Win or Lose?
Our seasons are kicking off. Little guys are taking the field for the first time and our oldest kids are underway with their High School teams.
So much weight gets placed on winning and losing. It breads all different emotions in us as people. Our team wins, the sun seems to shine brighter. Our team loses and we start second guessing everything we have done.
Over our years we have seen these dominate winning teams, at the younger ages, we played against fade away as kids started growing in size and leveling the playing field. Next thing you know, those teams are no longer the dominate ones. They forgot the process!
We say process over outcome here. The process of winning is a small step at a time approach. Then learning to see where you started to where you are now and appreciating that journey.
When we win, do we become complacent or stay humble and hungry?
When we lose, do we look for ways to learn and get better?
I heard a story recently about WD-40. It was designed to prevent rust, make things not squeak, and 1000’s of other uses. What does WD-40 have to do with baseball? Nothing but did you know the WD stands for “water displacement”? The 40 stands for how many tries it took them to get the formula correct. They failed 39 times before getting it right!
They learned from each failure to get the right result they needed.
I love this acronym:
LOSS stands for: (Learning Opportunity, Stay Strong)
Image Caption: Losses are just learning opportunities in the game and even in our life.
This is much like our walk with God. We fail day after day. None of us are perfect. Only one perfect human has roamed this earth, Jesus Christ.
Even though we mess up every day, Jesus’ grace and mercy covers us if we chose to follow him. He provided us the ability to learn from our mistakes.
Romans 5:8
But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
This is a funny game we have signed our kids up to play. I have heard it so many times, “the game of failure”, “Get a hit 3 out of 10 times and you are in the hall of fame”. I disagree with the game of failure part. Watching a HS game recently, one of our players had a double, a single, a walk, then comes up to plate and hits a hard line drive right at the 2nd basemen who happened to be in the perfect spot for an out. Did the batter fail? NO! We teach hit line drives all day in the batting cage.
As parents, and I am saying this to myself too, look for the small wins in your players development. Athletically and as a person. Those small wins start to stack up. When your player sees their small wins, they get more excited about the next step and not the next trophy!
Proverbs 24:16
For the righteous falls seven times and rises again, but the wicked stumble in times of calamity.
Player Development Time! "Daily Vitamins"
We have taken countless hours of time to put together packages for our coaches to teach skills at practice. But what about parents at home? It's hard to find time to train at home with all the schedules. These at-home style videos are short, to the point, and made to provide things your player can do with someone or alone.
The video shared today is what we call our "Daily Vitamins". Being a great defender takes as much work as being a great hitter. Funny the devotional today was about small wins and learning from losses. The player in this video was 13 at the time. Now he is 16 and we would pick apart his form in this video if he were to do it today. But, that's the whole point. Keep working, get better everyday!
We call these daily vitamins because the form and function of this package covers almost every move you would have to make when a ball is hit to you.
Find a wall, get a ball, and fall in love with it.
Image Caption: Take your vitamins and become an elite defender.
Lunch with Mission Road Church
Mission Road Church is opening their doors to all M-Pact Baseball and Magic Softball families on March 16th for a team bonding lunch. Please bring your families and lets enjoy this partnership with them. They have provided us a safe space for many years and allowed us to expand. They want to get to know all of you better and build an even better relationship.
Image Caption: Let's make sure we represent our community well and show our gratitude to Mission Road for the hospitality they have shown us.
Media Days
We will be holding our world famous media days this year again, however with some changes. We are using a different photographer this year who will be able to provide our images within a week. We will begin scheduling each team with him either at his studio or at our place, yet to be determined. So, have your coach or team manager get with me to schedule a time once your uniforms are complete. Get those poses ready too!!!! Let's have fun with it.
