Coaching softball has it's moments. They may be challenging, they may be rewarding, but one this is certain, there's never a dull moment!

Now that various softball seasons are getting under way, games are being won — and games are being lost. The winners rarely go back over the game in too much detail. They're usually happy they won, and figure they played the superior game and deserved to win.

The losers, however, often like to go back through the game in detail to determine why they lost. After all, they usually believe they have the better team too.

It's very tempting to point to THE incident that caused the game to be lost. It was the error when the game was tied. Or the strikeout with runners on second and third and your team on offense. Or the walk that led to a critical run when your team was on defense. Or (of course) the terrible call the umpire made in the last inning.

Yet the truth is, it's never one thing. Sure, that error put a runner on base after you had two outs, and the floodgates opened after that. Sure, you lost by one run when a hit would have brought in the runners from second and third. Sure, the umpire calling the runner safe when she was clearly out kept the inning alive for your opponents. But it wasn't a one-inning game.

Fastpitch softball games without time limits are seven innings long. If something terrible happened in one inning, what were you doing in the other six?

If your team had hit better in the fourth, that error in the sixth would've merely been something to work on at the next practice. If your team had played better defense, that bad call by the blue would've barely raised an eyebrow. Instead, it became a traumatic event that threatens the foundations of civilization as we know it.

Narrowing the loss down to a single problem makes it manageable for us. We like to think if that one event had changed that the outcome would have been different, and we'd be celebrating a win instead of mourning a loss. Blaming it on a single random event is a lot easier on the soul than facing the fact that your team didn't play too well throughout the game — or the other team was flat-out better. After all, who is responsible for helping the team become better? He/she stares at you in the mirror every day.

Of course the danger in blaming one incident, especially if it was player-related, is you may become angry with the player who committed the error/struck out/walked a runner on base/etc. and say some things you'll regret later. Remember that Hillary wasn't trying to let the ball go between her legs on an easy ground ball that would've gotten you out of the inning where you lost the lead. It just happened.

Wins and losses are the culmination of everything that happens during the game. There are plenty of opportunities to do both in every game. Perhaps the thing to remember is specific problems become magnified when you don't do so well in other aspects of the game. In other words, if you've scored 10 runs in the first three innings, a single error won't mean that much. But when you've scored one run in three innings, it becomes a much bigger deal.

Again, it's never just one thing. The more you keep that in mind, the more you'll be able to help your team keep its collective heads on straight after a tough loss. And the better you'll sleep at night.

Anyway, that's the way I see it.

Any ideas?

View Original Post at softballperformance.com

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