Somebody Has to Keep Score

The first thing I got rid of was the meter.

Most baseball training is sold like a cab ride, by the session, with the clock running. It looks fair, and it quietly ruins everything it touches. The family rations reps, because every swing has a price on it. The instructor gets paid when the player comes back, which is a different event from the player getting better. And the player learns that development is something you buy in half-hour pieces, like a haircut.

So we built a membership facility. You belong, you show up as often as the work requires, and nobody consults a wallet before taking another round. I did not do it to be generous. Getting good at baseball takes an unreasonable number of repetitions, and a pricing model that punishes repetition is at war with its own product.

Once the meter was gone we could see the real problem, which had nothing to do with money.

The teenagers, college players and pros who walk into our building are the most carefully encouraged athletes in history. They grew up in the look-at-me years. When a kid was about to get cut, a parent started a new team, so nobody got cut. When a tournament produced too many losers, it added divisions until everybody went home with hardware.

They were told they were good, and they were told it right up until the game got hard, at which point the adults who had done the telling had nothing left to say.

I do not blame the players. They are not soft, they are untested, which is a different condition and a curable one. Nobody lied to them out of malice. We mistook protecting a kid from losing for preparing him to win, and those turn out to be opposite projects.

So the place we built is old school and new school at once, and I mean both halves. The old school half is that we keep score. There is a board, your name is on it, and so is everyone else's. You will lose in public, regularly, to people you like. The new school half is everything wrapped around that: the technology that shows you exactly why you lost, a program built for where you are, and a room full of people who are expected to pull for you. We call it competitively supportive.

Each half is useless alone. Competition without support is a meat grinder, and my generation remembers those. Support without competition is a participation trophy with a monthly fee.

Together they make the one thing these players were never given, an honest environment, where the number on the board is true and the people around you are still in your corner after you have read it.

In my experience they do not wilt. They lean in, hard, like people who have waited years for someone to take them seriously.

The generation that was told it was good, turned out to be one that wanted to find out for themselves.