New Clothing Drop!!
We have some new clothes in the team store. "Strike Collector" is our Catcher's specialty shirt. The "FOCUS" shirt is for laser focus in playing catch to hit the spot! Every pitch!
"ThunderHeart" is a collaboration shirt using actual artwork from the Pottawatomie Nation with M-Pact at the heart. We wanted to embrace our region and celebrate it. Helping our players play with heart and passion!
Image Caption: Mission Field Scoreboards. Just a reminder of the main Mission!
How to OwnTheNow?
How many of you feel like your days are full of distractions? I am right there with you if you said yes! We all have piles of things going on in our lives and seemingly endless amounts of things pulling us in all different directions. It is hard to stay focused on what’s important at that moment.
We have a mantra here at M-Pact Baseball, “OwnTheNow”. It was a saying to help our players forget about something bad that happened in the past, don’t worry about something that could happen in the future and focus on the moment right NOW. That is the important moment, the one right now. We can’t control the future and we can only learn from our past.
Image Caption: Special Edition OwnTheNow "OTN" jersey for last season.
I’m not a huge social media person but the app called BeReal is interesting to me. It goes off once a day and you capture that moment it goes off, no matter what you are doing, and it shares with your friend list. Supposed to be real, no filters, just what you’re doing at that moment.
Trying to keep our players focused on the moment is a challenge. One day, the 2026 team was playing a double header. Two games, 2-hour time limit each game, back-to-back. Game one was uneventful, and the boys were losing focus. They didn’t seem to be engaged. Game two was about to start and no one really seemed fired up to play. Suddenly, BeReal app notification goes off! Everyone is rushing to get theirs posted because you have 2 minutes to take your picture. I took this image with mine for the day. It was a cool moment for me as a coach. Funny part was we played that second 2-hour game with more energy than the first and won!
Image Caption: 2026 squad having fun with a BeReal post at UCO. Fun Day with a cool group of young men!
James 4:14-15
yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”
Mathew 6:34
34 “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
We aren’t guaranteed tomorrow. We are only guaranteed the moment we are standing in right now. Making the best of that moment and following God’s path for us is what we asked to do.
“Living in the moment is a gift, that’s what they call it the present.”
Our journey through this phase of our kids’ lives is very short. I have one about to finish her college athletic career and one just starting his high school career. It all has flown by so fast.
I like to think that the “OwnTheNow” mantra applies to us as parents also. Helping our players through all the challenges this game brings them can not only help them but also help us stay in the moment and not worry so much about how many hits they get that day or where they will play college ball at!
Two quotes I have read recently:
"The present contains within it every potential of the future. The doorway is now. Your future self is built from what you do with the moment you’re in."
"We wait for the road to appear before we leap, but the path is meant to be built ― choice by choice, day by day. What we are waiting on life to give us is often what life is waiting for us to give it."
Get involved!
With the growth of M-pact Baseball, we are seeing that our positive environment focus is benefitting not only our players but our parents as well. We coach our players and our coaches to have a growth mindset, always looking for ways to improve. We are going to start sending out some feelers to see if people want to be involved in further improvements to the experience soon. Projects like service work in the community, event planning, player development, and long term facility development are topics of interest. Stay tuned for more information. If you have an area of interest that you think would help M-Pact please contact us at mpactbaseballok@gmail.com
Parent Handbook Excerpt
FAMILY - When you signed up to play M Pact baseball, you adopted a group of boys. Encouragement from a teammates parents goes a long way with a player. We are here to build up each other including a child that isn’t yours. The “one another” approach to your child’s teammates helps create a positive culture.
I Thessalonians 5:11 Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.
Image Caption: This handbook took years to create and some painful experiences to curate the contents.
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