Parents and Coaches,
Hearing what I’m about to tell you made me sick inside…for many reasons. Sick because I’ve worked with this athlete many years…and what happened was dangerous and unprofessional. Sick because this “coach” is probably doing the same thing to many other athletes. Sick because parents pay for this “coach’s” services and are getting fooled into thinking that what he’s doing with their athlete is awesome.
Bad Coaching
So this athlete has a hitting lesson recently at the “coach’s” facility where he also does strength and conditioning work with his clients. RED FLAG – Most hitting lessons are once per week which is fine because it is skill based. However, if you then tack on some strength and conditioning work once per week you have an almost certainty of getting extremely sore…every time. You need a consistency of effort of at least twice per week to build and maintain a level of physical readiness to not get extremely sore from strength work. This is Strength Training 101 – not a closely guarded secret of the Russian Olympic Team.
And this “coach” crushes the athletes with the work he throws at them. It shows an ignorance of basic training principles. It shows an immature and misdirected “let’s see if you’re tough enough” mentality not suited for the mentoring of young bodies and minds.
And the CRAP - I can’t call it training - he put the athlete through has left the athlete sore 4 days later. And the athlete has been training with us for 4 years and has accumulated the amount of training work more typically reached only by a college level athlete. It is hard for me to describe how over the top and ridiculous the amount of CRAP work that is required to make a highly trained athlete that sore, but it was roughly the amount of work that should have been done in 2 or 3 workouts! Oh yeah, did I mention that the athlete is in the middle of their high school season right now?
Brace yourself it’s going to get worse…
Every week the athlete reports to the “coach” their results from all their at bats during that week’s games…this is the one solid thing this guy seems to do. However, because the athlete had a poor hitting week, the “coach” poured the workout CRAP on extra heavy. For what purpose you may ask? To motivate? To toughen the athlete up? Only that “coach” knows what he was thinking. But I know what I’m thinking:
This idiot made the athlete WORSE this week. FLAT OUT WORSE.
Like I said, I’m SICK. Once I feel better, you’ll hear from me again about this.
