Baseball Toughness

Case #1 - I coach a very competitive kid. He is very talented for his age and also volatile. He is 11 and just in the last year or so, beginning to understand the importance of controlling his emotions. He was starting to get tossed from games and as he got older, coaches were becoming less and less tolerant of his sometimes disruptive behavior.

To his credit, I can see in his face the times that an explosion is coming and his efforts to control himself. What has happened now, though, is that he sometimes explodes before he has a chance to recognize it and stop. Very often, now, he quickly manufactures an injury.

A kid who has never had an injury to speak of before, now "gets hurt" every other time he is thrown out or commits an error.

Case #2 - On the same team, I coach a kid who has a very low tolerance for pain. He cries easily and is as often as not nursing some sort of ache, pain, bruise or cut. He has had more than his fair share of "real" injuries to include a broken arm and a broken leg, but has never let any pain (no matter how small) go by without bringing it to the attention of coaches, parents, fans and teammates.

Case #3 - Again on the same team, my catcher is an absolute pain mutant...best case, he feels none...."worst case", I think he may LIKE it.

3 kids with more similarities than differences playing the same game for the same coaches. Kid #1, I want to reward his efforts to control his temper. If, for the time being, he uses injuries to help buy him time as his 11 year old brain processes to proper response, I think that is fine. I want to trot out onto the field, pretend to tend to his injury and give him the minute or so he needs before coming back to the dugout. Kid #2, I want to reward and encourage the opposite behavior. I want him to raise his tolerance for pain and to stop the knee-jerk reaction that he has requiring the game to stop over a hang nail. "If you are injured enough to require attention now...or especially, if you are injured enough to come out of the game, you are too injured to come back and play today." Kid #3 has had injuries that should have had attention, that I either did not know about or ignored. You begin to see quickly that each of these players and my responses to them intertwine and affect one another in important ways.

First, I guess, my point is that if coaching were easy, I'd be alot better at it.
and Second, be careful to recognize that Bean's post pointed out one reason "WHY" a player might react dramatically, this post has 2 more "WHY"s. Do the best you can to balance the individual with the team....and the best way to do that is to emapthize -- get in their shoes the best you can and be careful of heat of the moment reactions and assumptions.