Apr 20, 2018Better Together, Part 5
In restructuring its baseball conditioning, Coastal Carolina had four goals. Here’s a look at goal number four: Pay attention to details.
Part 1 of this article can be found here.
Part 2 of this article can be found here.
Part 3 of this article can be found here.
Part 4 of this article can be found here.
As the last goal of our collaboration, having a relentless attention to detail and educating players means being “others-focused” and understanding we are teachers above all else. We practice the old saying, “Give a man a fish, and feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and feed him for a lifetime.” By the time players leave our program, we want them to have all the tools necessary to fish abundantly.
To hold up our end of the bargain, it is imperative that White, our student assistants, sport coaches, and I agree on the details we set out to teach. During White’s first few months on the job, he put me through workouts as if I was a player, so we could decide on the details and educational points we wanted to emphasize. From these sessions, we developed a list of “The Coastal Way” — which describes the finer points of good training — and shared it with all staff members.
Then, we distributed those details to the players. From the start, we give them an almost overwhelming amount of instruction on perfect exercise execution. For us, quality of movement, posture, and positioning are more important than chasing weight on the bar. Players must do exercises correctly before they can do them at high volumes or under fatigue. This allows us to address dysfunction before it becomes symptomatic.
Once we’ve established good technique with players, we reinforce it by ensuring that nothing goes unnoticed — we now have four eyes observing athletes in the weightroom (mine and White’s) where there used to be two. We also minimize the number of athletes who train at one time by having smaller groups hit the weightroom in overlapping cycles throughout the day. This enables us to connect with each player individually, which allows for proper kinesthetic awareness and grooving correct movement patterns.
