Good Coach/Bad Coach
You can tell when a coach is one of the good ones and when they are just there to get a paycheck or because they have nothing else to do. Donny in the photo above is one of the good ones. Unfortunately, the current coach my niece has for her high school team is not one of the good ones. The Shamrocks took another loss last night and a big part of it had to do with lack of preparation on the part of the coach.
It was pretty clear the other coach had done their research because they basically walked or intentionally walked my niece every time she was at bat. I could tell she was getting frustrated, but it was a smart move by the other team. They basically took her bat out of the equation which is usually a huge offensive boon for her team. By removing that, they eliminated the possibility of her teams mounting a comeback and winning the game.
I think the final score was something like 10 to 8 in favor of the other team.
Here's another example, you leave your best catcher sitting on the bench because the parent of your other catcher complains when his daughter doesn't get to play. That's just spineless coaching right there. It's one thing if you are on a travel team and you are paying for your kid to be on that team, but high school should be playing to win. You need to put your best players on the field to ensure victory.
Anything else is just pitiful. It's sad because this could be a really decent team if they had a bit better coaching.
It's funny too because just the other night my niece had to step away from a game to go to a senior awards night. It turns out, she got an award from the organization that cut her from the softball program when she was just a young child. There's actually a bigger story to it that I have probably talked about in the past.
It started with her dad wanting something better for her sister, it had a middle part where I almost got into a fist fight with a guy in the middle of a game who was harassing my niece, and now it ends with the same organization offering my niece a scholarship worth a pretty significant amount of money.
It's nice to see they made things right after screwing the pooch so bad all those years ago.
My niece is off for the weekend because it is prom season, but next week they will be back in action and I will bring you all the updates!
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