What Parents Want

I've been training players for at least twenty years. I think I know what a parent wants when they walk into my training session. The problem is, they're not going to get it today.
They want the immediate fix. Make my kid look good when he hits. Shouldn't he have his hands up? What do you think about his stride? Those are the normal questions I get.
I do my best to explain that they might be right. Maybe his hands should be up. Maybe the stride does need to change. But that isn't what we're building today. That isn't what we're working on today.

That's when I get the look. The dismay. Then why am I paying you? You should know this.
Here's the thing — it isn't important that I know it, and it isn't important that you know it. You already know what it's supposed to look like. You've watched enough baseball. But the players you're comparing your son to are not the same learner your son is today.

What does that mean?

The big league player has an amazing internal gauge of how he should be moving, how far he should be striding, how high his hands need to be. Your son doesn't have that gauge yet.
How do I know? Because you've already shown me. You need someone to hand him the answer for how he should look, how he should feel, where he should stand.

Those guys in the majors have that gauge, and it didn't come from somebody telling them to stand a certain way. They have a robust bottom-up nervous system. Your son's nervous system has been trained to be a top-down system. It won't make a change unless it's told to, and by the time it's told, it's too slow to compete at an elite level.

Don't worry. We can retrain that system. It isn't easy and it isn't quick. It actually takes a village, and it starts with you, the parent.

We need to set some standards for how we give information to your child. The first one: stop giving him the answer.

Every time we hand him the answer, we drill into him that he doesn't need the information the environment is giving him. He doesn't need what the challenge is telling him. He doesn't need what his own nervous system is telling him. Instead he learns to find the person in the room — or on the field — who already knows, and wait until it's handed to him.

That's how a lot of us were taught.

So you might ask: if that's how everybody was taught, how did big league players get so 
good? They probably weren't taught that way. Most of the coaches who worked with me never gave me the answers, and I'd assume most major leaguers had very few answers given to them either. Why? Because they were already better than most of their coaches, or they believed they knew more than whoever was handing out the answers. Call it the arrogance of the ego, call it stupidity, call it dumb luck.

The biggest obstacle in today's game is that every dad has a smart phone, and that phone is connected to some horrible social media platform where somebody is telling him how to coach his child and what it's supposed to look like.
Well, I'm here with a new plan.

I'm going to give you information. You can use it, you can take it for what it's worth, or you can tell me I'm wrong. All of that is fine. What I'm giving you is my opinion, built on eleven years of playing professionally while being undersized, and on the poor coaching I got along the way — which was a blessing and a curse in some ways.

I believe we finally have enough information backed by science, and enough great minds working on it, that we can be a lot more accurate about how we actually learn.

How We Fix This

It starts with not giving the answer anymore.

I get it. As parents we want our child to succeed. Not only that, we want it today, if not right now. So we give them the quick fix. And that quick fix shuts off the exact information loop we need turned back on.

So how do we fix it? We shut up. We let them fail.

It's hard to watch. It's hard to see your child struggle. But this fix will eventually change their world — how they learn and how they get things done.

After we shut up, the next thing is understanding what top-down learning is versus bottom-up learning. When does top-down work, and when does bottom-up have to take over? If they keep getting the answers, the bottom-up system will never be there when they need it.
Now, once the silence sets in and the player starts to get a little crazy in a training session, that's when you — or the instructor — have to pump the brakes. We need to keep the challenge at a snail's pace if we want the player to learn from his own actions. If we overload the nervous system to the point that the mind is racing, we're not helping the situation.
From the outside, this looks like it's stifling growth. But the amount of positive internal action happening is far greater than you can imagine. You just can't see it. Time will show it. The tortoise beats the hare in this race.

This is called recalibrating the nervous system.
Once you buy into this, you need to ask his coaches not to give him the answer either — no verbal cues on how to move during a game or a practice. They need to ask one thing:

How do you think you did today?

That question forces the player to start looking inward. It might take a few days, or a week or two, to reboot the system, but it is happening.

As parents, we have to build a new vocabulary for how we interact with the athlete. We need to get them looking internally and stop accepting the external response.

What do I mean? Here's one.

You ask, "How do you think you did in that rep?" after a swing in the cage, and the player says, "I pulled my shoulder out on that one."
T
hat's an external response. That's a visual cue some coach gave him when he was early on a pitch. The shoulder pulling off is a knock-on effect of something else breaking down in the swing. The easy answer isn't the problem. Yes, his shoulder pulled off — but what actually happened?

If there's no information coming from the body during that swing, an external answer is all he has to give you.

The change happens when the player explains something I couldn't have given him, something no coach standing there watching could have told him. That's the internal feedback loop the player has to build for himself.

What It Sounds Like When It Works

I've been doing this long enough to know the exact moment when it clicks.
It doesn't happen in a dramatic swing. It doesn't happen when the ball jumps off the barrel and the parent leans forward. It happens in what the player says after the rep.
I had a kid — fourteen years old, travel ball, three years of traditional lessons before he got to me. Every answer he gave me for the first two weeks was somebody else's words. His shoulder pulled off. His hips were early. He wasn't staying through the ball. I could tell you which coach gave him each one.

I never corrected him on it. I just kept asking the same question.

What did you feel on that one?

The first week he looked at me like I was speaking another language. He would give me the external answer, I would nod, and we would go again. No correction. No confirmation that he was right or wrong. Just — go again.

The second week he started to get frustrated. That's actually a good sign. Frustrated means the system is searching. He wanted me to tell him. I wasn't going to.
The third week he took a swing, paused, and said something I couldn't have told him.
My back hip didn't stay loaded. I felt it release early and by the time my front foot landed there was nothing left to drive with.

I didn't show any reaction. Inside I was done. That was it. That was the moment.
Because here is what that sentence means. He wasn't describing what the swing looked like from the outside. He was describing what happened inside the movement — in sequence, in the right order, from the right place. Nobody handed him that answer. No coach standing there could have seen what he felt. He built that description from his own nervous system.

That is the internal feedback loop working.
And once it works once, it works differently forever. Not perfectly — he would still slip back into external answers when he was tired or frustrated or when his dad was watching. But the door was open. He knew it existed. He had felt the difference between describing a swing and feeling one.

Here is what I need you to understand as a parent.
That moment cost three weeks of sessions where, from the outside, nothing was happening. Your kid was missing pitches. He was confused. He was probably telling you the sessions felt weird and that I never told him anything. All of that is true. All of that is exactly right.

The work does not look like the work.
What you see on the outside — a quiet session, a coach who asks more than he tells, a kid who is struggling and not getting corrected — looks like nothing. What is happening on the inside is the only thing that will ever matter when there is a pitcher on the mound who has figured your athlete out and the game is on the line and there is nobody in the dugout who can see what is wrong.

That is when the athlete either has the internal gauge or they do not.
We are building the gauge.

It takes longer than a lesson. It takes longer than a month. And there will be a night where your kid comes home and says they are not sure the sessions are working and they want to go somewhere else and get some real answers.
Let them feel that. It means the system is almost there.
The day they stop looking at you after a swing and start looking somewhere inside themselves — that is the day everything changes. You probably won't notice it right away. But I will. And eventually so will the pitcher who just tried to sneak a breaking ball past them on two strikes and watched them wait on it and drive it the other way.
That is what we are building.
It does not come with a quick fix. But it does come.

 

Silverback Athlete · Andrew Beattie · Sarasota, FL