For my internship at Longwood University as a Sociology major was to help coach the Longwood Baseball team. My internship was primarily to help manage the bullpen during the games. I had played for the Longwood Baseball team for 4 years prior so I had a pretty good base of knowledge to be able to do my job. I also helped the coaching staff connect more with the players and helped players with conflicts or issues with being able to connect with a lot of the guys they had played with in the past. Since there was a new coaching staff they also wanted to know the team dynamic from years past and how they were improving through social and cultural changes in the team and I would give positive feedback on the current situation at hand. 

My job was to be there for every game and use a walkie talkie to communicate with the pitching coach and the head coach who they wanted to warm up and go to the game. Then to communicate to the player that was supposed to go in the game how long they had to warm up and which players they would be facing when they would go in the game to pitch. Then after they had warmed up and were ready I would radio down to the coach to let him know the player was ready to go in the game. Another one of my jobs was to work with the catchers before the games to help them warm and do drills to be able to be ready to play that day and to help improve throughout the season. Another job was to help the coaches when the team in/out before the game which is pretty much just ground balls to the players to warm up before the game. But overall I spent a lot of the time getting to know the players throughout the year. With going on road trips and being with the team for 4 days a week on the road traveling to different universities. Most of our games were on the road this year which comes with a couple extra responsibilities such as making sure the pitching machine is set up for bp before the game and making sure there was no trash left in the bullpen after each game. 

During and before the games you are there for many hours and a lot of the hours is sitting around and talking with the players. This would include mindset and also what they thought of different things in the world around them and really getting to know them which allows you to be a better coach when you make connections with the players and who they are besides just a baseball player. One of the things I found myself talking about the most would be the culture of the program and how it was going in the right direction with two of the older players on the team. We would talk about what we thought about different situations and I would try to give them guidance on how to handle different things that would happen throughout the course of the year. We would talk about ways to get everyone on board with what the coach was saying. This part of baseball would differentially tie into different sociology classes I have taken where we have learned about social norms and people following the majority. So I would try to bring that into my ideas while discussing with the players how to make everyone work and buy into the program. Another big part of the game of baseball is mental. The game is full of failures and keeping players morale up is tough at times due to the nature of the game. My job as a coach and ex teammate of most of these guys is to help them work through their struggles and would try to point out the good and always be encouraging to the guys.  Using what I had learned in the classroom with giving people positive reinforcement and good in a society should bring out the best in people. Another thing that I would try to do was to help the young guys on the team make good choices and would tell them about players I had played with in the past and made bad choices and would tell them about the consequences that followed for those players. I would tie that into the device class I had with learning about different bad acts or things seen out of the cultural norm. In baseball it is very important to stay in the program’s cultural norm and if you go outside there will be consequences. This was all to help some of the younger guys make the correct choices on and off the field with some of the experiences of the past I have witnessed to change for the better and not make the same mistakes as players had in the past. To help them learn from others’ mistakes so that they can be better on and off the field.

Some of the key takeaways I have from my experience is mainly to be positive that being negative creates more problems and also makes the ones around you negative also. That  when being positive it feeds off on others and helps change the culture as a whole. Also learning the importance of a winning culture at a baseball program shows how it takes more than talent and hard work to win. It takes the little things and the teammates around you to buy into being able to achieve success, something none of the teams I had played for in the past years in college could ever do. I have also learned alot from the head coach Coach Ox. He has been a great leader and has also taught me alot about baseball and life and how to attack each day. What he has taught me the most is how to handle situations during a game with coaching with true emotion and not turning it off and on but staying true to yourself. I think this is one of the biggest things for a coach to be is to stay themselves and not be someone different each day. When you are yourself your players will connect with you and they will know what they are getting on a daily basis when you open up them they will open up also and allow communication to go back and forth and make the program continue to improve. 

Overall I have learned alot this year from the different coaches on the staff and the different players that I was unable to learn during my playing days. It has also given me a new enjoyment in baseball. Before I started this internship I wanted to stay as far away from baseball as possible but when I got the offer from Coach Ox to come out and help I thought I should give it another try. I had come to Longwood to play for Coach Ox  but he had left for a new job by the time I got here so when he returned I thought I would give it a shot to try to get back into baseball again.  I am very happy I did because it has changed my outlook on life and baseball and has turned me into not just a better coach but a better person also. It has helped me forget about the past of the injuries, losses, frustrations,  and failures but to see baseball in a positive way  and help me get back to loving the game I had grown up loving. This internship has gone by pretty easy for me since my playing days. I was a catcher and a pitcher so I knew a good deal about both so it was easy to help out both positions as a coach. Overall from the internship I have learned alot from the social interactions of the player coach relationship and the importance of a good one built on openness and the truth to be able to succeed on and off the field.