Don't Blink, Coach-Dad
This is a blog post I wrote about two months before I even decided to start a blog. Actually, it may have been the inspiration for this blog. So, I made it my first post. Here we go... blog officially launched!
I began coaching long before April and I had children. In fact, I coached my first team (a 15U team in Waverly, Ohio) immediately after college baseball. A special memory I will always have with this first team is, right before the post-season tournament I had an opportunity to potentially sign with the Frontier League and continue fulfilling my dream of playing baseball (as an adult). After a long day at Paints Stadium and a 20-minute drive back to Waverly from Chillicothe, pondering and reflecting on what I really wanted to do in life, I returned directly to the baseball park where my assistant coach and the team had just concluded our last regular season game and would be preparing for the league tournament next week. They were anxiously waiting to hear if I would be with them for the tournament... as a coach, or if I would be leaving them to get back in uniform... as a player. I assuredly announced to them that I was ready to hang up my cleats and continue the game I love, as a coach. Side note: that team went into the post-season tournament as an underdog and ended up winning it all. Exciting start to my new journey!
A few years later, while living in St. Louis I went to the local youth league to find out how to get involved in coaching a team and had the pleasure to meet some wonderful people and had some wonderful times, getting to coach in a city that knows and loves baseball. One memory of my time coaching in St. Louis, one Saturday morning at a tournament in South St. Louis County I walked to home plate for the ground rules meeting with the umpires and opposing coach. He introduced himself as “Andy,” and he seemed so familiar to me but I couldn’t place where I knew him. When I got back to the dugout one of our team parents said, “Hey, that’s Andy Van Slyke!” We gave his team a good, competitive game, but I remember they beat us that day.
By the time we had Brock, our firstborn, I had been coaching baseball for four years and was realizing that it was something I would want to continue doing for a long time, and perhaps one day, I would get to coach him if he loved baseball and wanted to play (we assumed he would, but we never wanted to force it on him). As it would turn out, he most certainly did love playing ball. It seemed like that was all we did during his childhood. Then Kaylee came into our lives a couple years later and she started picking up the bats and balls and playing right beside her brother. We quickly realized it was not going to be something we would need to convince them to try to enjoy. It was “in” them just like it was ingrained in me as early as I can remember.
Brock grew up with baseball. When it was time to transition from playing in the backyard to playing on teams, I did indeed get to coach him. Additionally, the majority of kids that he began playing competitive baseball with at age 7 and 8 remained together for the next 10-11 years. They played a lot of baseball together over the course of their childhood years. The other day they played their last baseball game together. And that fact is something I am finding to be one of the hardest things to have to accept... the finality.
That night, as I sat in a chair in our living room in silence, Brock came upstairs and handed me a baseball. Someone had retrieved the home run ball that he had hit in the Regional Championship game, and he wanted me to have it. Along with his signature, there were three inscriptions he had written on the ball:
2-Run Homerun – I love you
Last game as a Bulldog
Thank you for being my mentor in life and in baseball
In my mind as I sat in the chair, just before he handed me the baseball, I was back in the yard and he was 5. I blinked. And when I looked up he was an 18 year-old man with a baseball in his hand. My boy.
It’s not easy being a coach’s kid. The spotlight (or crosshair) is on you at all times. Inevitably there are times when people feel discontent toward the coach-dad and for some reason they subsequently project those feelings toward the player-son, either directly and openly or indirectly and privately. Even at home, the pressure and stress that coach-dad feels is sometimes difficult to suppress, which means player-son feels and takes on those burdens as well. It’s a completely different experience for that kid, and not always a pleasant one.
I love all my players just like sons, but every father admittedly loves his own son a little differently, which then creates a very difficult dynamic to navigate in practices, games, and team activities. A coaching colleague who also coached his own son (at the college level) once said, “If you end up coaching your own son one day you just hope he is either A) head and shoulders above the rest in talent, where there is no question he will be a draft pick one day, or B) really awful, to the point where he’s just happy to be on the team (and your wife and everyone else knows it and there’s no expectation of getting in the game). If he’s in one of those two categories it’s fairly easy to coach your own son. However, most coaches’ kids are in category C) good player, but has to work hard like everyone else to compete for a spot. This is the toughest situation, because no matter what he does it will not be good enough to earn a spot in many people’s minds, and if he does earn a spot it will obviously be because he’s being favored because he’s the coach’s kid.”
Brock, I know that is where you spent your time under my coaching tutelage, in category C. You busted your hind-end, and at times when you started to relax a little bit, I’d bust your hind-end and remind you that you needed to give a little more than everyone else. It probably wasn’t fair to you, but I hope it is something you can look back on and appreciate, and even more, learn from as you raise your own family.
Just like the other night when I held the home run ball in my hand, I’m still having a hard time reading through that third inscription without my eyes filling up with water. Maybe it will get easier. But maybe it will just be that way forever now.
As an adult man, before I had children, I can’t remember a single time when my eyes watered and a huge lump filled up my throat. I had emotions, but things didn’t touch me the way they began to after children were brought into the picture. It was a weird feeling for this macho guy. I remember standing above the baby cribs of both my children and not being able to control the flood that filled my eyes. I knew, in those moments, that things for me would never be the same. I remember praying that he would love Jesus, and that I would be the kind of mentor and role model he would need in life, and that I would have the opportunity to one day be his coach.
It happened. In a blink, it seems.
I have a lot of baseballs. Over the years I collected balls that I hit over the fence as a little leaguer, game balls from big wins I pitched in high school and in college, game balls from big wins in coaching, signed balls from players and teams I’ve coached, league championship balls, district championship balls, balls that are autographed by pros like Cal Ripken Jr... I have a lot of baseballs sitting around my house and office.
None of those compare to this one ball that was handed to me in my living room late on Sunday evening, May 28, 2017. This one ball tells a big story. It reveals answers to prayers that I prayed while standing over a crib in August of 1998. And it has the signature of my favorite baseball player in all the world.
I know it’s time to turn to the next chapter, and he’s going to do even greater things and he’s going to make me even prouder than I am today. My boy.
I love you.
Your Coach-Dad