My timeline blew up again this week.
A travel baseball coach posted something like: “You high school football coaches running mandatory practice the first week of summer, so your team can go 5-4 and miss the playoffs in the fall, are absolute clowns.” A satire account called Fired Coaches of Georgia, whose whole motto is “relax, it’s satire (mostly),” fired back: “The coaches you are mocking have records anyone can look up, verify, and judge. You’ve already proven that. The difference is their results are attached to jobs with real accountability. Jobs get lost. Families get uprooted.”
Within an hour, half my feed had picked a side.
Before my own reaction, I’ll push back on the original tweet itself. Multi-sport kids aren’t lazy for choosing one sport’s work over another’s in the same week. If a kid loves the football lift and skips a baseball game for it, that’s not punishable, and vice versa. They aren’t home burning through video games; they’re actively training, just in a different uniform. Different sports build different things in a young athlete: footwork, contact courage, the ability to fail in front of a crowd and walk back to the dugout. We need multi-sport kids more than we need coaches drawing territorial lines over a calendar.
I’ll be honest, my first instinct was to jump into the fight too. I’ve typed out the perfect comeback before and hovered over the post button. It never ends well: you don’t wrestle with a pig, because you both end up muddy, and the pig likes it.
If you’re not willing to put your name on a take and live with what comes back, an anonymous account isn’t courage; it’s a costume. If you can’t say it with your whole chest, don’t say it.
But that’s a tangent for another day. What actually stuck with me wasn’t the fight. It was the assumption underneath the first tweet.
The Assumption Nobody Questions
The coach throwing punches assumed every team running mandatory summer work should make the playoffs, and that a losing record proves you’re a clown, not a coach.
That assumption shows up everywhere: in the parent meeting expecting a state title from a roster never built for one, in the coach who measures himself against a program with triple his talent and wonders why he feels like he’s failing.
Here’s the math nobody wants to say out loud. In Georgia, there are eight state champions total across the classifications. Over four hundred programs start the season in January. By any honest count, somewhere around ten percent of those rosters actually have the horses to win it all in a given year.
That doesn’t erase the exceptions, a four-seed catching fire to win state in Georgia, Oklahoma knocking off three conference champions on the way to a national title after finishing eleventh in the SEC. Cinderella shows up. But she’s the exception you celebrate, not the standard you coach to.
The real question isn’t “why didn’t this team win more.” It’s “did this team get everywhere it was actually capable of going?”
What This Looked Like in Our Own Program
In 2023, we graduated eleven seniors, nine of whom went on to play college baseball: a roster built for a championship. We still got knocked out in the Final Four three years running: 2021, a walk-off from a future first-round MLB pick; 2022, a walk-off from a Division I stud; 2023, arms headed to the SEC and the ACC. That team had championship-caliber talent. The results said so, even when those specific scoreboards didn’t.
In 2024, we started five true freshmen, and we knew exactly what that year would be like. Those kids were highly ranked and still are, but fourteen-year-olds who’d seen “85” on a radar gun hadn’t seen it cut, run, or land for a strike against eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds with some “get back” on their minds after the year before. Seven errors in our opening game told us everything we needed to know. We didn’t have state championship expectations that season, because we didn’t have a state championship roster, and we coached it that way.
This year, those same guys are seniors. They’ll carry the state-champion expectation again because they’ve earned the right to.
The Application
This week, take an honest inventory of the team you actually have, not the one you wish you had.
Write down where this group can realistically finish if everything goes right, then write down one specific, attainable jump from where you are. If you’re a four-win team, the goal isn’t state; it’s six or seven wins and a team learning to compete under pressure.
Say that expectation out loud to your team and your parents before the season gets loud. Managing expectations isn’t lowering your standards; it’s coaching the team in front of you rather than punishing them for not being a team that doesn’t yet exist.
Your worth as a coach was never tied to a bracket you weren’t built to win this year. It’s what you get to do, not who you are. Strive to get better, make it worth showing up for, but don’t load expectations onto a roster that can’t carry them, or you and the kids who deserved better will both end up bitter and resentful.
You deserve more than that. Your players deserve more than that. And the good news is, more is available. It just doesn’t live on the scoreboard. It lives in the Red Letters.
Let’s get to work. — Coach O
Leave a Reply