Sunday, November 23, 2008

If you haven't had your butt beat, then you're not a good coach

Couple of great quotes from Pat Casey, the head baseball coach at Oregon State, in this month's issue of Scholastic Coach.

Coach Casey guided the Beavers to back-to-back College World Series titles in 2006 and 2007 despite losing seven starters, two starting pitchers, and an All-America closer after the '06 championship.

When he took over the OSU baseball program in 1995, the school had only qualified for the College World Series once (in 1952) in nearly 100 years of OSU baseball.

Here are Coach Casey's quotes from this article:

On what coaches can learn from their players:

"The biggest teachers of all are your players. You come to the field everyday trying to learn something from them and their response to you or how they react to it. If you’re not winning you better start looking at what you’re doing. And there are times when the personnel isn’t quite where you want it to be, but a lot of the time it comes down to what you’re doing."

On how failure leads to success:

"I always tell coaches, if you haven’t had your butt beat in this game, then you’re not a good coach. Because if you are a good coach, you’re going get to keep coaching and if you get to keep coaching, then you are going to get beat."