When people hear the phrase Daddy Ball, it stirs up many emotions.
But to me, Daddy Ball simply means the coach of the team is the father of one of the players, and to a lot of people, that means some sort of favoritism or politics.
But let's get down to the facts...
When you coach your own son, a couple of things that should come to mind are one, you have to treat your son like any other player on the team.
Most coaches who coach their kids feel like they can treat their kids differently because they're their kids.
They can be meaner or hold them to a different standard.
The fact of the matter is, you got to treat everybody exactly the same.
I was able to coach my own son in high school for four years.
I was his high school baseball coach.
I talked to a lot of people and did a lot of research to figure out what were the things I should do and what were the things that I should avoid...
This was a strategic approach to coaching my child.
I knew that we needed to create a framework, a framework within how we were going to handle each other at home versus on the field.
On the field, Tabor was just another player and the greatest honor that I could have is that the players would not know that he was actually my son.
Secondly, we established an unwritten rule when it came to baseball at the house.
We did not speak about the field or games, positives, negatives things that can be worked on.
Unless Tabor wanted to talk about it, he had to initiate the conversation...
...and this really helped create a sense of family and unity when we were home and allowed a separation from the field to the house, which is a big deal when you're coaching your own son or daughter.
A third key, and a very important one was, I wanted Tabor to grow as a person from his experience as a baseball player, whether I was his baseball coach or anybody else.
The principle I'm talking about here is, preparing him for life or preparing him for his path, whatever his path would be - and what we know about every path in life is there's going to be failure.
So my job was to use baseball to help prepare Tabor for his path.
What I did not want to do by being his head coach was to get out in front of him and try to prepare the path by removing obstacles failures and struggles, because those are truly the times when we grow the most.
It's through the adversity that we grow.
So preparing Tabor for his path versus preparing the path for Tabor for my son was a critical element to his overall development and that was part of the strategic approach of coaching my own child.
- Trent Mongero
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