Ripple: Building a Team
My Little League baseball coach, Mr. Keohane, passed away recently at the age of 97. I wrote this reflection about him a few months before he passed away:
I was on the phone with my father a few months ago and he shared that he just spent a couple hours visiting my Little League baseball coach, Joe Keohane. Mr. Keohane started coaching his own son in the early 1970's and just kept coaching the same team in my hometown until he was almost 90. I was lucky enough to play for him in 1983 (and again in 1984) when he saw me at tryouts and made a beeline to my father to ask him to be his assistant coach (so he could circumvent the draft process). Mr. Keohane was unbelievably competitive, but you would never know it. He understood the importance of every person on a team, leveraging the strengths of his players, trusting the learning process and the benefits of hard work for long term success over immediate victories, the importance of deliberate practice, and treating everyone based on their individual needs. He also had a tremendous capacity for empathy. Over 50 years of coaching 11 and 12 year olds, his Twins teams would end up winning the championship almost half of the seasons he coached. His last year coaching a couple years ago he was at least 15 years older than both his assistant coaches, who were both over 65.
I'm sure he didn't realize it, he probably still doesn't, but his practices were those of a master teacher. After warm-ups, he would start with a quick mini-instruction for the whole team. Then we would move to stations of some sort, and he would take individuals aside to give them specific things to work on, and simultaneously learn about his players. He always spent the majority of focus working with the weaker players on the team, giving them opportunities to grow at every position on the field, encouraging them but also expecting them to improve through repetition and specific goals. One player having trouble with ground balls would have a different goal as the player who keeps taking his eye off the ball while batting. The assistant coaches focused on the stronger players on the team. With the stronger players he would spend his time working on how to be great leaders on the team and explaining why he would make decisions, and keep those players focused on seeing the results of hard work and focusing on improving one thing a day. By focusing on the process, inevitably by the time the playoffs rolled around his teams would win, again and again. The weaker players worked hard because they knew they weren't relegated to right field or the bench, they knew they were important. The stronger players understood the value of everyone on the team, and so stayed positive and inclusive of all their teammates. Inevitably, everyone on the team would contribute. I guarantee Dan B remembers making a game-winning catch in the playoffs, when he started the season wearing his glove on the wrong hand.
Mr. Keohane understood everyone's strengths, and leveraged those strengths in his coaching. He soon learned that even though I may have had the strongest arm on the team, something was getting in the way of being able to actually throw a strike (the fact that I hit several opposing players contributed to this realization). Instead, he helped me focus on the strengths in my game and maximized my strengths to help the team, and be the best that I could be (just not a pitcher).
I'm not sure anyone can ever really know the breadth of their effect on the world, but I do know that the lessons on learning and leadership that I learned playing for the Twins when I was a kid have indirectly made a positive impact on all the people I have been lucky enough to lead (and coach) throughout the course of my own life.
