Sometimes cutting a player is the best thing for everyone
Last week teams here in Oregon held their 2022 high school baseball tryouts and first week of practices. As most of you know, tryouts are a weird feeling for most of us: we’re excited because they mark the official start of the season, but we also know that it means we’ll probably have to look a few kids in the eyes (please, don’t post lists) and tell them they won’t make the team.
But sometimes, that’s exactly what’s best for everyone, even if it doesn’t feel like it in the moment.
I shared about this in a tweet last week (after having to cut a couple of players), and received a ton of responses. Among them were quite a handful of replies and DMs about student-athletes who were cut from one sport, only to have that propel them to fall in love with something else.
Those responses reminded me of Anthony, a young man we cut from the baseball team.
We generally keep 14 players on each roster, with some exceptions. Back in 2018, we had a talented group of freshmen and ended up needing to send quite a few home. Anthony was among them. Up until that point in his life, baseball was his thing, so when we had to serve as the bearers of bad news, he was pretty sad.
He opted to continue trying to play baseball, so he decided to take the route we usually recommend: go out for track and field to stay in shape and build relationships while simultaneously working on baseball. Then, play summer ball on our high school summer team and see how it goes.
Along the way, though, there was a bump in the road. One that completely changed his life.
As it turned out, he was good at track and field. I mean good at track AND field, to the point where he fell madly in love with it and became a decathlete. When we got close to June that year, I reached out to him about playing summer ball, and he had zero desire to play because he realized that he liked baseball, but loved track and field.
There are a million stories like that.
Point is, if you know a player isn’t going to play and likely has very limited potential to ever get playing time (sometimes we have kids show up who have literally never swung a bat before), cutting them is actually a net positive for the team AND for them.
