Transitioning from 10U house/rec to 10U All-Stars/TB

[NoVA Softball]

I couldn't decide whether to post this in this thread or start a new one, but ultimately decided to start my own. This is kind of long, but hopefully helpful to someone out there.

I'm a moderately experienced coach (2 years as HC + 3 or so as an AC), but with all of my coaching in house/rec league until I coached my younger DD's all-star team this summer. I was pretty familiar with All-star and TB through my older DD, who played both, but this was my first coaching experience with anything other than house league. (In our area, All-star teams form after rec/house spring season and play May through July in tournaments and double-headers with other all-star teams or "C" TB teams. It's basically "travel light.")

Needless to say I learned a lot this summer! Now that the season is over, I thought I'd share my list of things I learned the hard way. Probably the first thing I learned is that it would be a really good idea to AC a travel or All-Star team before becoming a HC -- but sometimes you're the one guy willing to step up and do it.

This list is by no means exhaustive - lots of stuff went right or was exactly as I expected and so I didn't capture it as a "lesson learned." Some of this is unique to 10U, some of it unique to the house->TB transition, and some of it is pretty universal. Nevertheless, there are quite a few things I wish I had done differently. Here the initial list:
1. Stress the new level of commitment over and over early on, starting with the intro letter – for many families, this is their first experience with TB and they are used to house league where “Oh, Sally can’t make any games this week!” is commonly acceptable.
2. Collect conflict info at tryouts so you have this to inform your roster decisions. This is what you hold parents/players to. (Sucks to have a player on the roster who then says after the fact: “I’m missing 3 of 4 tournaments”)
3. Collect commitment checks even though it is a pain in the rear. It sets the right tone.
4. Practice a lot of hitting against fast pitches – this is one of the big differences from house. Use pitching machines in practice a lot to get them used to faster pitching.
5. The USSSA website is a great tool to find tournaments (USSSA Fast Pitch / ISTS Sports Statistics) - at least in our area.
6. 14 players is not too many at 10U – there will be very few events where you have 100% percent attendance. With 14 on the roster, we actually were down to 9 or 10 for one tournament, and I don’t think we ever had 14/14.
7. Spend time developing catchers – dropped 3rd strike and the aggressiveness of the running game makes this almost as important as good pitching. (though some tournaments at this age/level do not have D3K and limit base stealing.)
8. Keeping your pitchers developing and focused on pitching is essential. Hold separate pitcher/catcher practices (or extra time before/after practice). Reinforce that pitchers need to practice on their own too.
9. Get a pitching guru to help coach pitchers if you aren’t one yourself. (9.5. Become a pitching guru)
10. Hold tryouts and set the team as early as possible.
11. Let parents and players know what you plan to evaluate at tryouts and how they will be conducted (maybe even the exact format you’ll use). Many kids at this age will have never been to a tryout, and you might miss some good players who have never been introduced to bunting, or soft toss hitting, or whatever.
12. Learn the substitution rules for the rule set(s) that you'll play under. Many house rules are VERY relaxed and roster/substitution control requires much more coach attention. For that matter, become an expert on all the rules (D3K, interference/obstruction, pitching legalities, etc.) Don’t rely on baseball knowledge as there are some differences.
13. Break up cliques from previous teams right away. (e.g. no one pairs up with a spring teammate for the first 5 practices.)
14. Keep practices fun with lots of competitions and mini games. While the players are more skilled and focused than the average house team, they’re still 9 & 10 (I forgot this and loaded up mid-season practices with drill stations -- the middle of season dragged a bit until we put the fun back in at the end)
15. If you are frustrated at a game, do your best to keep a positive attitude (briefly vent if necessary). The kids will pick up and emulate your attitude (and you don’t want that attitude to be “we’re getting persecuted by the umps here and can’t win.”)
16. Recruit good AC’s – preferably head coaches (or at least AC’s) from the other teams in your house league since they’ll know the players & parents that you don’t. Ideally, have at least one AC who's the parent of a 9 year old, since your league will need to have someone who can become the HC next year when you move on to 12U.
17. If you want more of something, praise it. Make sure you call out players that are moving for backups, etc. even if the play doesn’t wind up going their way.

 

[robertc3]

Thanks for the write up. I made the same transition this year being a first year 10U all star coach after five seasons as HC at ages from 6U to 10U. Our LL all stars is a shorter season than your travel ball light season, but I learned a lot of the same things you did.

1. Stress the new level of commitment over and over early on, starting with the intro letter – for many families, this is their first experience with TB and they are used to house league where “Oh, Sally can’t make any games this week!” is commonly acceptable.

We make all of the families sign a commitment letter saying they will be at every practice and every game, no vacations, no dance recitals, no birthday parties, no excuses. We did pretty well holding the girls to that, but there were a couple of instances in which we gave leeway.

7. Spend time developing catchers – dropped 3rd strike and the aggressiveness of the running game makes this almost as important as good pitching. (though some tournaments at this age/level do not have D3K and limit base stealing.)

So true. We gave up lots of runs and extra bases because we didn’t know how to stop the running game. Our LL tourney didn’t use D3K, but we played in an NSA tournament that did and it cost us many runs in those four games.

8. Keeping your pitchers developing and focused on pitching is essential. Hold separate pitcher/catcher practices (or extra time before/after practice). Reinforce that pitchers need to practice on their own too.

We practiced two hours a day six days a week, so we had to incorporate pitching practice into our regular workouts which I don’t like to do. Developing your pitchers and keeping them sharp is so key because runs get really hard to come by.

13. Break up cliques from previous teams right away. (e.g. no one pairs up with a spring teammate for the first 5 practices.)

We had basically the same rule and we also said they had to pick a different partner each day in the beginning. We did various drills and competitions with mixed groups to make sure that we created a cohesive team. I was surprised how quickly the team came together.

17. If you want more of something, praise it. Make sure you call out players that are moving for backups, etc. even if the play doesn’t wind up going their way.

This is true no matter what you are doing in life. I love that LL requires the all star manager to have Positive Coaching Alliance training.

A few other things I learned or in one case learned that I need to learn something new.

Don’t be afraid to learn painful lessons. We played in a travel tournament the weekend before our district tournament started and it was so important to our development. We played the first team really tough, lost by one, got soundly beaten by a vastly superior team in the second game and then got a shellacked in our third game by a good team that was really well coached. We played that well coached team on Sunday morning and were up 9-0 after the top of the first and held the lead for a couple of innings. We gave them a huge scare and gave ourselves a ton of confidence. When we played in our district tournament we were a changed team. Now were the team that knew what to do and how to play. We took a couple of beatings in the travel tourney, but the girls and the coaches learned invaluable lessons. I am certain that the experience gained us one win in the all star tournament.

The girls that want to play at this level really want to work. As I said above we went hard six days a week and these girls got after it the whole time. After practice there would be girls asking for more BP and after our tournament ended there were girls asking if we could play in more tournaments. They ate up all that we threw at them and we threw a lot at them.

Teach the girls to weather the inevitable struggles without turning a pothole into a victory swallowing sink hole. We didn’t do this effectively and it meant our elimination from the tournament. If anyone knows how to do this effectively please let me know. The PCA teaches about a mistake ritual, but how do you teach the SS to deal with the mistake of the 1st baseman? Error can snowball and at this higher level you can’t give a team five or six outs in an inning.

 

[02Crush]

6. 14 players is not too many at 10U – there will be very few events where you have 100% percent attendance. With 14 on the roster, we actually were down to 9 or 10 for one tournament, and I don’t think we ever had 14/14.
9. Get a pitching guru to help coach pitchers if you aren’t one yourself. (9.5. Become a pitching guru)

I agree with #9.5. Not so much with #6. I think this depends on where you are from, your ability to find out as much info about families before committing to them (do they play other sports, other responsibilities, etc) I am entering 12U after two years of 12U. We never carried more than 11. Kids got a lot of playing time and all showed most all the time.

 

[Sweet Lou]

Yeah excellent write up. Don't agree with a 100% but it's a great start. Thanks for sharing.

Mostly #6 is what I don't agree with too like 02 crush. When DD1 was 10 and player 10U rec all-starts they carried 14 and had near 100% turn out for all tournaments. It made playing time for 10 - 14 very sparse.

This year at 8U all-stars DD2 team carried 12 players and that was perfect. For our 6 tournaments we had 11, 12, 11, 10, 10, 11 players. We guest played only 1 player all season to get to 10 one tournament.

 

[canyonjoe]

One thing I would stress to the parents is that you may have some struggles in tournaments out of the box. You hopefully won't, but if you do you don't have a lot of parent asking why we lost.

 

[Eric F]

As the parent of a first year player who made the All-Star team, EVERYTHING was new to us. The single biggest shock for us was what you mentioned in #1 - the time commitment. We wish it had been a little more clear from the start that it would consume 99.37% of our lives for those 7 weeks. Thankfully, our 12 girls - and their parents - were committed, and everyone got lots of playing time. In hindsight, it was a fantastic time, and I hope my DD gets the chance to experience it again. The other thing we realized is that we can deal with the short window of All-Stars, but becoming a TB family is not for us.