Better Men, Better Ballplayers

96: John Fitzpatrick - Indianola HS (IA)

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Jon Fitzpatrick Notes

 

Bio

    • Current Assistant AD and Head Baseball coach at Indianola High School in Indianola, Iowa
      • Starting 2nd season (30-11)
  • Below .500 year before
  • Kasey Blake, Brady Blake is junior
  • Former Head Baseball Coach at Martensdale St. Marys (public school)
    • 10 years, 12 years total 
  • Part of 88 win streak as an assistant coach (under Justin Dehmer)
  • 9 of 10 years as state finalist 
  • Ethan Westfall played professionally (Rockies)
  • 3rd year as a Mental performance coach
    • Author of Don’t Shoot the Young Buck: Living in the Present Moment
    • Worked with 3 college teams - Concordia, Central College, Simpson College
    • Multiple High school teams in all sports
    • Provides 1 on 1 coaching to many athletes

     

    Notes

    • The mental game is a separator
  • Brian Cain total immersion
  • Mental minute at the beginning of practice
    • Awareness, strategy, action
  • Build in routines during practice
  • Practice green lights, yellow lights, red lights
  • Release routine - physical, breath, self talk
  • Practice striking out
  • End of practice journal - well, better, how or start, stop, continue to reflect on themselves, the team.
  • Well, better, how for more of a weekly to kick start your week
  • Start, stop, continue post game to get us closer to where we want to be at the end of the year
  • Does the kids thinking align with the coaching staff thoughts 
  • APE - Attitude/Appearance, perspective/preparation, energy/effort
  • Be clark kent and turn into superman when you get to the ball field and change into your uniform. Journaling post game helps them turn back from Superman to clark kent
  • APE - stuffed animal to visualize APE
  • Signal lights 
    • Green lights - GO! When things are going smooth, 
  • Yellow lights - caution - pump the brakes or speed up through the light
  • Red light - STOP or you will crash
  • Recognize as respond to get back to green light
  • What does our body language look like in green lights?
  • How does that change when adversity hits?
  • Where is our focus?
  • What does our self talk?
    • Have kids write it down
  • Release language
    • Get big - take a deep breath on a focal point, 
  • GOOD
  • SO what!
  • First place to start with team was signal lights, then build routines based on those lights
  • Shadow bullpens - no ball, just visualize, and lost in a routine
  • Leadership drives culture, culture drives behavior, behavior leads to results (performance pathway)
  • Go from coach fed leadership, to player led leadership
  • Created 4 key principles to culture
    • PETE - process, energy/effort, trust, excellence
  • Define each of the principles
  • What you do on the daily basis will get you the results
  • Everything we talk about in baseball goes way beyond the field
  • Person, student, and player and what is “above the line” and define it, there is no grey area
  • “Was that above the line or below the line?” simple question to ask and hold each other accountable to
  • Carving out time every single day
  • What is driving your program? What are those things we are going to be really good at?
  • What are your core values? What do they look like on the field
  • Signal lights
  • Strategies to handle signal lights
  • 3-8 hitting chart - hard hit ball chart
    • Defined each number of hard hit and find out which numbers you hit when you are going good
  • What works best for you, and then get really good at that!
  • Pitchers first pitch % (60-67%), and quality innings
  • Figure out what pitcher is really good at and what they need to go with in certain situation
  • A3P - After 3 pitches is the ball in play or is it a 1-2 count?  
    • Pitching is about being efficient due to pitch counts
  • 2 out of 3 - 67% of at bats
  • Reverse engineer what we want from our program
    • Graduate
  • State championship
    • Get to the park
  • Win sub state
  • host/win a district
  • Win the conference
  • Go 1-0 today
  • Everyone has that same goal, how are you going to get there?  How are you going to separate yourself?
  • www.coachfitzpatrick.com
  • 515-339-5490
  • Twitter - @Fitzpatrick_MP
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