Perpetuating Mediocrity

In our local paper the other day there was an article about a former star baseball player from one of the local high schools who had played 13 or 14 years in the minor leagues and was just named a manger of a minor league team. In the article it was made to sound that his main qualification was that he was a good baseball man, never rocked the boat. This to me is an example of why sports like baseball make very little progress. Now is the time of the year that baseball teams are hiring coaching staffs for their player development/minor leagues, it is also the time when football coaches are being fired and new ones hired. If you watch it closely you will see it is a repeating process of recycling the same people into new jobs to repeat the same mistakes they made in their last job. No new ideas, no innovation, just hire friends and people they are comfortable with. Never break the mold. It is interesting to note that John Wooden said that one of the reasons he won his first championship in 1964 was that he went outside the family so to speak and hired an assistant with different ideas, the result, the famous UCLA Zone press the cornerstone of their championship teams. It is hard to get out of a comfort zone, but that is the only to innovate and make progress.

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Vern Gambetta

Director at Gambetta Sports Training Systems

Vern is the Director of Gambetta Sports Training Systems. He has been the a conditioning coach for several MLS teams as well as the conditioning consultant to the US Men's World Cup Soccer team. Vern is the former Director of Conditioning for the Chicago White Sox and New York Mets. He has lectured and conducted clinics in Canada, Japan, Australia and Europe and has authored six books and over one hundred articles related to coaching and sport performance in a variety of sports. He has a BA in teaching with a coaching minor and an MA in Education with an emphasis in physical education from Stanford University.