The Leadership Lesson I Only Learned Standing Behind a Dugout Fence

By Floyd Rembert, Marietta, GA

Every Kid Needs a Different Kind of Push

I have coached youth baseball since 2011, and the biggest surprise was not about baseball at all. It was about people.

Put ten eight-year-olds on a field and you will meet ten different kids who need ten different things from you. One kid needs you to raise your voice a little so he knows you mean it. Another kid will shut down completely if you do the same thing. One needs praise out loud, in front of the team. Another would rather you pull him aside quietly so nobody else hears it.

For a long time I thought good coaching meant having one clear system and applying it consistently. Consistency matters, but I learned that consistency is about your values, not your delivery. You can hold every kid to the same standard of effort and respect while talking to each of them in a completely different way.

That is the part nobody tells you before you start coaching. It is also the part that changes how you lead anyone, on a field or off it.

Watching, Not Just Teaching

When I started coaching, I spent most of my time talking. Explaining the right grip, the right stance, the right way to read a pitch. Talking felt like coaching.

What actually moved kids forward was watching. Watching how a kid reacted after a strikeout told me more than any conversation could. Did he get quiet? Did he get angry? Did he look over at his parents? Each reaction pointed to a different thing he needed from me in that moment.

Leadership in any setting works the same way. The instinct is to lead by explaining more, correcting more, directing more. The better instinct is to pay attention first. Most people will show you exactly what they need if you slow down enough to notice.

Confidence Is Built in Small Repetitions

You cannot talk a kid into confidence. I have tried. It does not work.

Confidence comes from small, repeated wins that a kid can feel for himself. A clean catch. A good throw. A base hit after three strikeouts the week before. My job is less about motivational speeches and more about setting up situations where a kid can succeed in a small way, then noticing it out loud when he does.

That lesson applies well beyond baseball. People do not become confident because someone tells them they are capable. They become confident because they do something hard, it works, and someone they respect points that out to them. Leadership is often just engineering enough small wins and making sure they get noticed.

Accountability Without Shame

A missed ground ball is going to happen. A dropped third strike is going to happen. How I respond to that moment sets the tone for everything else that season.

I hold kids accountable, but I try to separate the mistake from the kid. A player misses a play, we talk about what to do differently next time, and then we move on. There is no lingering on it, no making an example of it in front of the team.

That same separation matters with adults. Holding someone accountable for a result is not the same as making them feel small for missing it. The first builds trust. The second just teaches people to hide their mistakes from you, which is the opposite of what accountability is supposed to do.

Perseverance Is Modeled, Not Lectured

Youth baseball has a lot of losing in it. A lot of strikeouts, a lot of errors, a lot of games that do not go the way anyone hoped. If I get frustrated and show it, the team absorbs that frustration. If I stay steady, win or lose, the team learns that steadiness is possible even when things go wrong.

Kids do not learn perseverance from a speech about perseverance. They learn it from watching an adult stay composed after a bad inning and show up just as prepared the next week. That is the whole lesson, repeated often enough that it becomes normal.

What Carries Over

I did not expect coaching to teach me anything about leading people in a professional setting. I expected it to be about baseball fundamentals and nothing more.

What it actually taught me is that leadership is mostly about attention, patience, and consistency of character rather than consistency of method. Different people need different things from you. Your job is to notice what that is, stay steady regardless of the outcome, and give people enough small wins that they start to believe in themselves without being told to.

That is true on a baseball field with a group of kids. It is just as true anywhere else people are counting on you to lead them well.