Originally Posted by
greybeard
I'm not so sure that your statement holds up. Hitting a baseball in Little League is not what you would call a difficult thing to do. In fact, on the activity in sport, it is pretty darn easy. Are there kids who are confused, who do not understand what a coach is telling them, who might have diffiultywit the notion tat swinging a bat is different than throwing a bat, what the hips have to do with letting one's arms swing, sure.
If you are a coach that is on the cusp of bringing a team to Williamsburg, you are not trying to help such kids; such kids are not on your team, never have been, or, if they had been, they did not last very long. Helping such kids involves meeting them where they are, developing a net a safety around them, and letting them know that you know that they can teach themselves how to swing a bat or do anything else involved in playing little league baseball that they want.
Here's what they really do not need even though looking at how they approach the batting box might tell you differently. They don't need anyone to tell them how to stand in the batter's box, how to grip the bat, how to take a batting stance, and the plane upon which the bat should travel to strike the ball. These things anyone can plainly see. You encounter a kid that approaches the plate and seems lost, does not know how to stand or hold the bat and I'll show you a kid who is frightened and distrustful, of the coach, his teammates, his teammates' parents. His biggest fear is not in failing, but rather appearing the fool, the incompetent, the kid who can't get it. So, they take away the surprise, they present exactly the way they expect people will judge them, and are not caught with their pants down by trying to succeed and then failing.
The shortcoming in the coach as teacher/instructor lies not in the student but in the teacher/instructor. You make it safe and get that kid's trust, you take judgments out of the field of play (I'll address that briefly in a minute), and then you tell the kid something about the laws of physics that are at play in making a swing, and the kid will be swinging within a single practice and by the end of four or five will be hitting the ball consistently.
Here's what I'd do to create safety for every kid on the team, trust that they won't be laughed at, if not out loud in front of their faces, then behind their backs and without the giggles. You make a circle in which you are a part. You make some ridiculous action and howl like a wolf. Then point to the kid next to you and nod, and indicate, tell him if you need to that he should replicate it; and then the next guy, and the next guy after that. When it comes back to you, you repeat that ridiculous action again and then tell the kid next to you to repeat it also and to add a ridiculous action of his own to it; you then tell the ext kid to repeat both the ridiculous actions; and continue this little exercise until each kid gets to add his own ridiculous action. People will be trying to invent ways to be more ridiculous, they will forget parts of some of the ridiculous actions that have already been added, will trip over their feet and tongues and arms trying to replicate all of them, and have a great time laughing at themselves and eachother. Laughing in friendship, laughing as kids who are playing, who start getting it that everybody at some point is going to feel ridiculous, or much worse, are going to disappoint.
Talking to kids about trust, telling kids that it is okay if they miss, if they fail, will reassure them about nothing. People are much more comfortable with the devil that they know than the devil that they don't. Kids who "don't get it" you can bet your life are being held back by exactly that paradigm and they are dead on right to be. Sadly, that is the best that we have to offer them, the best that we have to offer them by taking over their world of play and making it into a competition of who can do some silly things better than others. I say "silly," because striped of all the adult fans and coaches the game is silly, silly is good, silly is fun, silly is safe, silly allows for experimentation, experimentation allows for failure and failure allows for its opposite.
Kids can learn to swing a bat and make contact with a ball; they can see that to catch a ground ball they need to take a wide stance, bend at the knee, open the glove, hold it close to the ground and navigate it so it meets the ball at the correct height and in the correct place. If you have to "terach" kids this, if you try to teach them this, it is because they are scared and distrustful and then also embarassed.
Big John Thompson is oh so fond of saying, "it's amazing how I suddenly became a really good coach as soon as I got some really good players." Big John was not trying to say that he did not think himself an extraordinary coach and I am not even wildly suggesting that your father isn't. I just don't think that that is what most kids need, and, absent the structure that adults foist on them from the time that they are barely out of diappers, it is not, I believe, one that they would chose. Why would they?