Episode #35: Chris "Skip" Hanks

Chris "Skip" Hanks has been the Head Baseball Coach at Colorado Mesa University for past 31 years.  This future Hall of Famer's coaching career includes 21 National Tournament appearances, four Division II World Series appearances, 12 RMAC Coach of the Year honors, and five Regional Coach of the Year awards.  In 2019 and 2021, he was named the National Coach of the Year by the College Baseball News Writers Association.  If that’s not enough for you, he has a career record of 1069 wins to only 413 losses.  He’s 1 of 8 coaches to lead his teams to over a 1000 victories in the history of D2 baseball!

Coach has mentored 30+ players who have been drafted by MLB teams including a World Series Champion (Sergio Romo).  He presently has 2 former players on MLB rosters, one at AAA, two at AA and a couple at A-Ball.  If you are one of those people who think you have to play D1 to become a professional, Coach Hanks is proof in the pudding that it is more than possible.

We had a great conversation about youth, high school and travel ball, college recruiting, and what we would to if we could re-build youth baseball from scratch and start over.  Enjoy!

Learn more about Skip Hanks here:  https://cmumavericks.com/staff-directory/chris-hanks/49

Transcript

0:00

Welcome back to the significant coaching podcast. I'm. Coach Matt Rogers, if you've been a consistent follower of the podcast, you know, I get a little extra geeky when I get to talk baseball and I. I was real geeky for this episode because I got to chat with one of the best baseball. Baseball coaches. In the history of the game, Chris, skip Hanks. The long time head baseball coach at Colorado Mesa university. This future hall of fame coach, his career includes. Includes 21 national tournament appearances. For division two world series appearances. 12. 12 conference coach of the year honors and five regional. Coach of the year awards. In 20, 19 and 20. 21. He was named the national coach of the year by the. The college baseball writers. Uh, association. And if. That's not enough for you. He has a career record of 1060. 69 wins to only 413 losses. He's one of eight. Coaches to lead his teams. To over a thousand victories in the history of D two baseball. Now throw all the stats and accolades out the window and you still have a great. Great man, husband and father, a world-class mentor and a leader of. Young men. He leads with his heart, but like most great coaches. It's as ability to adapt to the times and the needs of his. Players that makes them truly unique and special. Uh, what a. Loved to a plate for a skip Hanks. If you're. Enjoying these conversations. I encourage you to subscribe on your platform of choice. And leave me a comment with your thoughts and questions. You can always. Find me@coachmattrogers.com. When you want more information. Information. Without further ado. Here's my conversation with Chris. Coach. So great to see you. So great to have you on the podcast. I'm really excited just to talk coaching with you. If you're up for that I'm going to, I'm going to throw a hypothetical at you. Let's say you and I are going to start a, we're going to start a consulting company and we're going to travel around the country. And we're going to work with high school coaches and youth coaches, fields, gyms, auditoriums all over. Where do we start? What's missing? You've been doing this a long time. You and I've been coaching since the nineties for crying out loud. Where do we begin to get coaching on the right track? Not that it's off the track, but where would we re where would we re begin if we had the choice? I think you can always return to, fundamentals. You hear a lot of people say that what I see out recruiting and whatnot is the bulk of what we're seeing now is just pay to play. I know that these kids aren't practicing a lot. It's maybe a few swings at an indoor facility or whatever, what have you. It's always hitting usually. And. I think that I got to tell you when we get freshmen in our program, it's, we're amazed we have kids saying nobody really talked to me about how to bunt. And I didn't know anything about double cuts. And why do we have to be Why are you telling us to be 10 yards apart and, on the tandem and I could go down a list, but I think that we're showing up, we're rolling out the balls, we're playing games kids want to be seen that's the whole intent, like in the fall if you want to dig deeper into this, I would I'm a huge advocate of I think all the fall baseball should go away. I don't think it benefits the development of the kids one bit. It leads to more arm injuries and overuse injuries. They need a break. So it's all about two things. It's about organizations making money. And it's about kids getting exposure. Now it does give them exposure. But in terms of adding to the game and improving the game or their skill set, I don't believe it does that one bit. It's so funny. I just talked to Jenny Glenn, the volleyball coach at Metro in your guys league, and she said the same thing about volleyball. She goes let's start club in February. Let's end it in May or June. Let's get, let's allow these kids to be multi sport athletes. Let's try and keep them from burning out. So it's funny how you're mirroring almost exactly what she was saying about volleyball from a baseball perspective. And I just don't understand it. How many games did you play when you were 12 to 17 in a year? That was a long time ago, but I know, but I was trying to think about the other day, somebody asked me that and I don't remember ever playing more than about 20 games in a summer. Yeah, that's what I would say. But I really recall a lot of practices, we would play a couple of games a week. Yeah. We would practice a lot of round balls, a lot of batting practice, bull pens, practice and situations and different things like that. And now I think these kids have been habituated into honestly showing up and playing. They don't want to do anything else. And I can tell you when kids come to our program, they, what we see from freshmen, most of them, it's. It's the first time they've really practiced at the college level, and there's a, an adaptation period where those kids have to get used to the speed of the game, the expectation, the tempo practices because they're really used to, even when they do practice standing around in an outfield while one kid hits. And all that stuff, or, when you get into the travel ball sense there's not a lot of practicing going on in the indoor stuff doesn't cut it for me. I think there's a time and a place to do that, but you gotta be outside, man. You gotta be tracking balls in the outfield. You gotta be filled in ground balls off the bat. You gotta be thrown to bases, all those things. And that's my soapbox on the deal. I, quite honestly, every year we sign a couple of kids that are multi sport kids that are football kids. They didn't play fall baseball. And I'd say one, one common thread across the board is I do find those kids are better competitors, generally speaking than the year round baseball kid. I just, I've been doing this 31 years and I can tell you with the highest level of certainty that's a truth. And I would say in the football kids when they come to college, I can't tell anybody that they're behind. They're not behind the year round baseball kids. They really aren't. And and so I think we're missing something. I think money drives that. I think recruiting drives it. When I first got into coaching. There weren't really people committing kids prior to April of their senior year in high school, right? And now the transfer portal didn't exist, but kids could still transfer, but it didn't happen at the clip that it does now. So I think there's a lot of poor decisions that are made too early by both families and coaches. Yeah. And it'd be great if everybody just slowed down a little bit. It goes back to what you were saying. If I'm paying five, six, 7,000 a year, my kid's playing 70 to a hundred games and now they're going to college. They're practicing three, four days a week. They're playing two or three games and they're not getting a lot of reps in games. Because they're not ready. And I'm just not down with that. I'm not going to wait my turn. I'm not going to learn. I'm just going to go somewhere else and see if they'll play me faster. Think, a couple of different people have said this, but the model that's been created is backwards because, at the travel ball level, nobody really has to sit the bench but then at the next level, there's the. Possibility. They're going to have to sit the bench and going up every level of baseball, clear to the major leagues. The only level where you don't have to sit as in high school, travel ball, because you pay the money. The rosters are small. There is an expectation. When I pay 5, 000 bucks for my kid to play on a team, I suppose I want him to play. And. And it should be the other way. These kids should be having to earn a starting role, not just pay money and get on another team. And it's become so diluted there's so many teams and from a coaching standpoint, just simply recruiting is difficult because the kids are so spread out. They aren't condensed on, you see these elite teams that are very rarely elite anymore, right? It's easy to give ourselves that title though, isn't it? It is. Yeah it's amazing to me. And I feel like the high school coaches get pinched out of this deal too, because they're getting this is what we do at club and we're traveling and we're spending all this money. So high school is an afterthought almost. But that's where you're getting your ground balls, your fly balls, your, you're at bats you're getting game simulation. And I think the high school coaches have thrown up their hands a little bit. There's some stubborn and say, no, this is where we're going to do it. We're going to do it right. But a lot of them is just, we're going to play. We're going to get a lot of swings in and we're going to, we're going to go hit the ball and try and hit as many home runs every time we step on the field that, that I don't get. I just, I'm so hungry to get back for something to happen for some major league team to win the world series with a five, nine, 170 pound lead off man that slaps it to right field over and over again. And they win because they score seven runs a game and never hit a home run. It's never gonna happen, but man, I dream about that. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's difficult then, and these kids that if youth ages are being preached things like launch angle and in a indoor facility, lifted into the ceiling and you got to generally speaking, there's a better way to win. And we know his coaches a lot of times that there's a lot of facets that have to play. You got to be able to move runners. You got to probably have to bunt from time to time. And there's some people out there that say that Moneyball says that's not the way to do it. But you could make an argument the other direction as well. It's a conundrum, but starting And at those youth levels and in the format now of the importance is playing games, not practicing. We got it a little backwards. Yeah, I'm with you. Let's talk about recruiting a little bit since you brought it up. Let's look How do you tackle recruitment knowing that obviously you said you've got some multi sport athletes on your roster. How do you guys go about looking at your roster today saying, okay, this is what we're going to need next year. This is what we're going to need two years down the road. Yeah. We shoot for we shoot for A class of 10 kids per class, eight to 12. Really, we're working with around, we want to work with around a 40 man roster maybe 42 on the high end. Now, since COVID it's been a difficult it's been hard because of all those. Extra years and whatnot, but we're, and we're currently one year removed from getting back to that sanity. We're in the last year of all the anybody who has an extra year. But we looked at, we want to be a solid too deep at every position. If we can stagger those classes, say, if you have a junior shortstop, it's a good time to bring in a freshman. You have a senior, you have a sophomore. Now it doesn't work out that perfectly all the time. It's nice to have either, one kid per class at a position, or I really liked the staggering of years because a freshman usually can. Live with reduced innings because the juniors playing in those things, but that's more or less how we tackle it. And so that we try to avoid the mass sex of the players any one year now injuries and things like that can throw you off schedule with the size of each class. But that eight to 12 per class is what we're looking for. I like that because there's going to be some, there's going to be some retention there and some you're going to have some kids that are going to leave or decide that it's not for them and that you got to have a little right. How many of that 4042 will see 1010 games where they'll get substantial innings in a third or fourth of your season. I would say that, we as coaches, I don't want to say chuckle about this, but we always discuss it that, when the dust settles, it's really seven to seven to eight pitchers that pitch 80 percent of the innings and it's about 12 position players Maybe 13 that have played all the innings and now you have your blowouts and you have kids with a small number of at bats and different things, boils down to 7 to 8 pitchers pitch the bulk of the innings and it's 12 position players. And so you're looking at about 20 kids, about half the roster is playing 80 percent of the games or more. And those other kids. The challenge is to get him to buy into the development and communicate with them where they're at which is sometimes difficult to do because these, what you find out is people in general, but these kids are very poor self evaluators They're very egocentric. They're looking at themselves. I always tell people if I give our kids the opportunity, if we want to talk about any individual kids work ethic and I give the kids a platform, every kid do a T will sell to me that they're one of the hardest workers on the team. That's 40 guys saying they're the hardest worker on the team. And yeah. Oh, in our program, we don't have the how hard do you think you worked conversation? It doesn't occur. We let them know. We'll let you know if you need to pick it up or if you're doing a great job, but we're not gonna ask you because we all know you guys are all going to say you're gonna sell how hard you worked. How do we teach that coach? How do we teach them to self evaluate when they're, oftentimes the parents are even worse evaluators. So what they're surrounded with isn't great evaluators. So how do we teach that? How do we get kids to be able to look in the mirror and see a reality of their ability, their character, their work ethic? I think there, there's a lot of levels to that, but one thing we do is We chart everything. Every pitch is charted. Every at bat is charted. We keep track of, ground balls. We chart a lot of practice stuff. We'll put, for example infielders on any particular drill. We'll know how many ground balls they're going to get and how many throws they're going to make. And it's simply a tally thing. You caught it. You threw it to first rate. You bobbled the ball, you mishandled the ball, or you threw it away. That's noted. And over the course of time, you accumulate all that information. Now, it's a lot of work. All right. But you accumulate it over a long period of time and you mix in there what they do in games, they're there, there ends up being a high correlation. The as I tell our hitters, the guys that are mishitting the most balls and batting practice have the lowest production in games. The guys that square up the most balls in batting practice. Over a long period of time. There's just a super high correlation and you can show them that and then you got to teach kids not to be victims because the next place they'll want to do is self handicap and make an excuse. Yeah, but I wasn't feeling good that day or John got more reps than I did, or, they'll keep. Going down and you just got to stop them, got to be able to show them that you got to demand that they look in the mirror and honestly evaluate themselves. We, when we do camps say tryout camps we put a radar gun on every throw. We'll use obviously a radar gun and stopwatches with say catchers throwing. And the radar guns, the radar gun, I can tell a high school kid, my catchers all fall in this range of their throwing velocity. And when you're eight or nine miles an hour below that, you just, you want what we're looking for. And I think you can be nice. You can be kind, but at some point we got to be direct and tell them right where they stand and give them the power to then figure out how to respond to that. And it's gotta be amazing. When a kid comes to you and say I'm not playing enough or why I'm not playing more and you pull out eight weeks of stats and you're And you can show them their barrel rate and their strike throwing and their, their attention to detail, you have it all on stats. How did they handle that when all of a sudden their thought of who they are and what they were doing, and they see the reality of that, what happens to that, that shell that they're in? As I mentioned earlier, early on kids that are new to our program they immediately go to, yeah, but I was sick this day. I had the hamstring problem that I was dealing with, they want, and then we just say, no, let's stop that. That may or may not have some. Factor, but that's why we attempt to do it over a long period of time because there's ups and downs, but the math to some degree does solve it. In the end no, we we try to keep track of mishandles and let's just say we're doing double play feeds and we're turning double plays in the middle of a pretty good clip or a lot of reps, there are kids if you track it. They're the highest rate of mishandling balls, dropping balls just bubbles what have you. And, that, that is a piece of what helps decide. Or make decisions in the end and as I said that it generally core correlates very high with their true fielding average in a game sense or Batting average whatever Have you and I know if we can get kids to repeat success in practice first from a simple standpoint, but then we Add variability and we make it more difficult. And everybody's going through that and they're being coached while they do it you get a feel for things over time. I we tell, I tell our guys, over the course of the year we see them practice a lot more than we actually see them playing games. When you think about the fall, every batting practice, every infield practice, we throw a lot more innings over the course of the year in a bullpen than we try to illustrate how important the practice is. We're evaluating you during practice. Can you see that when you go and watch kids play when you're at tournaments, you're watching film, can you diagnose some of that ahead of time? Yeah, I think you can at times that I think you have to see enough stuff, but you see a little, I call them this might be a little off that there are some things that You know, we term, if you're looking at a pitcher, you're looking at a hitter, you're looking at a fielder, there's some, they could have a mechanic that how would I term it? It's a catastrophic deficiency, that as coaches, when we've been doing this a while, there's some things that are easy corrections and fixes, and there are some things that are massively difficult to, because by the time these kids get to us, they've had, Thousands of repetitions doing it in a manner that they feel is comfortable or that their body is telling them to do and They still may be able to be efficient enough to get it done most of the time, as pitching gets better, there's some hitting mechanics that will have to change or they're just not going to have success. There's some things that just don't work. Yeah, you can get away with some of those deficiencies against a 72 mile an hour fastball. Correct. When now you're seeing 89 9091 and then the curveball is. 81, 82, all of a sudden those things speak loudly to an evaluator. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I've been doing a lot, I've been working with a lot of college ad's as of late. About coaching coaches. And it's just it's a real problem for me. Cause I was the youngest college basketball coach in the country. 25 years ago, 27 years ago, 28 years ago. And I was handled the job. I just won a high school state championship. Somebody handed me the job and said, Hey, we want you. All right. I never recruited before. I did a little bit as an assistant, but never really ran my own program. No one gave me a policy manual on these are the dates you need to get things done. This is how you should recruit. This is the numbers you should be going for. Did anybody do that for you, coach? I know it's been a long time, but it's not amazing. It's amazing. I grew up with a coach, a football coach. I think that that helped me. And I think there have been a lot of good baseball coaches that have come out of a football world of influence. Yeah. I, football coaches were probably the earliest adapters of high level coaching, in my opinion, maybe because of the numbers and the intricacies of the game and it's multifaceted, but football has been ahead of baseball for a long time. Oh yeah. And. Just in terms of how things are done. So I think that had some help because I grew up in that world. And I, at a very early age, I was in, or I think I probably knew. I was gonna be a coach when I was in high school. It just resonated with me. Yeah, me too. And but yeah, I've worked at a great institution, Colorado Mesa, but in my time I've worked for 13 athletic directors, And I've seen the spectrum of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Yeah. And the high level, ness, if that's a word of some and some real parrot, poor characteristics of others. And during that time, I think that yeah, I would say I'd never received that. And of course, I think in a, an athletic director would have to be extremely confident. To suggest coaching the coaches, but even on terms of there's some policies and procedures on how to get travel done and turned in. That's one facet. Another facet is recruiting. Another facet is just how you coach, which I think is the one where an AD would have to. Tread the most lightly because generally coaches have they identify themselves as really good at what they do. And I think coaches are bad self evaluators too. Hey, listen, I can tell you, and we had a little longer, I could rattle off for you my weaknesses. I know. Yeah, exactly what they are. And I own them and I know them, I'm aware of them. And you work on some and others, maybe it's a personality thing, but I also know what I'm good at. Yeah. And but I think everybody's got to do a little better job evaluating themselves. Yeah. It may be the greatest weakness in our country. It doesn't matter if it's sports or anything else. It's the ability. To evaluate oneself and to be honest with oneself. And it might be the cause of a lot of our problems more times than that. What are you doing with your staff? How do you get them coaching at the level you want them to coach? You've been there a long time. I'm sure you've got assistants that have been with you a long time. And I'm sure you've hired a lot of your guys over the years that wanted to coach and know how to coach because of you and know what you expect. What are you doing from a coach development standpoint for your crew and your assistance? The first thing we try to do is be really very clear. I think the communication is important. That's where things generally break down. And but I think the expectations, I, one thing that I feel helps our coach, some of our coaches, as I try to empower them with some areas of responsibility it's there on a I trust our coaches. I step in and say, I want to see this drill or I'd like to see these kids do this better. But I think that people that have some skill and ability, which are which my coaches do, they're good coaches. I think I like to entrust them. We have a lot of discussions, but empower them to try some things, give them a platform where they can insert some things, their ideas. And I'm a firm believer that, the old adage, there's more than one way to skin a cat. I really believe that. And but I do think there are some fundamental things that need to be in place, some organizational matters a tempo and manner in which we practice that you can truly improve your chances of winning just by setting some expectations. And then holding kids accountable to a level of performance and from everything, the way they perform, the way they behave, the way they take the field the way they take care of the field, the way they take care of the clubhouse, and you just don't waver on it. And we have a saying we're either coaching it or we're letting it happen. One of the two things. Yeah. And so if my kids are hoodlums in the dugout during games, we're either coaching it or we're letting it happen. I guarantee you we aren't coaching it. And so I think most of the decisions are as simple as that. Empowerment is such a big deal, but being able to express discipline with it is equally important. I would imagine with 40, 42 kids, how many guys, how many coaches do you have working with you on a day to day basis? I have two full time coaches and I have two part time coaches, and I have a graduate assistant. You, I would imagine that if I come to your field, I'd love to come to a practice at some point, I would imagine you've got Four or five different practices happening at the same time, right? Yeah. Yeah. We go through different phases of practice where it's, there's individual periods, group periods, team periods. It's set very this is one area where football was always ahead of baseball, They have it down to a time frame and a clock and you move through periods where you work on offense, defense, special team, inside run, team offense, team defense, individual periods. Football guys figured that out a long time ago. Baseball, not as much, although it's gotten a lot better. Yeah. I think that you're going to have trouble finding a high level performing program that isn't also, Highly organized in most cases and practice with some sort of tempo to the practice. Well, 40 years ago, it was 40 guys. What, like you said earlier, 40 guys watching one and then a rotation. Now, when it's, if it's done you can have 40 guys rep after rep with very little standing around. Yeah. And I'm a firm believer. One thing I really believe to be true is. The quality is more important than the quantity we go for high level intensity and in short spurts, as opposed to, the old thing, you go to the batting cage and take 300 hacks let's cut that down to 50 and let's lock in, let's get the intensity level up and let's go to work and we're out in less than half the time, but the product is better. Yeah it also comes down to you're never going to see 50 pitches in a game. If you see 12 pitches you've done some work up there at the plate, having that routine of that's similar to games and mirroring games, I imagine is really important from you, right? Yeah. And the guys have to learn to deal with failure as well. Just like we do in the game. We. Sometimes I think from a hitting standpoint, a mistake coaches make it batting practice is always too easy. And, if you just always have what we call dead arm and the coach up there laying it over the heart of the plate, these kids leave feeling, feeling good about themselves, but in some cases they haven't improved. So we use a lot of variability. We. Rarely do the same hitting format two days in a row. I think that creates the differences and we change their timing mechanism with distances of BP, how far the balls come and they got to solve those timing problems like that. Yeah, I could go on forever on that, but I think that it's we do start with some we do everything in progressions. For example, with an infielder, we'll start with a stationary or rolled balls and we'll work our fundamental handwork and footwork and and then we'll oftentimes go back to those fundamentals, but we advance to more difficult things. And. Halfway fun goes full fun goes off the machine live stuff, but again, I think where we get it wrong in baseball sometimes is you got to look at the duration you're doing it because baseball isn't a sport where the shortstops playing out of breath, in basketball, the point guard in the center playing out of breath, right? Football, you're playing out of breath, baseball. We don't really do that. And I don't know why we practice that way. Makes sense. And baseball is so much about foundation of skill and then being able to react. Correct. As a hitter, if that's all I ever see in practice is fastballs, I get to games and I'm seeing a slider, I'm seeing a curve. I'm seeing off speed. All of a sudden, all that practice I went through is a mess. It's hurt me more than help me. So we have to counsel our kids when we put you through a challenging practice, let's talk hitting, where as a coach, I know there's going to be miss hits, maybe some swing and misses. Maybe you're going to be popping the ball up in the infielder in the top of the cage, and the kid doesn't leave the cage feeling good. And we try to explain to them that the fact that you're leaving, not feeling good might be a good thing. We challenged your outer limits of your abilities. We put you in tough situations and I'm a real, I'm really into motor learning and I've studied that a lot. And I know that as we tell these kids, you'll go home at night and when you sleep that out, that brain's an amazing thing. It'll figure out solutions while you're sleeping and you will make those hard things easier. Okay. And that's what's, that's what's so much fun about baseball. It really is. Anybody that thinks baseball is boring has never played baseball, has never coached it, because there's so much going on every single pitch. The movement of the outfield, the movement of the infield, the read of the arm angle, what the catcher's doing. So I love that component that you get to do. I was a baseball coach long time ago. And I, I tell people this all the time. I interviewed for a college head college baseball job. And a week later, I interviewed for a head college basketball job. Cause I love both sports and coachable sports up to that point. And I got the basketball job, and I love my, I had a great career and I enjoyed my career as a basketball coach, but there's a big part of me that wishes that It would have went the other way because like you said with football, baseball is like that for me. There's just so many components, it's everything from, understanding the dirt on your field and how to keep it dry and how to keep it the right way and how to rake it the right way. And, how to get your guys enough reps and this or that and seeing everything. So I'm envious of what you do coach. And I love, Watching guys like you coach because you get it. You've got 18 thoughts in your head at the same time and you've got it organized. Is that fun for you? Is that a part of the joy for you? Yeah, it is. Now you bring it up a little bit trying to take a team and maximize our time. Yeah. Our efficiency. Yeah. I was always really impressed. With I liked watching football practices that were very well orchestrated, coordinated, and you got 20 minutes here for let's just say inside run where the offense is working on their running game. You got 20 minutes, man. You got to be dialed in. Offensive line needs to know the right footwork on the right place with the fronts they're seeing. And, and then you moved. Special teams, maybe it's a field goal block. I don't know. And you got 10 minutes to dial that in, man, you gotta be locked in. Yeah. And so it is it's fun and at times challenging. In one area where I know I've gotten better as a coach, as coaches, it's sometimes hard to. They let a kid leave practice before everybody's finished. And so I, I didn't use to, if you've done all you can with the pitchers, why do they have to stay 35 more minutes? Because, so get the heck out of here. And you find out the kids appreciate that because they'll be like standing around. That's some of those things in coaching. We got to know where we're doing too much. Yeah. How much BP does your pitchers? Throw compared to your, you and your coaches and hitting off a machine. Our pitchers really don't throw any batting practice. They don't, it's all bullpen work. No. Coaches we incorporate a lot more machine work now than we used to. There's so many really good machines on the market now. Yeah. That can, that will do a better job. Those machines throw a better curveball than I can and it doesn't get sore they throw more strikes. And so you could utilize machines. I still, we still have them see a, an arm swing, but as I said, we vary the routines. Our pitchers will throw some batting practice at the beginning of the fall and the beginning of the spring. But after that, we try to we're very cognizant of how much they're throwing, what they're doing. We, as I said, we chart everything. We know how many balls basically every pitcher's thrown during the week. They have to record it in a log and we log the bullpen pitches the numbers you know, and you try to keep track of whether, if a kid's not pitching maybe we look at their workload and sometimes it's not enough, so you can always alter those things. Yeah, coach, you've been great. I could talk to you all day. Tell me a little bit if I was going to put you in a room with a bunch of parents and a bunch of young baseball players, what advice would you give them on tackling their college recruitment if they wanted to play for somebody like you or play at your level? What's the best advice you can give to those families? The first thing I would tell them is they're worrying too much about it. And that's hard to sell to them. Yeah, what I mean by I that is these kids are so consumed now with where am I going to go play college baseball? The first thing they got to remember, why don't you worry about being a better hitter, a better pitcher, better fielder? Let's make sure we're taking care of that. Let's make sure we're performing at a high enough level. We're going to garner some interest but it has to start with becoming the best player you can, I would tell them they're very well served to go to a small number of camps that are hosted by schools. If you're interested in those schools that'll put you right in front of those coaches and they'll get to see you. I think that kids need to They need to find out. They got to decide what they want. They got to have knowledge of the level of program. Part of that bad self evaluating is kids tend to evaluate themselves towards a program or situation that really isn't good for them. It's not a good fit. Maybe they're not that level of a player, but good luck telling a kid or especially a parent that if you go to these camps and you're playing on a travel team and you're playing places where Coaches are present, then if you're a good player, you'll be found. Now, there are players out there that are, the quote unquote, late bloomer in those sorts of things, there are some good recruiting services that work individually. Like we have a couple. The, we'll listen to they call us personally. They now know our program. There's probably been some mistakes along the way, you market yourself a little bit, basically I think if kids are worried about becoming the best player they can, it ends up working out. The problem is the. Is people want the answers too soon? We always chuckle when we're looking at a any particular travel ball team The moment the first kid on that team commits somewhere and puts it on social media Man, everybody starts panicking. Yeah. John, Johnny got signed. I got to get committed. I got to get committed. And these kids rush themselves sometimes into bad situations. And the crazy is the kids that are truly the best players and they know they're good. They don't worry about it quite as much. They're getting attention. Kids that aren't getting attention. They want attention. There is a point in time where maybe you're not good enough to. And. So I think that if you're a good player, coaches will find you. Yeah, I agree to some extent. How do you feel if a kid were to call you and said, Hey, I'd like to come to your camp. I've got some video of me hitting and fielding. Would you guys take a look at and just let me know if I'm even close to being a guy that you consider. How do you guys feel about that? Taking that 2 to 3 minutes and giving that feedback to a kid. We do it all the time. And we'll tell a kid who reaches out, send us some video. Yeah. Now, we get so much of that, we'll get run over with it. Yeah. But I'll promise you. You this when we turn on a video and there's stuff that jumps right out. If a kid can really run or that swing path is beautiful and you can just see the bat speed, the hand speed, the power we'll there's been times when we stopped the video and we fire off a phone call right then and there. Now, I would say that's a small percentage. Sure, but it does occur. So what I would tell kids is, yeah, send an email. We don't, kids need to keep an email to a coach very short. I don't need to know that I don't need to hear them. It doesn't help to say for them to tell me they're a great leader and they're a real hard worker. That means nothing to me. They're better off having their coach who sincerely feels that way. You're better off a coach. Will you call this school? Yeah, the coach is going to have a reaction to that. They're going to probably make a judgment of yes or no or yell calm. But what we try to take out of coaches is honesty because you know what some things that happens is recruiting services or certain coaches. They want to help a kid. They feel it's part of their job to place kids. And truthfully, I guess I would feel this way once I get you placed. Okay, don't have to worry about Matt anymore. He's got a place to go to school. But if I haven't been honest with that coach, that kid gets there, it turns into a bad situation because then we end up. Have a new cut a kid or, and so back to your original question. Yeah. I think kids ought to reach out, send video. I even tell kids, if you've sent me something, I get busy. If I miss two days of emails, man, there's no catching up. There is no catching up. Yes. So I tell them send again, the four. Fourth time I get it, I'll remember you and I'll probably say, Hey, Charlie, sorry, I haven't gone back or whatever. I love it. I love it. Yeah. I do this for a living coach and I help kids and I only take on a couple of kids a month. And for me, I always tell them, listen, we're going to talk about your character first. We're going to talk about your drive and how serious and your commit commitment is. And then you're going to send me some film because if I'm going to work with you. I'm going to be really honest with you. So not only am I going to tell you what I think your ability's at, but I'm going to tell you where I think I can get coaches to even pay attention to you. We're not going to worry about placement. We're going to worry about evaluation. We want coaches to be able to put their eyes on you and say, this is how I feel about you. I can help you, or I can't help you. And that's where we learn. So placement might be at the school. You never even knew of, never even thought of. Yeah. But until you get an evaluation and you get some honest opinions from coaches, it doesn't matter. Doesn't matter how good you think you are, mom and dad think you are, how good your high school coach is. You've got to have college coaches that think you can play. And the more you hear that feedback, the better. So I love it. You're preaching to the choir. So I appreciate that. Coach talk real briefly about your team this year and what you guys are looking at and maybe highlight a couple of guys that are coming back as seniors. Yeah I think we'll have a, I think we'll have a good club again this year where we appear to be deep on the mound. We have some power arms. We have some finesse arms. We have some righties lefties. We have we have great character kids. Of course, we affect that a little bit in recruiting. We don't deal with problems off the field. These kids work. They do work hard. Some work harder than others, though. And and we don't mince words. We let him know. Yeah, you don't work as hard as John. What? Yeah, no. We have a team that got eliminated the NCAA regional last year. We have a bunch of returning starters back that are a year older. We have some backup guys and now we'll, we're backup guys. We'll assume leadership roles and starting jobs. And, truthfully, we still have three weeks left in fall baseball, to evaluate and we're evaluating every moment. That's great. That's great. Coach, it means a lot to me. You've had an amazing career. It's been fun to get to know you and I wish you and the boys a great season. I know you guys are going to have a lot of fun and get a lot done. Thanks. I appreciate it. Take care. Good luck. All right. Thank you. That's a wrap for this episode of the significant coaching podcast. Podcast. I'd like to thank coach Chris Hanks for sharing his passion and. Wisdom with me. It always warms my heart to meet coaches who care more. About developing young people than winning games. And then coincidentally. When more than anyone else, like skip Hanks, I'm proud to call. I'm a friend and excited for our next conversation. If. You're enjoying these conversations. Please click that subscribe and like buttons. If you're interested in working with me or scheduling me to speak at your school organiza. Organization, you can schedule a free strategy session at coach Matt Rogers. Dot com. Thanks again for listening. Have a significant week. Goodbye until now.