When I coached baseball, I put significant effort into making practice fun and interesting. Given my background in video games, I knew that how a player is introduced to a game is way more important affects how well they play the game. Does the player understand what is required of them? Do they understand the goal? Do they know how they will be measured? And most important of all, does the layer understand the skills the must master to win the game? Game developers put a lot of time and energy in making the skill requirements clear, obvious, and easy to learn. We want easy to pick up games that are challenging to master. Developers introduce players to the controls using a gentle progression. Psychologists call this a regiment of competency. Schools are set up this way. Students learn the fundamentals, and once mastered, they build upon those skills moving at the next level. Single-player video games do the same.

Baseball, in contrast, is an insanely complex game. Most kids are thrown into the sport with a random selection of skills to master all at once. Take the simple act of throwing a baseball. Most of the rest of the world starts with the feet. You kick something. Not Americans. We throw things: Footballs, basketballs, baseballs. The crazy complexity of tracking an object moving through space is hard. A soccer ball, in contrast, stays mostly on the ground. Young players can think two-dimensionally. Not so in baseball. Instead of a big round ball covered with black and white patterns to make it easier to track along the ground, kids are asked to stand in front of a small white rock traveling toward their face. What could go wrong?

Even I did not learn how to throw a baseball correctly until I was 32 years old. The only reason I learned how to do it was because I needed to teach it. You see, baseballs are not perfectly round. They have these weird, famously red threads called seams. Seams create ridges which interfere with the aerodynamics of the ball. In plain English, a baseball thrown carelessly or without skill will not fly straight. But in the hands of a master, a ball can dip, slide, curve, and sometimes fly straight.

It was here, throwing that oddly shaped ball that that most of us first learned how to "play" baseball, which is nearly always teamed up with the inverse but equally difficult skill of catching the baseball! Let's not forget that most kids start out with overly stiff leather gloves three sizes to big for them. Nothing about the way we present baseball to kids is easy for them to learn or master. Nevertheless, kids do learn, and they can learn quickly, if they get the right support. This is why I worked so hard to make practices fun and engaging. In contrast to the coaches I saw who kept kids standing around while they talked, our practices were like continuous motion machines. Kids ran from drill to drill getting as many repetitions as possible. For example, when my back yard was a "hitting camp" complete with 70 foot batting cage and not one but two pitching machines, we could have 7 kids safely swinging bats at the same time while five took a break or moved to the next drill. It was heaven.

Players enjoyed the stimulation of lots of activity and it gave the assistant coaches something to do. However, I noticed after a few practices that I could sort the players into two groups. It did not matter how old they were, or how talented. To look at the kids you would not be able to tell them apart, or assign one group to another. There were big kids, and little kids in each group. There were older kids, and younger kids on each side. Some had a lot of skill, others were still learning the basics. It took me a while to pin it down.

The thing that separated them appeared to be attitude. One group was absolutely fearless. They were enthusiastic, eager, and willing to try anything new. The other group, however, preferred to practice drills they had already mastered. I had adventurers and grinders, and I wasn't entirely sure what the difference was until we started to play real games. Competition revealed the defining trait.

My little adventure seekers were eager to compete. They charged into the breach. They hit the ball or struck out swinging. My grinders, in contrast, acted like deer in headlights. They stared at strikes down the middle of the plate, and when they struck it, it was always looking. I knew both groups of players wanted to win, but in the games, the grinders froze up.

I felt tempted to drop the grindy kids down in the lineup or move them to the outfield. Give "the better players" more opportunity. But I knew that would lead to a vicious cycle. Players who hit higher in the order get more plate appearances. More plate appearances means more chances to hit. More chances equals more practice. More practice leads to more improvement. More improvement results in batting higher in the order, and so it goes.

These kids were too young to be pigeonholed like that. I wanted to do something about it before I just gave up on them. Because the thing holding them back seemed to exist between their ears, I started to research the psychology of competition. I found a book by Carol Dweck, called Mindset. I will save you twelve hours of listening to it on Audible and give you the punch line. It turns out we humans can have two mindsets. One is called a fixed mindset, and the other is called a growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset fear challenges. People with a growth mindset embrace challenges. This, in a nutshell, was what I seemed to be observing with my players. But what was causing it and what could I do about it? Could I get all my players to have a growth mindset?

The answer was a definite maybe.

According to Professor Dweck, when a person (young or old) perceives their worth in a community comes from some attribute they have no control over, they enter a "Fixed Mindset". What do I mean by an attribute you don't control? Think of your intelligence, or your talent. Do you know how to spontaneously increase or decrease your talent? How about how smart you are? With no way to increase or improve the source their success, people (especially kids) become protective and cautious. They self-protect and stop taking chances. What puts a kid in a fixed mindset? Typically a compliment. It is usually given by a well-meaning adult who says something like, "you are a winner because you're so talented." The compliment feels good, but the player not associates their success with talent. And how do they control that? They want the praise, but they're not sure what to do to get it again. The same thing can happen in math class. A student gets a good score and an adult says, "You sure must be smart to get a good grade like that." As if their intelligence is the source of their positive outcome. But how do you control that? Adults mean well. They are trying to encourage the kids, but the method can be counter productive. The very thing earning the student, player, or child praise, also feels out of their control and that brings them stress.

Players with a fixed mindset play not to lose, instead of striving to win.

The counterpart to a fixed mindset is a growth mindset. Here too, adults prime kids into a growth mindset by use of praise. However, the praise is focused on a trait the child controls such as effort and hustle. Kids in a growth mindset enjoy a challenge. How is that possible? Because the players do not see their self-worth coming from the outcome of their effort, their self-worth is created by the effort. If you said to a kid, "You must have worked really hard to get such a good grade." You are now recognizing a success behavior (not an attribute). And kids can control their effort.

Once I learned about Mindsets, I could see how the adults (parents and coaches) were adversely affecting the players. I called a parent-player meeting. We sat in the stands behind the backstop, on a cool Arizona night before practice. I addressed the small crowd of twenty-odd people, getting down on one knee to look the players in the eye. I told them "make a fist" and the kids all made a fist. I looked at the parents. "You too." (You can play along too, go ahead. Make a fist!) Then I said, "Now, grip your fist as tight as you can. Squeeze really hard." Everyone made fists. Kids scrunched up their faces. I continued, "Now, let up about twenty-five percent." People relaxed a little. "Now let up halfway." More relaxed looks, arms appeared loose and comfortable. "Finally, let up until your fist is barely closed." I scanned around. Everyone was looking at me. "Now, open your hand." I stood up and dusted off my knee. "That people, is control. And from now on, we are only going to focus on behaviors we can control." I went on to explain that we did not want to praise talent, or intelligence, or any attribute that players did not know how to control. We could praise hustle. We could praise planning, thinking even, paying attention, taking a swing at a pitch. There were lots of things we could praise, but we would not praise attributes we had no control over.

I explained how all the adults, coaches, and parents had inadvertently mixed growth mindset encouragement and fixed mindset priming and how I believed it was hurting the boys' ability to compete. From now on, we would only praise behaviors the players could control, like effort, attention, and courage. I told them all, "Positive results came from deliberate effort applied at the edge of our ability. We get stronger from challenging ourselves."

Of course one meeting was not enough to change such entrenched behavior. Everyone struggled policing our praise, but we did it, eventually. We looked out for each other and supported each other. It took weeks, but the difference was remarkable. Now everyone on the team was doing their best, and my job as coach got even harder because at every position in the lineup players genuinely competed. We became one team, not two. We were a team of strivers. And all because we made it safe for our players to try their best.

When I coached, safetyism had not reached its full impact, but I could sense it coming. Safetyism is making safety the highest priority over all else, and in its extreme form, it may be more harmful than a fixed mindset. Young people are not given a chance to fail because it might hurt too much, and consequently they also learn not to try. It's better to stay in your basement playing video games. But kids need challenges to grow. That is one reason why I now love baseball. No matter how much I wanted to help my players, I could never step into the batter's box for them or take the field with them. It took me years to stop talking to them during at-bats. I wish I had done that much sooner. My job was to get them ready to play, then let them play.

But a collapse in the access to sports for most kids has deprived many children, and especially boys, from getting the chance to learn these lessons. According to the Aspen Institute, by 11 years old, 80% of kids fall out of team sports. And where do they end up? In video games. I love video games. I still play them. However, video games are only one part of a childhood. No video game can take the place of real-world physical challenges. Obviously, I am a fan of baseball, but there are also individual sports like golf, tennis, or martial arts. Even non-traditional challenges like ninja gyms can help our children learn how to develop a growth mindset. The children of our neighborhood team thrived when they challenged themselves.

Like batters at the top of the order who get more chances to improve, the more intentional we are as parents, coaches, educators, and stewards of youth can find to give kids growth challenges, the better prepared our children will be for life. They can become people who embrace challenge.

Teaching kids to face challenges with a growth mindset was one of the best lessons coaching baseball ever taught me.