The College Baseball Pressure Cooker: Fighting for your life at 18

Daily Newsletter 11/100

The College Baseball Pressure Cooker: Fighting for your life at 18

Everyone knows that college sports can be filled with stress and the pressures of performance, but that is only half the story. They are packed with infinitely more responsibilities and time commitments than any highschool athlete was ever expected to manage, and oftentimes leave the freshmen running around lost trying to find their way in the program.

High School baseball teams have close to zero meetings, the class schedule is completely laid out before you in one building, and the classes are pretty straightforward with the academic standards being mediocre for the average HS.

College could not be more different, the schedule is ever changing, molding to needs of the team and the whims of the coaching staff. The game schedules are flux and so are the practice schedules. Meetings are common but erratic, and oftentimes the communication is suspect. Freshmen looking to compete on the field must navigate all of these external stressors while also trying to compete with athletes that are grown men, having gone through 2-5 years more of puberty and physical development than the fragile 17 year olds that show up on campus in the summer/fall following their HS graduation.

Coaches do their best to help players adapt to the new lift, and most of the time they do pretty well. However its never 100% effective, and oftentimes even if coaches try their best certain players will fall through the cracks. Coaches might be really understanding, but even if they are, the freshman will place unbelievable amounts of stress on themselves after missing a meeting or showing up late. I promise you, my first intra-squad outing after missing the morning meeting was the singular most stress I have ever felt in my life.

What to do:

It might sound simple, but as a freshman there are a few things that really stood out to me that I should have done more of. They are as follows:

• Formalizing my Schedule

• Having maximum notifications set for all team communication applications

• Introducing yourself to your teachers

• Embracing a long term, growth mindset

Formalizing your schedule:

This sounds stupid, but familiarizing yourself with a set in stone schedule when it is possible helps to remove a lot of doubt/uneasiness that surrounds college sports. Have everything that you can control be totally controlled, and then deal with the add ons as they come. Knowing every minute of your day before you go to bed the night before does wonders for any anxieties that you have, and I never came close to accomplishing this until I was a junior.

Having everything written out and easily accessible helps you be more punctual and helps you take out any unnecessary guess work. This is easily the most boring thing I have written about in the last few weeks, but just do it.

Maximum notifications for team Communication

This is as simple as it gets, you simply cannot use the excuse “i never got the text” in college baseball. Even if you didn't get the text, they will simply never believe you. You have to do everything that you can in order to maximize your success. It's really easy to miss a text if you don't have notifications on, you will receive a lot of boring texts that you view as unimportant, and the important ones will snake their way in between the boring ones, hiding behind the bland academic coordinator reaching out to remind players about their tutoring hours.

You wont really find a lot of benefits from simply showing up on time to everything, but the brutal negatives you will get from missing or showing up late will make you stress out more than you could ever imagine.

Introduce yourself to your Teachers:

This is simple. You might not understand, but eventually you will see that not all teachers have a positive view of athletics. In fact, a lot of professors don't like athletes much at all and probably won't give you the benefit of the doubt.

You need to go out of your way to form some kind of relationship, you need to sit relatively close to the front, and you need to make sure you actually put forth the slightest bit of effort in classroom conversations. This is the second most boring thing I've written about, but again, just do it.

Embracing a Long Term Growth Mindset:

This is far and away the most important thing you can do. Pretty much all of you are going to be competing against players who are better than you, more experienced than you, stronger than you, and less intimidated than you. You need to take the pressure off yourself in any way that you can. Embracing the long term mindset allows you to detach from the current acute performance, the bad outing, and the struggling bullpen. You don't need to perform your absolute best today, you need to get better over long horizons.

The more I get into the weeds of scouting and player evaluation, I see blue chip prospects come in every single year and struggle as freshmen, only to be a high draft pick their junior year. I see endless amounts of first round possible picks throwing less than 10 innings as freshmen with more walks than innings pitched.

The jump is super hard and you need to make it as easy on yourself as possible. You don't need to make it harder than it already is.

Coaches perspective: What can you do?

Coaches, you have the biggest role in helping a group of people who oftentimes are not actually capable of helping themselves yet. They are so underwater that they can try their best to slow everything down, but might not be able to. As their coach, it is your responsibility to go out of your way to help them slow everything down, teach them what it looks like to embrace a growth mindset and help them improve slowly. Lower their expectations, help them chip away at their deficiencies and show them they are capable of competing at this level if they are.

You might find it annoying to coddle the freshmen every year, and it probably is. But being able to have your freshmen build every week and contribute in the spring is huge for your team and its winning percentage. It'll never be easy or smooth sailing, but it'll usually be worth it.

This is where pro ball is able to help young players more than college, the time-span of development is much longer, high-school picks aren't even expected to do anything worthwhile for a few years in some cases. This is a luxury that college doesn't have all the time, but being able to get players into the same mindset will often lead to their development speeding up, even if they intend to slow down.

John