Jerry McClain, a one-time professional baseball player, has been coaching baseball at colleges and high schools for the past couple of decades, and specializes in training up-and-coming young pitchers. He has strong opinions about warming up before practice, about following the principles of Positive Coaching, and about the life benefits of learning how to coach well. We interviewed him recently, asking him for three helpful tips for coaches — and he gave us a bonus fourth tip.
1. Proper warm-up for pitchers is absolutely critical before games. Jerry has his pitchers perform an exercise routine using “sand bottles” — 16-oz drink bottles filled with sand (10-oz bottles for pitchers younger than 12). The warm-ups are aimed at increasing blood flow in the pitching arm and, especially, the shoulder.
“Just throwing the ball around or, worse, playing long-throw catch as a warm-up is a terrible idea,” says Jerry, “Yet too many coaches skip the real warm-up. You have to warm up the arm — get blood flowing in the arm and especially the shoulder — before you start throwing the ball around. You’ll ruin the kids’ arms while they’re still teenagers if you don’t pay serious attention to this!”
2. Read “Positive Coaching,“ by Jim Thompson — “It’s the best book out there about coaching; I’ve read it many times.” Thompson is founder of the Positive Coaching Alliance, an organization to train sports coaches to deal effectively and positively with their kids — practical advice, Jerry says, not just for coaching — but for parenting, too. “I encourage everybody to read this book — even if you’re not a coach, you’ll learn life and business lessons.”
3. Understand that coaching is a skill set that is also an overlay for life skills and for business skills — Learning how to coach well helps you become a better manager — and a better human being.
Bonus tip: If you’re coaching boys teams, be sure to take the opportunity to coach a girls’ team — “It’s totally different from coaching a boy’s team,” says Jerry, and it will expand your coaching ability, and your life skills too.
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Manage Your Team With Zenergo
Zenergo.com can be helpful to coaches trying to manage their teams and schedules, deal with players and with parents, and find support staff or even additional players.
Here’s a view of a baseball team’s group page; notice the “A Street Baseball Team Parents” at the bottom — that’s an example of a Subgroup for the parents of A Street team members. You can create a subgroup for the managers/coaches/support staff, too.
Baseball team page with "subgroup" for parents
Joining Zenergo is easy and free at http://www.Zenergo.com — and in the Baseball Activity you can specify your interests and focus.
Better yet, you can then create a Group for your team — one central location where the kids and the parents can share information, check the calendar for practices and games, post photos, and save forms and documents. As coach, you can send messages to all the whole team, or just to subsets like the parents or the other coaches. You can even create a Group for the league, with SubGroups, one for each team. Groups can maintain privacy from non-members, which is important.
No more trying to juggle email, and calendars, and sending attachments, and posting pictures to someplace else, and worrying about protecting the kids’ privacy. Zenergo has everything in one place — perfect for the complex job of Coach!
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