There’s a kid on my son’s baseball team who trails chaos wherever he goes. Shows up to games with no cleats and when he’s got cleats on they’re untied. He misses nearly half our practices and shows up late to games. He’s on his third hat. When we do calisthenics, which we do at every practice and before every game, he complains and cuts corners. He doesn’t take constructive feedback well; he doesn’t cheer on his teammates. He doesn’t listen and he distracts other kids. Baseball requires that you hustle and this kid doesn’t.
These are learned traits. When it’s her turn, his mom either forgets to bring snacks or just doesn’t do it. She asked me to buy a cup for him and then never paid me back – and the kid doesn’t wear it anyway, despite our constant demands. His home life is steeped in disorder and it spills into the dugout and onto field. In short, he’s a mess.
This is the kid I need on my team. I love the go-getters, the big hitters, the shirt-stained-with-dirt infield divers and the ‘Yes, Coach!’ team leaders. And I want the boys who cling to the dugout fence and chomp their gum and scream, “TWO OUT RAL-LY, HIT IT UP THE AL-LEY!” at the top of their lungs and the guys who grab their gloves and adjust their caps and shout to the other boys doing the same, “Let’s go get some OUTS!”
But dutiful kids isn’t what I signed up for. This is youth development, not youth enjoyment. We can’t field a whole team of Stephens, but we can handle one or two. We’ve got a head coach and four assistants – that’s five men all holding the same standard. Five men showing the kid that they’re frustrated when he doesn’t put in the work. Five men showing the kid how to hone a skill, whether it’s catching deep fly balls or staying in front of a hot grounder. Five men calling him out when he cuts corners. “None of that olé shit, Stephen! Stay down!”
Some of the coaches in our lives are here for a season and gone. Some are there for us many decades over, and others are so fleeting we may never remember them, or they us. The dads, the big brothers, the mentors we seek out, these men mold us over hundreds, over thousands of hours and interactions. Others impart only a glancing blow. Once, when I was 17 and stupid, I was driving way too fast on the freeway and an older man pulled up next to me and lowered his hands, as if to say, ‘Hey, take it easy.’ I definitely sped up and probably I flipped him off. That was a 10 second exchange 30 years ago and I bet he never thought of it again. I think about it often.
We work with boys like Stephen in order to make them men like us. Men who don’t cut corners or shirk from responsibility. Men who work hard; men who hustle. And men like us work with boys like Stephen because we saw men we admired working with boys like us. Men who would dedicate thousands of hours guiding us through life’s biggest hurdles. Men who would call us out in practice when we cut corners. Men who would pull up alongside an unknown car, with an unknown kid, and say, “Hey, take it easy.”
The Misorganized Mind 