The Journey · Day 3

When Development Became Competition

Journey Marker: Shawnee Braves → Oklahoma Braves | Late 1990s

The first year I coached the Braves, I inherited a team that had already been drafted. The next year was different. Now I was the coach from the beginning.

I could participate in the draft. I could start thinking about what kind of team we were going to become. I had a couple of dads willing to help, and for the first time I was beginning to understand that coaching youth baseball involved more than showing kids where to stand and how to throw a ball.

There was strategy involved.

There were personalities.

There were parents.

And there was competition.

Learning From the Teams We Couldn't Beat

That second season, one of the teams we kept running into was the Storm. They were good. Their coaches were smart, organized and competitive.

One of those coaches was Jeff Hawkins.

At the time, Jeff was on the other side of the field. Later, he would become one of my assistant coaches with the Oklahoma Braves and an important part of our story.

My recollection is that the Storm beat us in the championship game that year.

I hated losing.

But I was also learning from it.

From Development to Winning

By the time the boys were nine, something had changed.

We weren't just putting together another recreational team anymore.

We were beginning to build something.

I had been involved in a small network-marketing business, and I found a way for the team to generate a little money through it. That helped us buy better uniforms and cover some expenses. It wasn't some grand business plan. At the time, I was simply trying to give our kids opportunities without putting every expense directly on the parents.

That was about the point when the Shawnee Braves began becoming the Oklahoma Braves.

My philosophy going into that nine-year-old season was development.

That part is important.

We were going to play older competition. We wanted to enter tournaments. We wanted to earn opportunities to play postseason baseball. At the time, from my perspective as a coach, it felt like a new world of possibilities for kids willing to compete.

So we played up.

We were nine-year-olds competing against ten-year-olds.

There was a Bethel team I remember being especially good. We could compete with them, and we eventually finished second in that league.

That's where something started happening inside me as a coach.

You begin the season saying:

We're developing kids.

Then you win a game you weren't supposed to win.

You win a tournament game.

Then another.

Suddenly you're standing there thinking:

We can win this thing.

And once that happens, the competitive side of coaching can start changing your decisions.

Instead of spreading pitching opportunities around because everybody needs to learn, you start thinking about which pitcher gives you the best chance to win.

Instead of moving kids through positions for development, you start settling players into roles.

Those decisions don't necessarily make somebody a bad coach.

But they change the environment.

I didn't fully understand that at the time.

I wanted to win.

The kids wanted to win.

The parents wanted to win.

And I believed—then and now—that there is nothing wrong with competing hard if you do it the right way.

Two Different Worlds

But I can also look back now and recognize something I couldn't see clearly then.

Youth sports was beginning to separate into two different worlds.

There was the community draft model, where kids registered and teams were built from whoever showed up.

And there was the competitive model, where coaches increasingly assembled teams and kept players together.

I liked parts of both.

I loved the fairness and community aspect of the draft.

But I also liked having a group of kids I could teach over several years instead of rebuilding a roster every season.

As the Braves evolved, some players left because the direction wasn't what their families had originally signed up for. Others joined. We never really became a traditional tryout team. My memory is that players tended to come through relationships, opportunity and fit.

And fit meant more than talent.

I learned pretty quickly that parents mattered just as much as players.

I believed we could teach a kid baseball.

Teaching an adult how to behave around youth baseball was sometimes much harder.

Looking Back