Article Provided by: The National Fastpitch Coaches Association (NFCA)
Article by: Melvin Jenkins, Vernon College
Turn out the lights, the party's just begun...
The end of the season and school year have come and gone, and now that we have had a bit of time to rest and recuperate; it's time to take stock of the season and see where we are going in the year to come. For those of us on the high school level that means seeing our players and general students make the transition into the world as graduates. This is a significant time for us as we move forward in the support and preparation of our incoming and returning players. And, for some of us there is the situation of preparing to transition to, and take control of new programs.
The first part of the process is sitting down and taking an honest assessment of your program and determining what worked well and what areas need to be addressed for improvement. I have come to believe that a key part of this is to honestly see where the development of your players is and to ask yourself, are you in a situation of fostering the progress of your athletes to perform better? Or, are you putting on the finishing touches of a program that is in contention for championships on the district/conference level and beyond? If you are just entering your tenure with a program you might be trying to establish positive habits and a level of success that will be expected throughout your program. In contrast, you might be in the process of pursuing championships at a school with yearly expectations for success.
With this in mind, you can begin by analyzing what areas must be addressed in terms of your personnel and their development for the season to come. As a high school coach I was a strong believer that the summer and approaching fall are imperative to the development of underclassmen who will have the chance to compete for starting roles on the varsity team the next season.
This is an area that I find very important, and way too often overlooked in the push to win quickly in the high schools. The odds are that you will only have two to three really exceptional players on an average team. If you are lucky and have cultivated the development of talent on your campus (or coming up from your feeder schools) you may be blessed with five or more talented starters each season. With this being fairly common, we must put time into the development of younger, less experienced girls or our rosters will never fill out to facilitate a traditional three and four year cycle of success. The help that you get running your off-season teams is crucial for instilling the same concepts you want at the school and improving the skill of players beyond your allotted time with them in the school setting. This is not to be overlooked because even if your school has an athletic period it cannot compare the practice time that can occur after school with community coaches/parents working on the things you need your girls to know.
Considerations exist and must be addressed when it comes to playing your underclassmen in the process of developing your program. There is an urge to drop that younger player into the varsity arena due to her playing organized travel/select ball in the summer, or being more physically developed than her peers to get you to that magic three to five-roster status. I suggest that you also take a keen look at whether she can handle the implications of socializing and being ask to perform in leadership roles with girls three to four years her elder. It's difficult enough getting a group of players on the same page without the variables of age and basic maturity being added into varied skill levels. It's hard to manage the self-esteem of a young player who has been called up too early and experienced minimal success on the field while not fitting in with the other girls off the field too. The right timing is imperative for the success of most young players.
Collegiately, coaches are looking at different programs and practices to allow their players to improve their skills, overall fitness, injury rehab, and possibly clear up academic issues of eligibility. This is the basic asking of what you can do to help your players reach their potential. Do you need to change practice times and techniques to get a better result? Are your usual preferred methods not yielding success with this group of players? Does the off-season need to adjust to put the best possible athlete on the field? The end of season analysis can be the result of glaring questions, or, simply therapeutic in finding missteps in how you have been administrating your program. It can help you develop a plan for making those corrections. The reality of having greater control of collegiate programs in structure and personnel is that you have to look for not only what is broken, but what "looks" broken to those with an interest outside the program.
At all levels, the end of the season is also sometimes about a coach getting up and going out to cultivate and nurture pipelines of talent for the coming years in a program. I personally know what it's like to spend summer weekends in 100 degree Texas heat to lend moral support to players who are, or will be members of my high school teams in the future. Those efforts sometimes will not yield results for two to three years for middle schoolers, or they might be immediate in a non-starting underclassmen feeling good about her abilities and her decision to keep playing because you spent a few hours of your own time on the weekend watching them at a summer tournament.
Collegiately, the old standard applies: "sometimes its not about the X's and the O's, it's about the jimmies and the Joes." You have to get out and recruit the type of players who can improve the level of play on your team. Get out and see the talent that you are trying to tap into; and most importantly, make a concerted effort to see your local talent and those places that have provided talent to your team before. Then, just as with the high schoolers, follow up on the prospect even after they have committed to your program to show them that you are sincere in believing they can bring success to your team.
In conclusion, I want to remind each of you that although some seasons are tougher than we like, and some seem to fly by with ease; the universal truth is that the end of one season notifies us that it is time to start preparing for success in the next one.
