Managing Expectations and Building a Team
Hello Families,
Many of you received our earlier invitation to join or start the Conejo Valley Kings baseball team. (Newsletter 1 and 2). It took a lot of brainstorming, and the interest was truly remarkable. I want to thank every one of you for participating in these initial steps to get the team off the ground.
Today we’ve “closed the books” for the time being. The interest in joining already exceeds normal baseball team limits and I want to take a moment to be completely frank and solidify what we are doing, how we are going to do it, and why.
Here are the priorities for the team as I see them:
- Continue Practice. The main objective: give the kids a cool, fun place to practice alongside like-minded, similarly skilled teammates. We’ll develop a fundamentals-focused approach where we focus on specific skills that help them succeed as young athletes.
- Build Chemistry. Let the boys develop clear roles and positions that will transfer into next year’s all-star teams. We’ll continue teaching all positions while giving each player a sense of personal responsibility to the team—using their individual strengths to let them build something greater than themselves.
- Accelerated Development. “Travel Ball” is an enticing option for many of the best players in our league. Every year, as kids get older, the league loses some of its top talent to more intensive programs where players develop at a faster pace. Our intention is to provide that accelerated pace to these players right here “at home.”
- Compete. Lastly, but for some families, most importantly, we want to compete against other teams. We need to do this to accurately assess our overall strength as a team by playing in the same arena as Encino etc. . Although this is arguably the least important factor for development, we have to respect the families for whom competition play is the primary driver. We have to do this by fielding the most appropriate team to succeed at the level we have chosen to play.
Competition:
Until we understand the strength of our rivals, the team culture will be to field the most strategic 11 players in any given travel-ball competition tournament. In these early stages I wholeheartedly believe it’s the best path for long-term success and sustainability for everyone. We simply won’t last long as a team unless we prove we can compete. For the first tournament, this is non-negotiable—we are going in blind against teams that have been playing at the travel-ball level for years. We have to test the waters and understand the competition and we have to do it with the most experienced players we have. We can use the knowledge we gain to help the less experienced members of the team get “up to speed” and ready for this heightened competition.
SCRIMMAGE DAYS!
In order to keep things fun and give players more in-game experience we will implement regular scrimmage days. Everyone had a ton of fun scrimmaging the 9U squad, and we hope to host a bunch of these days throughout the winter, we will seek out and challenge local teams in a relaxed atmosphere.
Thoughts on Depth:
One area we need to improve is depth. We had an awesome all-star season with a rock-solid core and players locked into key positions, but whenever we switched things up or someone was absent, we underperformed. We’ll need to train players to be more dynamic and capable of playing multiple positions. Many of our key players will need to pitch, so we’ll build a rotation strategy with secondary positions. Given the off-season nature of this effort, we can’t expect perfect attendance, so we’ll prepare players to step into different roles as needed.
Pitching:
From what I’ve seen, at this level pitching is the single most crucial aspect of success for a young team. We seem strong right now, but I want to treat pitching as priority one. I’m urging all potential pitchers to seek outside instruction—it doesn’t have to be expensive; it could even be with family. It just has to be intentional. To pitch on this team, I want each player to report how he has been training outside our normal practices. We won’t have the time, nor do we have the staff, for intensive personal pitching instruction.
Hitting:
Much like pitching, we won’t have time for detailed personal hitting instruction. We urge every player to take lessons and/or practice hitting at least once a week. Our players should be able to easily hit 40 mph in the batting cage, feel very comfortable at 45 mph, and be actively attempting 50 mph, I guarantee we will face pitchers in all of these ranges at 8u travel ball, We will have team cage days and we expect players to meet these benchmarks to participate in tournaments.
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As we move forward into Halloween break, and into our first practices in November, I want you to know that I fully believe in all of the kids on this team and in its periphery, I have no desire to be exclusionary, on the contrary, I hope we as a team act as a catalyst for more kids to want to join us to practice and grow, I hope for our kids to be a good example to their friends, showing them what hard work and friendship can provide. My experience with Sage, the older boys and the CVLL coaches has been exactly this, we have been grateful recipients to an inclusive culture. I hope to extend this inclusivity whenever appropriate to any CVLL family who loves the game and is willing to work. (We earned our way dragging the field)
The ultimate honor would be that come next summer the interest in all-stars be so strong that it facilitates “silver” teams, this would strengthen our league and make better spring season competition for our kids for years to come.
Newsletter 4 will be focused on practice plans, scrimmage days and participation while dealing with secondary sports.