By Jim Catalano
Jim Catalano is an Associate Editor at Coaching Management.
Coaching Management, 8.6, September 2000, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/cm/cm0806/jump.htm
Ask average baseball fans when the season begins and you’re likely to receive a variety of answers ranging from February to April. Ask a group of college baseball coaches the same question and you’ll still get a variety of answers, but the months mentioned will likely be August, September, and October—a time more commonly associated with college football instead of baseball.
In many baseball coaches’ minds, the successes of April, May, and June are sown during the fall. And while the length of the season may vary among NCAA Divisions I, II, and III, the opportunities it provides a coach do not. “I don’t know how we would survive without the nontraditional season,” says Jack Allen, Head Coach at Division II Tarleton State University. “We’re limited in scholarships. Consequently, we have to take a lot more walk-ons than other schools. Rather than give a kid a 15-minute tryout and try to judge if he has the ability to play or not, we try to come to a reasonably sound decision during the six or seven weeks in the fall.”
“Sometimes, our first day outside in spring is our first game, so during the fall we have to drill into our players exactly what we want day in and day out,” says Bob Fornelli, Head Coach at Division II Fort Hays State University. “You can work on those things indoors, but it’s not the same thing as being outside on the field every day. The 20 hours we get per week [in the fall] seem like a lot of practice, but the team really has to use that time to work on the improving itself for when spring comes around, because there’s not a lot of time to work outdoors before the first game.”
Assessing Players
As Allen alludes to, the main fall-season goal for many coaches is to assess their rosters. Is that high school pitcher you recruited still throwing as hard as he was in the spring? Who’s going to replace the star shortstop who graduated? And how do you sift through all those walk-ons?
“In college baseball, we don’t get to see kids that much before they arrive,” says Patrick Atwell, Head Coach at Division II Quincy University. “In a nine-inning game [we scout], an athlete might only might get a couple of plays. But starting in the fall I’m seeing him every day. I try to be open-minded about kids improving—they can get so much better in the fall from start to finish, especially the young kids.
“We’ve been in the top 25 for the last six years,” Atwell continues, “so we also get better walk-ons, which has upgraded the competitive level. I actually have gone into fall expecting a kid to come back as a starter, but then some walk-on comes in and takes his spot. So now I’m open to being surprised by a new kid coming in.”
What are coaches’ strategies for assessing players during the fall? “You try to analyze your team by comparing your upperclassmen who you’ve seen play to your incoming freshmen,” says Danny Hall, Head Coach at Georgia Tech. “You hope you don’t have a lot of injuries—sometimes guys come back from summer ball nicked up, and don’t get a chance to participate—but as long as everyone is healthy, you’re going to be able to evaluate them.”
“We look at two different groups—the new players who we don’t know enough about yet as competitors and the veteran players,” says Paul Mainieri, Head Coach at the University of Notre Dame. “I don’t worry about a veteran who has already performed here at a high level in the spring season. If he’s not doing well in the fall, that doesn’t concern me, because he’s probably working on something new, like a new pitch or bunting with two strikes.
“With new players,” Mainieri continues, “you use the fall to try to assess what their ability is going to be and how they perform in clutch situations. You try to put as much pressure as possible on them to see if they will be able to handle it when the spring rolls around, although clearly it’s not the same as the spring season.”
Drills vs. Games
With a limited number of hours to practice in the fall, coaches often debate whether this time should be spent scrimmaging or working on skills. “We scrimmage once or twice a week, but most of our guys play all summer long, so the fall is a period when we can evaluate them to see where they are,” says Steve Owens, Head Coach at LeMoyne (N.Y.) College. “We plan our practices to get in a lot of the repetition that we lose out on in the springtime from not being able to go outside.
“It’s a critical point of the year for us,” Owens continues. “At the end of the fall, we’ve done enough repetitions to know what we have to work on. We’re trying to figure out what we need to improve on, and if we need to make positional changes. Going into spring practice, I want to know our strengths, our weaknesses, and what kind of baseball club we have to prepare to be that season.”
Allen, on the other hand, favors scrimmaging. “We spend 90 percent of our time in the fall playing intrasquad games,” he says. “We still get the opportunity to coach kids—if we see a kid make a mistake we’ll stop the game and try to correct it—but we’re dealing with kids who, at the minimum, have three or four years of high school baseball experience, plus all the summer league play they can get in. If they don’t know the fundamentals by now, I don’t know that they’ll ever play college baseball. So we spend our time building skills by playing 45 to 55 intrasquad games, which puts us ahead of teams that don’t play those games.”
Atwell recommends keeping a balance between teaching and playing. “Space the intrasquad games over the fall, so after you teach a few days in a row, there’s a game to look forward to,” he says.
Fornelli, who is entering his fifth year at Fort Hays State, has changed his strategy in the last few years. “My first year, we did a lot more fundamental drills than intrasquad games,” he says. “But at this level, kids have already done a lot of that fundamental stuff and now they want an opportunity to play. So in that short period of time during the fall, we try to play as much as we can, while making sure the players are doing the right things when they do get an opportunity to play.”
Other coaches indicate they have lessened fall drill work since recent NCAA rules changes now permit some coaching to take place during the winter months. “We do some fundamentals work during the fall,” Mainieri say, “but now that we are allowed the two hours a week of individual workouts during the offseason, we’ll save a lot of that one-on-one work for between fall practice and spring season.”
Intrasquad Intensity
Those coaches who do use the fall primarily for intrasquad games say there’s a lot more to it than just counting off players and sending them out on the field. You want to create a game-like atmosphere and focus on maintaining the players’ intensity level.
“We put the teams in two different uniforms, we turn on the scoreboard, and we get volunteer umpires,” Mainieri says. “We make it as competitive as possible in the hopes of getting a better read on which players will rise to the occasion in those situations. The number of innings we play varies depending on pitching available. If we only play four innings on a given day, we’ll put zeros up on the scoreboard for the first five innings to make them feel they’re playing the last four innings of a nine-inning game.”
Fornelli lets his players know that there’s something at stake with the scrimmages—usually running. “We’ll play several one, two, or three-inning games a day. If you lose that game you run a triangle—from home plate to the right foul pole to the left foul pole in 60 seconds. Sometimes we’ll play nine one-inning games and if there’s a tie, both teams have to run. It makes them compete harder when something’s on the line.”
Many schools end their nontraditional season with a “world series” of intrasquad games, playing best three-of-five or four-of-seven scrimmages. “The captains draft the teams, the assistants coach, and I might umpire,” Atwell says. “They play for a T-shirt, but it’s like playing for a gold medal. You see who can compete, get the big outs, and make the big hits.”
Atwell also keeps stats to make sure the players stay on their toes. “They know jobs are on the line,” Atwell says. “We keep stats for everything, from j.v. to intrasquad games, so they know there are numbers to judge them on. If they go three for 30, it’s there in black and white. They tend to be pretty competitive when they know you’re paying attention.”
Creating game-like situations doesn’t mean giving up on the opportunity to teach at the same time, though. “If we see a mechanical problem, we’ll stop the ball game,” Allen says. “But in most cases it doesn’t take more than 45 seconds to correct a kid. We want intensity during these intrasquad games, but we also want it relaxed enough that we can step in and do some coaching if we need to.”
Something New
Intrasquad games are also the perfect environment for players to try out new techniques, and most coaches encourage such experimentation. “Our center fielder, Steve Stanley, loves to bunt, but that wasn’t a secret after his first year,” Mainieri says. “He knew that by his second year, when we played other Big East schools, the corner infielders would be playing right down his throat. But as soon as he’d have two strikes on him, they’d back up.
“So I challenged Steve to practice bunting for a hit with two strikes on him,” Mainieri continues. “If he fouls it off and strikes out during a fall game, who cares? But the more he did it, the more confident he got, so now he’s become especially adept at bunting with two strikes. It gives him something different in his repertoire when the spring season rolls around.”
Matt McDonald, Head Coach at Division III St. Olaf College, likes to have pitchers work on new pitches during the fall. “It’s a good time to work with them because they all pitch in the summertime and their arms are in pretty good shape by the fall,” he says. “Most guys are pretty fundamentally sound if they’re returnees, so maybe they’ll work on a new pitch or refine an old one. It seems like we spend lots of time on changeups in the fall. They’ll try it in the scrimmages, and then they’ll have a bullpen session with me or another coach to refine it.”
Allen also lets his players experiment. “We encourage those who want to try switch hitting, as well as pitchers who want to learn a new, pitch to do it in the fall," he explains. "My job’s not in jeopardy during an intrasquad game, but if we’re playing Abilene Christian and the pitcher experiments with a pitch that gets hit 600 feet, he doesn’t pay the consequences, I do.”
How Much?
As important as most coaches feel the fall season is, they are wary about the burnout it can cause in players. Pitchers are especially vulnerable when they follow a spring season with summer ball. “Some of the high school kids here in Texas complete a long school season, then jump into American Legion or Connie Mack,” Allen says. “Some of the summer coaches have a tendency to overwork pitchers, and that’s the last thing those high school kids need. So I worry about them being burned out before I even get hold of them in August. It’s happened a couple of times—I see a kid in March throwing 88 miles per hour, but throwing 81 in the fall. Then I know he’s burned out. He doesn’t need to work out, he needs to rest.”
Veteran players can be afflicted by a different form of burnout. “For some of the better players who have a position locked up, they can get burned out because they’ve been at it so long,” Mainieri says. “They don’t feel they have to prove as much in the fall.”
What are the solutions? At Georgia Tech, Hall only uses four weeks of practice, which he feels gives his players enough time away from baseball during the fall to avoid burnout. “More than anything, the guys are going to get mentally fatigued,” he says. “We try to keep them busy for a month, but the fall is their chance to be a normal college student as well.”
With his veteran players, Mainieri tries to identify one aspect of their game that, if improved, could make them a little better. “If a guy can hit, maybe I’ll tell him to work on his running to give him something specific to focus on and keep him fresh,” he says. “I also appeal to their need to exercise their leadership qualities.”
Allen also does the same, tapping into his seniors’ pride and giving them responsibility for instructing the younger players. “Many of them are going to become coaches after college, so we try to impress on them the importance of being involved as leaders during the scrimmages,” he says. “We’ll have 60 kids in our program, who we’ll split into two teams of 30—some of the better games we’ve had have been the fall intrasquad games.”
Sidebar
To Play or Not to Play?
While colleges are permitted to play scrimmages against other schools in the fall, those games count against the 56 contests that the NCAA allots per school year. Therefore, many coaches don’t like to play in the fall against other schools in order to conserve those games for the spring.
“In our case, where we feel we’re challenging for an NCAA bid every year, we feel it behooves us to save all 56 games for the springtime,” says Notre Dame Head Coach Paul Mainieri. “You don’t want to be left out of the tournament because you didn’t play enough spring games to rack up enough wins to get consideration.”
However, at schools with very wet or cold springs, many coaches figure that there’s no way they’ll get in their 56 games during the spring anyway. “With the weather, we’re somewhat limited,” says Steve Owens, Head Coach at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, N.Y. “We got in about 50 games last spring, which is about the maximum we usually can get in. So it makes sense for us to play some scrimmages in the fall.”
At Quincy University, Head Coach Patrick Atwell frequently scrimmages his j.v. team against other local colleges. According to conference rules, these scrimmages count only toward each player’s individual total of 56 contests; therefore, a pitcher or junior varsity player who wouldn’t play every game in the spring is in no danger of exhausting his eligible games. “I’ll play my young guys, and use decent pitching,” Atwell says. “That gives me a chance to use my young players, who won’t play a lot in the spring, while seeing opposing junior college kids compete, too.”
With the College World Series moving back a week in 2002, schools in the cold-weather climates may be able to get in more spring games. “That will really help Northeast schools, because a week up here in the spring can mean a lot of change weather wise,” Owens says. “Hopefully, that change will help us to get outside earlier and to play more games up north and fewer down south.”