by Richard Todd, WebBall Head Coach

Perry Husband spent over two years researching over a million data points on pitcher-hitter match-ups and testing his conclusions with players and teams, before publishing his program for effective velocity.

Ron Wolforth and his wife, scrimped and struggled to open and keep their first facility going before finally cracking the nut on pitcher conditioning and the new mechanical/training paradigm that has helped him bring 90 of his students to the 90 mph mark and get well over 50 drafted. (That's so far, more news to follow.) They also committed tens of thousands of dollars and countless sleepless nights in the effort to make their approach to reaching people successful, not to mention the educated risk in opening the Texas Baseball Ranch miles from Houston.

Tom Hanson spent immeasurable time trying to blend his business psychology model with his past experience as a college coach before developing his "confidence conditioning" and subsequent programs that proved the true value of mental training.

I can also think of countless coaches and instructors who have toiled in relative obscurity, often starting in a volunteer capacity, before finally seeing the results of their labors.

And my own story is similar - years as a volunteer coach before turning WebBall into a viable web portal for baseball knowledge and baseball products.


Does that mean every volunteer coach should expect to some day be rewarded? Probably not.

No more than every young player who picks up a bat will become starting first basemen for the Twins, or shortstop for the Yankees.

But the other side of this is also true. No growth in baseball is possible without a strong base of volunteer coaches and supporters, aided by new moms and dads who come in every year to keep teams going and feed the beast of amateur baseball. And many of those do become life-long volunteers. I myself continue to coach as a volunteer, but how much longer I can keep that up is hard to say.

The catch, however, comes when a coach or instructor (such as Ron, or Perry, or Tom, or many others) decides that baseball is more than a passion, more than a hobby, and it becomes the thing that could put food on the table.

This usually doesn't happen overnight. I myself know many who work at least part-time on day jobs, then work long evenings and weekends in baseball. But once the final transition is made, it is seldom with any expectation of making a fortune, but rather seeing an opportunity to realize a legitimate return on their knowledge - gained over many years.

Kudos to them.


However, something needs to be made clear. Only the best deserve the opportunity. And it's important to distinguish between coaches who get paid because they expect to be paid, and those who are paid because of the extra value they bring to a team.

Likewise, many instructors - in fact many instructional facilities - fail very quickly, within two years, because a) they did not understand their responsibility or b) they simply had no good business sense.

The "b" failures don't interest me. They have failed for reasons that have nothing to do with baseball - poor market savvy, bad cash-flow management, struggles with assistant instructors, etc.

But the 'a" failures really do matter. Those instructors failed because they did not do the job ...did not improve their students performance ...did not understand the expectations of moms and dads to get a good return on their instructional investment ...did not even keep their athletes in the program long enough to really do some good. Basically they served as glorified babysitters, tossed some balls, watched some swings, but mostly watched the clock.

So, in this article, the focus - and the assumption - is that we are talking about coaches better than average, and instructors who really do know their stuff, and do deserve to be compensated for the help they provide.


If we believe - and I do - that quality instruction/coaching needs to be funded - the question is where, how and by whom?

I'd like to suggest that right now too many groups of parents, in too many teams, are poorly allocating their financial resources to too many games and not enough training.

There should come a time in every team's life when they need to decide something fundamentally important...

• Should we raise the many $$$ required to take the team to yet one more tournament where we play 4 time-shortened games, and give everyone maybe 20 at-bats and 20 innings in the field?
  
• Or should we take those same funds and put them into improving our ballplayers - by paying for the coaches to get more training, or paying more guest instructors to come teach us ...so that the next time the team competes, it will be with the potential for a much better result.

My point is that while volunteerism must be lauded, and must be encouraged, do we have our heads on straight when we play more than we train? And if we are lucky enough to work with a coach who is willing to give some of his time, should we automatically assume all of his time is available to us free?


I think volunteerism deserves more credit than it sometimes gets. It is through that effort (whether intentional or unavoidable), that insights first come to the forefront from people like Ron, Perry, Tom and others. It really is how we keep improving the game.

But we also have to maintain baseball as a community recreational activity. And we, therefore, have to give volunteer coaches their start. Yet we need to accept that, especially in the upper tiers, volunteerism is not enough.

• There has to be some mechanism by which those who learn the most, who become the best, can earn some credit for time spent - even if they don't all open training facilities.
• We also have to recognize the challenges faced by parents and players who want to be part of baseball yet confront the wall of affordability.

No, volunteerism must exist.

But I think that standards for expense remuneration could be set, and perhaps tax credits issues for "time served". It might not seem the best time, given the current economic crunch, to suggest such a thing. But I am afraid that if we don't, we will lose precious years, and baseball will lose more numbers.

That said, this is but one perspective.

WebBall should soon be launching a Nose 2 Nose survey that will include the idea of volunteerism tax credits, while also looking at the challenges of training/playing, free/paid, etc.