After taking the car in for an inspection one day, you learn your brakes are no longer up to standard. They need to be replaced. While you’re not thrilled, especially since you’ve had the car for a short period of time, you pay for a mechanic to install a new set. After a few hours of labor and a couple hundred bucks, your brakes problem is now solved.
This is a classic example of a downstream problem-solving intervention. You’re not addressing something that creates problems. You're reacting to a problem. The car mechanic solved your problem, but he didn’t address the underlying issue that caused the brakes to fail in the first place: Poor driving habits.
Brand new cars don’t need new sets of brakes. They need drivers who can take care of them.
Now think about this situation as a coach: Are you spending the majority of your time reacting to problems downstream, or are you spending your time addressing the sources of those problems upstream?
Baseball coaches are no different than car mechanics in a lot of ways.
Just think about all the times your players have come to you after a stretch of bad games and either 1) their arm was hanging, 2) they forgot how to hit fastballs, or 3) they were freaking out because they dropped three places in the batting order. These are not upstream insights. They’re downstream issues that started with one bad performance. That performance ultimately compounded into two bad weeks.
Instead of shifting the focus upstream to the things that caused the problems (e.g. lack of training, poor habits, external pressure), our players got locked on the symptoms they saw downstream. They didn’t bother to look upstream until it was too late. By that time, they were smashing the panic button and you turned into their car mechanic.
Instead of working on strategies to prevent the problem in the first place, you had to come up with a solution for the damage that had already been done.
Just think about how much easier your job would be if you spent more time as an instructor and less time as a car mechanic…
Best of luck to our college summer guys this fall!
Over the next couple of weeks, players all across the country are going to be moving back into school. With them, they’ll take the training, experience, and knowledge they gained from you this past summer. If you successfully equipped them with:
Awareness for the issues they tend to run into
Tools and strategies to solve their common issues
The ability to have conversations with their coaches about the things they need to be successful
you’ll be able to do a lot more instructing this winter when you see them next. If you didn’t, however, you’re going to spend a lot more time as a car mechanic.
We’re always going to run into times where our athletes need a new set of “car brakes,” but we should strive to eliminate these situations as much as possible. The less time we focus on fixing the old, the more time we can invest into building the new.
ICYMI: Bridge the Gap 2021 is back this November!
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