Systems for Development part 1

Creating a system for development:

Are you actually making your players better? Is your coach actually giving you enough to improve? Are you seeing progress week to week or season to season?

If not, it's probably long overdue for you to overhaul some facet of your coaching or your own personal training. Time is limited.

The term “player development” is possibly the most overused and misunderstood buzzword around athletics these days. Colleges use it to promote their newest million dollar facility upgrade and coaches use it when their players get drafted to show how much improvement they have made under their coaching, but what is it really?

It is simply this: Creating tangible improvement in players physical capabilities.

Whether that be: fastball velocity, running speed, offspeed pitches, hitting for power, arm strength or pitching command. Can you verifiably improve your players time and time again?

And no, this isn't measured in draft picks or major leaguers. Is that the end goal? Absolutely. However, the biggest colleges get the most talented players 90% of the time, so how do we know if said players are actually improving from their coaches or if they just “raw talented” their way into professional baseball?

The way you should view talent acquisition and those players' improvement is on a standard bell curve. If an elite college recruits 10 elite players every single year, and half of them improve while the other half doesn't, that doesn’t show their ability to develop players at a high level. This school might win a ton of games, strictly off of talent alone. However, simply acquiring elite talent and letting the odds play out doesn't mean you are actually doing an above average job at “player development”.

This goes into another point: the best college coaches are often elite program managers and elite salesmen/recruiters. It is very simple: the best way to be good is to simply have the best players. Failing to acknowledge this as a major role in the job of all coaches wouldn’t provide a clear picture.

To provide an analogy: you wouldn’t trust a wealth manager to “develop” your finances if their track record was having 50% of their clients lose $ every year.

So how do you create a system to develop your players? It might sound overly complex but it's really not. A really easy way to look at this is to view the “system” that is in place as a flow chart. The “system” sets the precedent and allows everyone to know what is usually done in each situation.

Find out tomorrow

John