As I enter my second season as an Assistant Baseball Coach at Newbury College I want to give a quick shout out to Head Coach Kraig Kupiec who has been projected to become the Coach of the Year in NECC for the second year in a row. The Nighthawks improved in all facets of the game in his first season breaking single season team marks in batting average, slugging percentage, on base percentage, hits, runs, RBIs, stolen bases, and ERA.
On February 9th the New England D3 College Baseball Blogalso picked Newbury College to finish out the regular season in first place. In the years previous to Kupiec’s arrival the team had won no more than 6 games in any one season. So what caused such a drastic change in performance across the board?
Answer: The Approach
More specifically, the commitment of doing things the right way. “We don’t care if you mess up 100 out of 1o0 times as long as you take the right approach to the baseball,” stated all 4 coaches of the 2012 coaching staff. “We are more interested in building the success for the long term, than we are with short term results. If you work hard and you follow our guidance, you will be amazed at what we will be able to accomplish by the end of the season.”
We come from a long line of believers that a well executed baseball repetition always yield a positive result regardless of what may be marked down statically. We also come from a long line of believers that a positive statistical result does not always reflect a well executed baseball repetition.
The focus has been and always will be on the details.
We have all of our players make a personal player check list. Before the season, we cover exactly mechanical and mental steps they need to focus on in order to play at their highest level. Each player has different strengths and weakness, so each player check list has something a little different to focus on.
From there, we taught our players that value of one simple question. What do I need to do on this next rep to put myself in a position to succeed?
From there connecting the dots is simple. If you know what it takes to be successful and you learn from your previous reps failures, making the right adjustments are easy. You may have a bad rep, but you will almost never have an off day or even worse, an off week.
Baseball is game of constant adjustments and when you forget to connect the dots, it can be a very frustrating game. If you haven’t do so already, take time to make a personal player checklist and educate yourself on what it means to take quality reps.
When you acquire the knowledge to make accurate adjustments on every rep you take your game will go to the next level. If you want to picked as #1 overall take the time to focus on the details.
