Introduction

Welcome to my blog! I’m excited to have a place where I can share some of my thoughts, questions, and whatever else I want to write about. I will be getting into more of what this will be about, but it feels necessary to share some of my background and why I coach.

            I grew up playing pretty much every sport imaginable for at least one year but eventually settled on baseball and basketball. I was always very passionate about sports and whenever someone asked me what my favorite sport was, I would always reply with the one I’m currently playing. During high school, I ended up being a fairly average athlete that succeeded by doing whatever was asked of me by my coaches. This meant that I never struck out and hit the ball on the ground the vast majority of the time during baseball season, and believed defense was far more important than offense during basketball season. I never once questioned what my coaches were telling me to do, which unfortunately played a role in me not being sought after by many colleges. I ended up choosing to go to the University of Northwestern-St. Paul to play D3 baseball after not really talking to any of the coaches at all. I had a decent freshman year starting at 2B and 3B but remember thinking I should be one of the best players on my team and in the conference. I didn’t have any serious expectations about how college would be, but I expected it to be a level up to say the least. I quickly realized that minus a few players, my high school team had better talent. Even though I played with a handful of D1 teammates and our starting 9 all played college baseball, I still wanted more out of my college experience. This fire that I had gained to get better, changed the way I viewed baseball. I started diving into all the information I could get my hands on. I started recording my swing consistently, watching big leaguers, and trying a million different drills. I completely changed my swing for the better I thought. My sophomore year I ended up walking and bloop singling my way to decent stats on paper, but I would say I got worse overall. That fueled more fire in me, but the trend continued throughout my 4 years.

            Even though I didn’t have the career that I wanted, the value of “learning” how to improve as a baseball player ended up providing a passion for coaching. I use the term learning loosely since I really didn’t know what I was doing, which I will get into more different time. My older teammate who I grinded with throughout college started working at a club baseball organization and hooked me up coaching a 15u team the fall of my senior year. Almost 5 years later I am still here with my old teammate and having a lot of fun and success doing so.

            I probably should explain how I got into pitching since I haven’t mentioned that at all. To put it simply, I never had a fresh arm so I decided I would be better sticking to infield until senior year where I said screw it, my career is over after this. I had the strongest arm on the team, and we need help on the mound so let’s give it a shot. I will go into more detail on that at another time because it is an interesting transition with some valuable lessons learned.

            I honestly do not have a concrete plan into what type of posts I’ll be doing, or how frequently I will be writing. Throughout the course of the day, I have many different thoughts and ideas, so this is where I make some sense of them or not. If I had to choose goals out of creating this, it would be to hopefully provide some value to those who read, and help me dive deeper into ways I can become a better coach.