Trust Your Gut!

• stadmin
• October 7, 2025
• 6:06 pm
• 0 comments

• Home
• Uncategorized
• Trust Your Gut!

A family that I'm good friends with and whose son just finished his Little League career this past season recently joined a very well-known 13U club baseball team in the area.

Being new to the organization, the Dad stuck around the few first official team practices earlier this Fall and was immediately struck by how mean the coaches were to the kids. Insults, public shame, condescending comments, and punishments for bad swings (despite good effort) were just a few of the things he personally witnessed that led him to call me and ask if this type of "toxic environment" (his words) was "normal" post-Little League.

On the phone he described what was happening at the team's workouts and wondered if this what just "what baseball is like at the higher levels" because he himself did not play past Little League.

It was an honest question, and I immediately commended him for seeking out advice rather than just accepting the status quo simply because many of his son's buddies were also in the program and the organization has a lot of local name recognition.

Many coaches and programs, at all levels of the game, defend toxic environments because they believe they need to make the kids "more competitive" or "tougher."

There is no data that shows that yelling at or humiliating a player, or making sarcastic, cutting remarks improve an athlete's resilience, toughness, or grit.  Quite the opposite. More often than not, that type of behavior stifles performance while also sucking the joy out playing and making it more likely that a player will quit. 

It also fractures one of the most important - yet often overlooked - parts of team sports: the relationship between coach and player. To be honest, yelling and screaming is just lazy coaching, and is totally unacceptable for leadership to act that way at any level of the game.  There are so many ways to improve a player's and team's competitiveness, grit, resilience, ability to make good quick decisions, and overall performance and resorting to immature, emotional reactive behaviors isn't one of them!

Coaches who don't possess effective motivation and teaching skills resort to yelling, screaming, and insults because they have nothing of value to offer, so they fill that vacuum with the easiest and least worthwhile form of communication; their own emotional reactions and insecurities shared at a high volume.

It is critical that coaches teach their players how handle mistakes or missed opportunities, but too often we see these coaches model their own inability to move on or handle adversity.

Back to my buddy, it was an important first step for him to recognize that this was, in fact, the environment being created by the coaches and tolerated (perhaps endorsed?) by the organization.

Here's what I told him.

Once his son decides where to go to High School, whoever the coach is at that time, well, that will be his coach. And if that coach treats the players on the team horribly, then his son can decide whether or not he wants to continue playing. It's not like a family is going to move to a new school district because the JV Baseball Coach is a jerk, so you're kind stuck with the luck of the draw in High School. And sadly, not everyone is lucky enough to end up on my wife's High School lacrosse team 🙂

But at the youth levels, when there are, and I'm not exaggerating, more than 2 dozen different club baseball teams in the South Bay, there is absolutely no reason to accept that type of verbal abuse or toxic environment...especially as a "paying customer!"

We all know coaching is about waaaaaaaaaaay more than just teaching correct fundamentals. Some coaches are very good on the technical instruction side of coaching but are terrible on the emotional, motivational, and culture-creation part of coaching.

If you're reading this blog, you know which part of being a great coach I think is more important, but as kids approach high school finding the right tradeoff between technical knowledge and healthy environment is absolutely a valid concern.

In a perfect world, you would be able to find an incredible human being who also is great at teaching, but those types of coaches are rare.

In this particular instance, my friend told me after watching the first practice and witnessing the environment firsthand that he came home and said to himself, "Ah, now I see why kids quit sports that they love."

YIKES.

He was still torn though, and legitimately so. Was pulling his kid out of this program going to hurt his son's future as a ballplayer?

The players on the team were all talented and hard-workers - would quitting in favor of a team with a potentially lower overall talent level but much better culture hold his son back?

Or would it propel him further?

Was the cringe-worthy environment worth staying in if the technical instruction was high quality?

And how was he, a dedicated father but one without personal playing experience past Little League, supposed to know whether the "nuts and bolts" coaching was actually as "high quality" as the organization advertised?

What was the optimal tradeoff between accessing baseball knowledge and being in potential unhealthy environments?

These are all completely normal concerns and questions that I know a lot of parents are asking themselves these days, especially as the club/travel space gets more and more crowded and making a high school team gets more and more competitive.

(And for the record, this experience is NOT unique to baseball. I have heard some absolute horror stories about youth club and high school coaches in all other sports as well.)

My advice to him was pretty straightforward; if he thought that the environment was so negative that it might legitimately lead his son who LOVES baseball to quit, then they should leave the program immediately.

To put it another way, I encouraged him to "TRUST YOUR GUT."

I got the sense that after seeing a practice he immediately just knew, deep down inside, that the coaching environment was unhealthy and could possibly to lead to his son falling out of love with baseball.

So parents; if a club team feels to you like it's too intense, TRUST YOUR GUT and leave.

If a club coach or program demands that players quit other sports to focus entirely on their team and that doesn't sit right with you, TRUST YOUR GUT and don't sign up.

If the environment at practices and/or games feels overly negative, mean, or abusive, TRUST YOUR GUT and leave.

If you feel like you're not getting the experience you were promised and the club feels like a "scam," TRUST YOUR GUT and leave.

While I make just as many mistakes as anyone else trying to raise kids without an instructional guidebook, I think one of our greatest natural tools as parents is our Gut; in life and in sports.

We should trust it!

I can't tell you how many times I've heard a parent say something like, "You know, I just didn't think XYZ team was going to work out before we even started, but we did it anyway and then it turns out I was right from the get-go."

TRUST YOUR GUT. And then have the confidence to act on that feeling.

Ignore the FOMO. Follow your compass.

Don't worry if everyone else is signing up for a team that you don't feel right about. Don't participate in a program that doesn't align with your values or that turns out to be something other than what you were led to believe it would be.

Another thing my friend did that was extremely valuable to his decision-making process was to be a fly on the wall at a couple practices to get a sense of how the coaches behaved, how they treated the kids, and to see if what the team said they would do was vastly differently from what they actually did.

This is also especially true for organizations will multiple teams. Many will make promises of access to certain coaches, field time, and games but then only give their "top" teams that experience while every other team that's lower on the ladder gets left behind.

In general, parents should not be hovering at every one of their child's practices, especially as they get older, but when considering joining a new team, I think it's absolutely a good idea to see first-hand how the team will run and how players will be treated.

Sadly, I just don't think we can blindly trust any club team's marketing or take any of them at their word these days. We need proof.

ALL clubs boast being "next-level" and "development-focused" with "experienced, quality coaches" but I know I would never put my son in a program that I hadn't fully vetted first.

Some clubs follow-through and create quality experiences for their players. Many do not.

And in the absence of a "Yelp" for club teams (hey, that's a pretty good idea!), I wouldn't just trust what I saw at the "tryout" or saw in an Instagram ad to make that decision because that's when the organization knows all the parents are going to be there watching.

Find a way to see the team practice before you commit. Find out when they're playing a game close by and watch the coaches react in the heat of the moment. See how they treat the kids after making a mistake. See how they react to calls they disagree with or interact with the other team's coaches, players, and parents. Ask other parents whose opinions your trust who have already played in the organization what their experience has been like. And don't just ask the parents whose son starts at Shortstop and bats clean-up every game; they'll probably be happy. Find out how they treat everyone.

We all know the type of coaches who are kind to the kids in practice and then turn into monsters when it's game time.

We all know the type of coaches who are happy-go-lucky when the team is winning and then a flip switches when the team is losing and they start screaming at their players.

We all know the type of coaches who talk a good game about sportsmanship in the "parent meeting" but then don't have the tools themselves to handle adversity and are quickly exposed when they are unable to take the high road when a moment of controversy arises.

And the only way we can truly know what type of organization or team we're joining is to see the coaching staff in action.

So, if/when you decide to jump into the club baseball world (and hopefully that's not before the age of 11 or 12, at the earliest), do your homework, watch the team in action, and most importantly TRUST YOUR GUT.

It's usually right.

Play Hard, Have Fun!