Author name: stadmin

I’m coaching Maddux’s 10U All-Star team again this season and we had our 1st game on Saturday. The team played great and won 4-1 but the point of this blog has nothing to do with that win. Maddux, after absolutely crushing the ball in our 3 All-Star scrimmages leading up to our 1st real game […]

Over the past several years, the focus of youth sports has sadly shifted toward focusing on chasing plastic rings and preparing for the “next level,” and away from the real wins of sports participation for kids: learning life lessons, creating lifelong memories, and spending quality time with friends. Despite this trend, I’ve witnessed some incredible

Baseball has provided me with a lifetime of stories to tell, but one of my fondest` memories of my playing days didn’t happen on the field. It was 1999 and I was Freshman at Brown. The Red Sox and Yankees were facing off in the playoffs and as if the oldest rivalry in baseball clashing

Hopefully, you’ve had a great Little League season with positive coaches and parents who have a healthy perspective on youth sports. Trying to win (and dealing with losing) in youth sports is definitely part of the learning process, but we all know how unnecessarily intense many coaches and parents can be…to the detriment of the

As the amateur baseball world becomes more and more obsessed with velocity and almost all off-season youth baseball programs focuses on playing as many games as possible, we are seeing an epidemic of arm injuries at all levels of the game. The data is staggering. 36% of all MLB pitchers have had at least one

I’m reading a book right now with that title and it describes a fascinating phenomenon among extremely high-achieving entrepreneurs where they are never happy and never feel fulfilled, despite being massively successful, because of how they choose to measure their “success.” Naturally, this made me think of youth sports and some of the pitfalls that

Here’s an important question “What’s the strike zone in Little League?” What was your answer? Sorry, you’re wrong, try again. What was your next answer? Sorry, wrong again. At every Little League field in the world, here is the correct answer: “The strike zone is whatever the umpire says it is.” If the ball bounces before

It’s only Saturday so we don’t know how the Masters will end yet. Will Rory complete his career grand slam? Will Justin Rose become the oldest 1st-time winner? Will Scottie Scheffler join an exclusive club of back-to-back winners (Jack Nicklaus, Nick Faldo, and Tiger Woods being the only 3 players to accomplish that)? Regardless of

I did a lesson yesterday with a long-time student who is now 11 and playing Majors for the first time. I first started coaching him when he was 5. Boy, does time fly! In his first game of the season, his team faced a really tough pitcher who threw incredibly hard and for those of

“Approach” is the baseball word for “strategy” at the plate and while I put the finishing touches on a “Masterclass” I’ve been preparing for all Little League parents and coaches to help their player be more confident and aggressive at the plate, I thought I would share a sneak preview one of the key lessons