player and ones that I’ve coached, there are always the 1-2 players whose interest is deeply rooted in their own personal goals. I’ve been fortunate enough to mostly deal with the tolerable “I” players, but have absolutely been on, and coached teams with the destructive “I” players (calling Antonio Brown….calling Antonio Brown.)

Don’t get me wrong, I get people need to do what’s in their best individual interest at certain times, but we’ve seemed to dip a bit too far towards the end of the spectrum of “me do me.” I think we as parents, coaches, and mentors need to help young athletes balance and teach them the right time to “do me” and when to accept their role on the team and be the best version of themselves.

So move up in the box, get athletic, square early, and get the bat flat and out in front so you can see the barrel and the ball at the same time. Catch the ball with the barrel, not stab at it, and DO YOUR JOB! In life, sacrificing for the sake of the group will actually pay big dividends in the long run. Be known as the “consummate teammate” and not the “diva.”