By Staff
Coaching Management, 12.7, September 2004, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/cm/cm1207/qaambrose.htm
Peter Ambrose is the only baseball coach Cardinal Spellman High School in Brockton, Mass., has ever had. That’s not uncommon in places where schools seem to sprout up every few years, but Spellman was founded 47 years ago.
Along the way, Ambrose has also been the school’s head football coach, athletic director, and dean of students. Retired from other duties since 1998, Ambrose remains the volunteer head coach of baseball and football.
Ambrose has spent his entire coaching career at Spellman, a private, co-educational, college-prep Catholic school of about 650 students near Boston. A 1986 inductee into the Massachusetts Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame, he’s also among the half-dozen members of the state’s 500-victory club. His 2004 team made its division’s sectional semifinals.
In this interview, Ambrose discusses how he’s kept the focus on the athletes.
Why have you stayed in coaching so long?
I don’t believe in getting burned out—not if you enjoy something, which I still do. The old knees don’t work as well as before, but I still enjoy seeing the kids progress as athletes and as people. I still look forward to practice each day, and I still enjoy helping the kids overcome their personal problems. Some of my fondest memories are of kids who have turned around.
How do you deal with problem kids?
You have to sell them. We try to sell them on the philosophy of “we and us,” teamwork, knowing the rules, playing by the rules, and knowing the sacrifice you have to make to be an athlete. I’m at a tuition school, and some of these kids have to go to work after practice and around games, and it’s a hardship for them, but they make that sacrifice. I think that’s important. Kids have to know that they have to be accountable to themselves, their parents, their teammates, and their school. And I think athletics does a lot toward that.
I don’t have any discipline problems on my teams. They know up front where they stand with me. If they screw up in the classroom or are disrespectful to their teachers, we don’t want them on the field. They know that they’re going to have to conform to the rules and be respectful to the coaches, their teammates, and themselves. Those who do not conform to the rules usually quit on their own.
But there must be times that players have to be corrected and disciplined. How do you do that?
I like the youngsters to know first of all that I really care about them. I care more about them as a people than for their ability. They know I’m fair. And I’ll listen. Even when I was handling discipline at the school, if a kid was right and a teacher was wrong, I’d back the kid. They have to know up front that you’ll treat them as adults and that you want them to treat you as an adult.
Most important, you’ve got to take the time to listen to them and let them take the time to listen to you. Let them weigh things and make choices. You have to respect that there are a lot of distractions and choices in the high school years. There’s no set thing that turns kids around. Some of them just want attention, to know that you care about them. Some need to know that if they make a mistake, they need to learn from it and keep going. I’ve had youngsters who were just pains in the neck when they first came out, and they were like sons to me when they left their senior year. They knew I cared about them.
How do you deal with declining interest in baseball relative to other sports?
When I was a kid, on a Saturday morning you had to get down to the park early so you could reserve the diamond. Now you could fire a cannon down there and you wouldn’t hit anybody. There’s too much specialization—camps and playing year-round in one sport. I don’t think that’s good for the kids, even if all they play is baseball. If you’re capable of playing two or even three sports, and if you can handle the academic work, I think you should. There’s a lot you can get out of being on a team that can’t be counted in wins and losses.
It also takes good coaches to get kids to play. We need coaches who aren’t in it for the money or just the winning, but who are interested in the kids as people and who show it.
What skills do young players lack from not playing as much as in years past?
Well, we spend 80 percent of our practice time strictly on fundamentals. We can practice only two hours a day, so we stress defense and hitting—and situations. If you get into a situation you haven’t been in before, that’s when you break down and make mistakes. I strictly follow my practice schedule—I know what I have to cover each day, and I focus on going from point A to point B.
How do you keep kids interested in learning the fundamentals?
Even though they’re 17 or 18 years old, they still like games. You can’t just stick them in a cage and tell them to hit for an hour. So we break them up into two squads for hitting contests and things like bunting drills where there’ll be Gatorade, a T-shirt, or some other prize. It’s also important to let them see their progress: How many hits out of 50 can they get today? How many tomorrow? How many the day after that?
I also talk to them about how the fundamentals help us win. I go over each game, usually right after it ends. If we lose, I’ll say, “We’re back at practice tomorrow, and this is what we’re going to do.” I help them see the little things that they may not see themselves.
How do you find assistant coaches?
I use volunteer assistants. I get people who played for me, went on and became successful, and want to give something back. It’s a variety of people—captains in the fire department, corporate CEOs.
How have parents changed?
They’ve become worse. If the parents had the intelligence of their offspring, we’d be better off. They put too much pressure on their kids. And if a kid strikes out, they blame the umpire. The way some parents act, you’d think these kids are getting paid.
To deal with them, I let them know I won’t put up with it. When they start getting too vocal, I take them aside and speak to them. I have some who can’t watch the game from inside the fence, so they go outside and get out their screaming and hollering where no one can hear them.
As coaches, we try to demonstrate the opposite way to handle it. If a youngster strikes out or makes a key error, we never, ever, ever humiliate the kid. We’ve lost games where kids have dropped pop flies that an 8-year-old could catch. But they’re not doing that on purpose, for heaven’s sake. You can’t be screaming and hollering at them.