I've been finding myself thinking more and more: "what can I give these kids?" — standing in front of dozens of elementary schoolers every week.

I coach my son's youth baseball team. Starting next year, I'm also taking on the role of team operations director, and my weekends remain as busy as ever.

The operations director manages weekly scheduling, team-wide communication, carpooling and umpiring coordination, accounting, equipment procurement, and much more — an impressively broad set of responsibilities (deep respect to the people who've done this before me...).

In the past, all of this was managed over LINE (Japan's dominant messaging app). Since I knew that system wouldn't work for me, I've already built tools to automate much of it. I'll write about that somewhere else.

Today I want to document my coaching philosophy — how I approach working with dozens of elementary schoolers, including my own sons.

The Manager's Direction Is King

  • The foundational premise: the team's coaching philosophy follows the manager. My role as a coach is to act as a follower — maximizing the manager's direction
  • My understanding of the manager's philosophy, roughly: "raise the standard of what's normal, and aim for victory by naturally expressing that high standard." Greetings, preparation, cleanup, calling out, running to and from positions — the idea is that raising the baseline of these fundamentals, combined with building basic baseball skills and standards, ultimately translates into competitive strength
  • I digest this philosophy in my own way, and I regularly check in with the manager to understand what he's intending to communicate in his daily instruction and remarks. This year there are many parent coaches, and the manager is relying on us more, so opportunities for dialogue should increase

Foundational Athletic Ability Is Queen

  • With the manager's direction as King, I see foundational athletic ability as Queen — in the sense that it builds a base for the kids' sporting lives going forward
  • The manager's specific mission for me personally: improve the physical capacity and baseline athletic ability of the team. I design and lead a roughly 45-minute program every session. I wrote about this in a previous article
  • The physical program is an area where I can apply my own knowledge and experience, so I've been given a lot of latitude here. The current focus: hip and pelvic mobility, and building the ability to move with correct posture
  • Watching the kids' movements visibly change has been genuinely exciting

Catching What the Manager Misses

  • As a coach, the moments that most need my attention are the ones the manager's eyes and words can't reach
  • The typical example: when the manager is giving 1-on-1 instruction to one player, the other kids are effectively unsupervised. I judge whether what the manager is telling that player should be shared with the whole team — and when it should be, I broadcast it. Technical corrections about an individual's habits or weaknesses stay with that player, but behavioral norms that apply to everyone — like how to project your voice, or how to run properly — I share without hesitation
  • The same applies to younger players losing focus on the bench during a game. I encourage them and help them follow the game, rather than letting them drift. Sometimes kids even wander over to talk to the manager mid-game, so I try to proactively engage before that happens
  • Helping players who are reluctant to help set up or clean up before and after practice falls into the same category. This is part of the "social standards the team expects" — it ties directly to what the manager is trying to build, and I want to convey it clearly

Feedback Philosophy

  • Spending time with today's kids, I notice many of them aren't used to critical feedback or correction. Talking with their parents confirms it — there are quite a few families that deliberately avoid giving strong feedback
  • At the same time, since these kids are putting in effort to play on this team, I want them to take something back from the experience — some form of human growth. Not just my own sons
  • So my approach is to give clear feedback on behavior that affects team discipline. I aligned on this with the manager in a recent conversation
  • Not running full speed, not calling out, not watching teammates' plays — I address these in the moment and prompt improvement
  • There will be disagreement about this. But reflecting on my own life, the strongest feedback I received as a student has had the most lasting effect. My favorite phrase: "make yourself the subject." There's so much I wouldn't have realized if no one had said anything
  • Because of this experience, I see withholding feedback as an expression of indifference. If you care about these kids, you should tell them — that's my stance
  • That said, how I deliver feedback is adjusted based on the individual and the situation. I'm especially careful with younger and newer players. The right words are different for every kid, and timing matters too. There's no formula here, and I'm genuinely wrestling with it

Feedback and Recognition as a Pair

  • Follow-up after feedback is something I pay as much attention to as the feedback itself. When a player I corrected demonstrates good behavior in the next opportunity, I don't miss it — I call it out. Correction and recognition always come as a pair
  • Because many in this generation aren't used to negative feedback, correction alone tends to leave them simply deflated. Pairing it with recognition means the correction lands as "expectation" rather than "attack"
  • "You did the thing I told you about" — that one line, present or absent, makes an enormous difference to how much of the feedback actually gets absorbed

Navigating Distance With My Son

  • I pay careful attention to how I manage the distance with my own son. I consciously separate my role as a coach from my role as his father
  • I don't treat him as special within the team. By the same token, I don't hold him to a harsher standard just because he's my son. I hold him to the same standard as everyone else
  • That said, I'm still his parent — when he makes a good play in a game, I'll quietly praise him or give him a fist bump when no one's watching. Because I'm his dad.

Relationships Among the Kids

  • I try not to intervene much in the kids' relationships with each other
  • The team spans multiple grade levels and has close bonds without much hierarchy. The kids seem to have built good relationships on their own. I trust them more than over-managing it
  • The fact that they're forming good relationships independently is itself, I think, an extension of the "high standards" the manager is aiming for

Writing all this out, what I'm really trying to do comes down to one thing: give these kids the experience of throwing themselves fully into baseball, as a team. Not the technique (which I honestly don't fully know) or the wins and losses — but the experience of being part of a team that plays seriously and with everything they have. If something from that experience carries forward after they leave this team, that will be more than enough reward for a coach.