Virginie-Western coach Steve Sabins (left) shows how Sam White at home earlier this season in Morgantown. (Photo by Kevin Kinder / Bluegoldnews.com)
Morgantown – We think of a baseball coach – or a manager, as he is known in major leagues – as a man whose main function is to manage a ball game.
Who starts where? Who beats where in the line? What is the right time to change launchers? Should the striker have a blow or a race?
But a coach or a manager is much more than a strategist.
He lives today and lives for tomorrow. He is a teacher and a parent. He is a psychologist and disciplinary. It is hard and it is soft. He prohibits and forgive.
His work goes from Dawn to Darkness, always a game just behind him, a game to come and in his hands is the future not only of himself and his familiar, but of those who play for him, while being under the critical eye of the media and a flying audience who encourages him with each victory and cursed him for each defeat.
Steve Sabins spent a decade of training in Virginia-Western, but it is the first year as a manager. To date, it has only been just a lift upwards upwards, but his season has reached a critical moment when he tries to put away a regular season Big 12, to prepare the eye conference tournament towards a regional berth in the NCAA and, hopefully, a super regional series and, while it is, dreaming of leading the school to Omaha and the world series.
At the same time, he tries to keep his team on the right track, first in a group, but just as important as individuals, each with different needs that must be filled, with different Egos and different attitudes, a new challenge almost every hour.
Allow him to make us browse these challenges this last weekend, which started with a difficult loss in which he was ejected for the first time as a manager, where he was injured in his team and where he guided the difficult points to win two of the three games.
Amount
While Virginia-Western entered the weekend, they had just lost two consecutive games for the first time this season, led the Big 12 by three games and the speech was more openly directed towards the post-season, which he understands is better served by suspension until the first job is finished.
Can he defend such a speech now?
“As soon as you try to defend something you are not the owner, you just get kicked up,” Sabins said. “This is the truth. Try to play anything at a high level while being tight or tense. It is not fun, first of all, and when you do, you are worse. The only option, strangely, is not to worry and put yourself in this state of mind and to recognize how cool it is that we are even in this situation to start.”
You see, they are mounted on this elevator on the ground floor. New coach. Their best player, JJ Wetheholt, left for a professional career. Uncertain pitch.
He understands that a 39-7 record shouts success, but he prefers to whisper him for nothing has been settled.
He sold his players on this approach.
“They are not really focused on the results and do not fall into this syndrome of us will do this or are qualified for that,” he said. “They are wired that no matter what's going on around them, they feel that they need to improve. This is why we are in this position. ”
They take a match, a stick, a throw at a time. This first two -game game sequence was a test and they passed it.
“We lose against Marshall and we lose the first match against Texas Tech, but when we enter this second game, nobody thought we had to win this match. No one was panicking,” said Sam White, second goal player. “If you continue to look forward and keep worrying about the past, it will eat you alive. Concentrate just on the next game and control what we can control.”
No, they hadn't played their best ball, but Sabins was not worried about how they would react to that.
“I think I went how they will react,” he said. “In the role of a coach, you always think you have a big piece of the way he will react. Is it like a search for what we are going to do and how to supervise the situation before the match? Who are you going to contact with?
“I always believe that they will answer and that they are able to answer and they obviously have nothing to make me think the opposite. You don't expect it, but you are never surprised. ”
Winning this second match was crucial to reset, then on Sunday, they played their best baseball for a long time.
“Even if we win, it was as if we were in a dog fight and a kind of evacuation,” said Sabins about the recent stretch of the ball. “It was a little Grindy, but today it was as if we were playing earlier in the conference season.”
On Saturday, Reese Basinger came out of the enclosure of the lifts due to an early injury to the starting launcher and launched seven hells of relief to win his sixth victory of the season.
“A victory is a victory. We are 43 fairly gritty guys. Each game of the victory column is good. Just here, where he says 39, that does not say how we won, he simply says that we won. I could abandon six lines of line in a row and if they are a victory.” There are always things we have to work on after a victory.
Cook a solution
There are always things to solve and these are not always things you practice.
Sabins decided on Saturday that he would stick to a basinger for as long as he could and that meant that Chase Meyer had not been able to relieve himself. Then Vecut on Sunday, they released a laundering of Jack Kartsonas and Carlton Estridge, bypassing Meyer again, an annoyed type player who is impatiently awaiting each rescue assignment and was crucial in what WVU did.
“We haven't been there with Meyer a ton,” said Sabins. “He is so precious for the team and won as many games as one of the big horses of the lift enclosure, so I even talked to him after the match. I told him that I knew he wanted to be in the game and I wanted to put it, but detailed, it didn't make sense, so I had to have this guy at home for a steak dinner.”
Yes, a coach must sometimes play Cook and Host too.
He will find a way to get it to launch a round against Pittsburgh and be quick to play it this weekend in the Big 12 game against Kansas State in the last series of conferences of the season.
Face failure
The circumstances brought Sabins to juggle his staff. The first year student Gavin Kelly in the Pittsburgh region is listed on the list as a receiver and plays the outside field, but when the second goal player Sam White injured in the shoulder and could not play defensively, Sabins moved Kelly in this role about a month ago.
It is hardly his main position, but he did an acceptable job but had a difficult period in the loss of Saturday and needed someone to let him know that he was appreciated.
That someone was Sabins.
“He did well,” said Sabins after the second match on Saturday. “There were ups and downs. Sometimes, for a first -year student, you eat a sandwich. He did not do much, but he said that he had changed his mentality to play defense in defense at the offense on the defense.
“He started to think:” Strike me the ball. ” I want to make this game. I said to him, “Why do you think you stayed in the game after the disorder you have made of defense in this game?” He said he didn't know why.
“I can either leave you in it and you can understand it, or I can simply remove a superstar from the programming and things get worse, so that makes no sense. Even if you think you spent the worst day defensively of your career, you have had two double games and ended up winning the game.
“There is no one who turns the double game better, no one who has a better arm and can do it, so even the worst day, he helps us win an important game.”
