I greatly enjoyed watching the LSU baseball team compete this year. They did so at the highest of levels and maintained that effort all the way through to win the National Championship. One of the qualities that I most admired about this team is that they just played the game. That sounds like an over simplification but if you coach you know what I mean. The score had absolutely nothing to do with how we played. This is why so often we could take a 2 or 3 run lead and stretch it to 7 or 8 runs. It is the reason why we could be down 2 or 3 and still win by 5 runs. Now some teams can do this on occasion but it was a common feature of this championship team. They were not into the result -- they were all about the process. The score had nothing to do with a good at bat.The second quality that I admire about the LSU baseball program is the leadership -- starting with Coach Paul Mainieri. For those that say nice guys finish last, well you need to take a look at Coach Mainieri and his track record of success. In today's society there are a lot of different ways to win. Unfortunately you can cheat and win. Many of us, purist, don't want to admit it but it's out there. That's not to say that it sometimes doesn't catch up with the cheater but they do sometimes win. Sometimes you can win with players of poor character. They don't go to class...they get in trouble...they don't care about their school or community. Not so with LSU baseball. There are not just outstanding baseball players but outstanding people. Why? Because that is the philosophy of Coach Mainieri -- he recruits quality people and he leads them in a quality way.
Thirdly, they are great examples of excellence. Last night we have open gym scheduled for our players. None showed! They were all together parked in front of the television cheering the Tigers at they play baseball. That tells you that our players respect the baseball team. One of the things that LSU does is create several venues where the athletes from all sports get to interact. It pays off because I think our team will be better observing the baseball team. That camaraderie is shown by Les Miles and Trent Johnson making the trip to Omaha to support the team.
Finally, sometimes as basketball coaches we think we can only learn from basketball coaches -- nothing could be further from the truth. As an assistant basketball coach at West Virginia State College I was also an assistant sports information director and my sport was baseball. Each spring I joined the baseball team, coached by legendary Cal Bailey to keep his book and his stats. We shared dinners, bus rides and conversations in the dugout. I learned a tremendous amount about teaching, motivation and player development from Cal who to this day is a friend and a mentor.
Skip Bertman, the baseball coach for many years was another great example for all our coaches in the way he ran his program. After he became the Athletic Director at LSU, he went out of his way to coach the coaches -- to impart even more of his wisdom on us. For some reason Skip took a liking to me and I was the beneficiary of many phone calls and trips to his office to learn of ways to be better at my craft. Again, to this day I still lean on Skip for advice.
So find coaches that are successful -- no matter the sport or the level -- and learn from them. I've no doubt had a little more of a slant towards LSU in this blog entry so forgive me. I've tried to keep this blog about coaching, teaching and motivating but today I'm truly proud to be a Tiger because of our baseball team -- not jut because they won the National Championship but more importantly because of how they won it and the fact that they share it with the rest of us.
