And so it came to pass that I was asked to be an assistant for a fall majors team. I had just coached a AA team this spring, and I wondered how it would go—would I survive the sudden leap from 7-8-9 year olds to 10-11-12 year olds. Now that my own kids are off in college, I don’t always follow a nice linear progression from one age group to the next like when I was coaching my own kids.
Jumping groups was jarring at first. Everyone knew how to throw and catch.
The good news is a LOT of the kids knew me from when they were younger and knew I’d been around, so I had some credibility with them on day one. They would always say, “I WANT TO GO WORK WITH COACH GROSSMAN”.
That warmed my heart.
So I found out after the first few games that we could make plays on routine grounders, but, when faced with game situations, our players tended to panic. I like drills with live runners, and the players had become fond of a game called KNOCKOUT in which the coach hit ground balls and the first player to make a mistake was OUT and had to sit out for a little while.
So I modified the game they already liked.
I told them I had invented a new TWO PLAYER KNOCKOUT.
They were curious.
The story was we would hit a ground ball to a shortstop, and we would have a live runner on first. The shortstop would have to make the easy throw to second. If something went wrong and the runner was safe—BANG, both the shortstop and the second baseman were KNOCKED OUT, but instead of sitting out they became live runners (just at the end of the line for the runners leaving from first). Some players were horrified that if they made a good play they could be knocked out if their counterpart dropped an easy throw. Personally, I liked it as it taught them that it doesn’t matter if one person makes half a play.
We got better with runners on base.
