Ignite → Develop → Perform: Building Players for Life
Ignite passion & love of baseball
Develop skills that scale
Prepare players to perform in competition
IGNITE
Your child is most likely still in the sampling phase, not the invested phase, of the sport
Retention is the first and most crucial piece of development → Can’t develop them to perform if they don’t stay in the sport → If they want to play again next season we’ve won
They remember how you made them feel not what you said or made them do
Success now ≠ success later
- Low percentage of Aus U18 players become Aus senior players
- Lower percentage of Aus U12 players become Aus senior players
- Best U12 club player ≠ best senior player
We Ignite with Experience
Immerse your child in environments where experience is focused over short-term performance.
What it shouldn’t look like:
- 2hr 3 inning game, 3 at bats each (2 walks)
- Catcher retrieving passed balls to back fence every second pitch
- Coaches & parents telling players to “be patient” or “keep your elbow up”
What it should look like:
- Positional versatility vs pigeon holing
- Focus on process > outcome
- Hard hit balls > base hits
- Aggression > taking pitches/looking for walks
- Celebrating intent – e.g diving effort, caught stealing
- Freedom not fear – how many stolen bases can you attempt > don’t get caught
- The kids are into it!
Your role as a parent in this environment:
- Give process-based praise – aggressive swing & miss > you shouldn’t have swung at that
- Be their reset button when they revert to outcome focus
- Be mindful of your words & body language from the sidelines – the best parents aren’t seen or heard
- Car ride home: did you give your best effort? Was that fun? I loved how fast you ran the bases/swung the bat
- Baseball at home, play don’t train – if they’re keen, let them throw and hit freely
DEVELOP
We Develop with Long-Term Athletic Development
Most high performers will be developed anyway in later pathways, you don’t need to make them a high performer now, focus on the experience and make them players for life
What this should look like:
- Self organization (hit a home run to centre field) – you do this in all other areas (teaching them to kick a footy or brush their teeth), rather than implicit technique repetition (do X,Y,Z in your swing)
- Exploratory, experimental kids > repetition robots – messy/some failure is ok! ~60% success rate sweet spot
- Everyone throws ‘bullpens’, takes groundballs & flyballs
- No U12 POs – all the best pitchers grew up as hitters/2 ways – Peter Moylan, Liam Hendricks, Jacob deGrom, Paul Skenes
Your role in LTAD as a parent:
- Encourage a breadth of athletic activities (e.g other sports, unstructured play)
- Place value on intention & output rather than outcome (e.g quality at bats > hits, output tally > box score)
- Ask questions > lecturing feedback for teaching moments – why did you run that extra base, could you have thrown it to 2B instead?
Pipeline Knox 2Ball as an example – you will see:
- ‘Drill’ environments that facilitate players to explore skills that scale through self-organization
- Encouragement of skill & positional versatility within a fun & competitive environment
- Reverse engineering retention via 2Ball – kids to enjoy the game – hitting, offensive aggression, web gems, competition – more balls in play increases occurrence of the above – gameplay modification e.g coach pitch for more strikes to hit & field, close backnet & extra balls to decrease dead time, bases count as runs for aggressive hitting approach
Highly recommend the below presentation:
PERFORM
If we achieve Ignite & Develop with a LTAD outlook, we will naturally reach the performance stage (in baseball & life)
What performance looks like right now:
- Player pushing parent to go to the game/training
- Best effort & trying new things
- Intentful movements > cautious replication
- Effort over outcome – hustling down the line even when they know they’ll be out
- Separating the game – not taking a strikeout into the next at bat or inning