This Week in Eagles Select - Building vs Filtering
Building vs Filtering
Last week I linked to a video of a couple coaches talking about how the current environment of travel baseball and softball was not created with the best interests of the players in mind, but what’s best at making money for the organizations (fields, tournaments, training facilities, etc).
At Eagles Select, money is not our motivation. Eagles Athletic Association (the legal entity for Eagles Select) is a 501c3 non-profit. On the softball side of the program, all of our team coaches are volunteers and their children pay the same fees as everyone else to play. They are in it for the love of the game.
As I look at travel softball programs, there are two typical approaches they take: building or filtering.
Filtering teams take a large group of players and filter through them to find the “best” set of players, typically based on their existing skills. The sole purpose of the team is to win games and tournaments. Players are typically responsible for their own individual skill development and team practices are focused on how best to combine each player’s individual skills to maximize the chance of winning. The product they sell parents are the number of games played and pictures of rings to share on social media.
Success is measured on the number of wins and tournament victories.
Their scope of interest in a player is the current season, and if a player does not produce in the way they’d like, they cut that player and find a replacement.
Building teams focus on taking a set of players and developing their individual skills to be the best they could possibly be. The purpose of this team is to focus on the individual outputs of each player and less on the outcomes of games. Games are used as as training grounds for development and opportunities for reps. We can’t train every part of the sport in the batting cage and there is no substitute for game-speed experience to practice the skills we’re developing.
Success is measured based on improving the skills of individual players. For example, improving a player’s bat speed from 40-50mph or a pitcher’s strike percentage from 30-50% are successes regardless of the outcomes of the games.
Their scope of interest in a player is long-term, over multiple seasons, understanding that the best player development takes time, repetition, and that players will fail many times before they succeed.
When you choose one approach over another, you are making a trade-off. One approach sacrifices long-term skill development in favor of winning now, and the other approach sacrifices winning now in favor of long-term skill development.
Eagles Select is a “building” program. Our “North Star” and number one priority is individual player development (right along with our players loving the game). Additionally, we take a unique approach to player development in the idea of “We Before Me.” Our teams support each other in our development and know that sometimes, we need to do things that aren’t purely in the interest of winning a game in order to support the development of our teammates. For example, having a new pitcher pitch several innings, even though we know they will walk a lot of batters, so they can get the experience to become a better player and help us win down the road. Or putting a player in a new position, knowing they’ll make mistakes, so they get experience and become a better player.
Being clear about our North Star helps guide our decisions and how we allocate our resources. For example, if I had to choose between playing a weekend tournament or bringing in an expert to do a clinic on throwing, hitting, or pitching, I’d choose the clinic, because our priority is player development.
Don’t get me wrong, winning is important, but I want to make sure our players have the skills to win when it actually matters. An 8U/10U/12U USSSA tournament doesn’t really matter — I want our players to have the skills to compete and be successful when it does really matter: middle school, high school, and perhaps even college.
Not all skills are physical. The mental development that occurs when learning physical softball skills like perseverance, grit, determination, teamwork, and patience will last them well beyond the softball field.
Where is everyone this weekend?
Happy Mother’s Day to all our 🥎 mom’s!
Most of our teams are off this weekend for Mother’s Day, but we have a few in action this weekend:
Alliance
USSSA 12th Annual Mothers Day Classic
Talk to you next week!
Brian
