Meet Coach Cory

Cory: “My motivations for my instructional approach stem from much more than just excelling in the game. I am trying to give these young athletes a platform, a stage, and an opportunity to express themselves and, in turn, receive some of life’s most valuable lessons back as their career goes on. Baseball and softball, may be just a sport or a kids game to some, but they certainly have a way of teaching you things that you might not otherwise understand about yourself if you had not pushed yourself to limits within sport.”

“My passion to instruct is incredibly detail-oriented, and I have applied this detailed approach to ensure that I’m doing my best to keep the student successful in the game for as long as possible. If I’m successful in that, the game itself will provide its many blessings and opportunities to these youths as it did to me and many others. Providing a consultative, mentor, and companion style in my lessons helps me layer in life lessons along with sport-specific lessons.”

Cory: “I am an analytical thinker at heart. In my everyday life, technology that captures data or automates otherwise menial tasks is why my wife might call me a nerd. Bringing that style into my lessons has helped me to understand my students and their game at a much deeper level, but the biggest difference has been being able to point to objective data and trends to prove what we think is the main priority for advancing. With my more advanced athletes, subjective thoughts, generalities, and misguided goals won’t hold up over the long haul. These players need the best tech for us to ensure they’re on the right path.”

“I have found that, from my more competitive athletes, there is a need or a want for the hard work and dedication to show, display, and track results objectively. Some of the technology that gets brought out during our journey helps to refine and modify some of our adjustments that we’re asking our students to make.”

“Understanding all of the pieces of the puzzle individually can be a daunting task for students, parents, or new instructors. Ask all my clients, I get longwinded as I talk through the mechanics. It’s exciting! We then create plans for how those pieces will ultimately be placed together to get our girls and guys to and through their goals.”

Cory: I guess haven’t put it into words in the past, but I think about this idea quite often. It comes up in the daily routine of our schedules more times than some would care to take note of.”

“There is a really fine line that I still push myself to squint and look for in the sand on this topic. Each student is going to have different goals, wants, needs, backgrounds, and futures. When you look at it from a bird’s eye view like we are now, that seems easy to navigate and understand. But when you’re in a 30-minute session with these kids, many of them are going through things that they’re not always to going to share.”

“Providing an environment as an outlet to bounce ideas off of, share personal stories with, talk through the failures that are guaranteed to arise, is an invaluable asset to a young person these days.

“It cannot be understated that putting the phone down and talking through issues face to face that are either real or perceived has a tremendous positive effect for these athletes.”

“Talking through the minor adjustments of bodily movement to create something that has value in the world and on field of play is a gift that I give to my clients, but I will go down with the ship with the view that this game will someday be taken from you and what remains is what we really strive to give back to these kids and ultimately the community.”

“The mental toughness, the coping strategies, the friendships, the physical fitness, the time management skills, the emotional awareness – these are the things that have to be part of the time with coaches. Being able to teach the technicalities of a specific sport movement is the easy part, creating a trusting relationship for the other things I just mentioned is the harder part!”

Cory: “In many scenarios, the truth is that it depends on a wide range of factors that we, as coaches, have to be aware of and process before approaching this topic. Every coach on social media or YouTube wants to showcase their athletes that have success on the field because that’s what brings money to the program or through the doors. Like, yeah we get it, of course that’s how the world works.  It’s inspiring. I think what gets overlooked is the coach that brings up all of their athletes equally. At MJB, you walk through the door and we’re pushing up ceilings for each kid.  The kid that wants to make his school team, the kid that’s waiting for his growth spurt, the kid that wants to play at the next level because they LOVE the game. Those kids are what fuels a training facility and we’re more than happy to celebrate those successes with them.”

“Daily coaching and instruction have very little success to market out to the public in such a small scope of time. Just look at the percentage chance that a high school athlete will go on to the next level in their sport. The numbers are historically low, and the odds are not in everyone’s favor. Not everyone coming through our doors even has the goals to play super competitively, but they are still there to better themselves every day.  And we all know, as parents, we are happy to have someone help better our children.”

“We coach through planned failure – we put students in positions to either push themselves through to learn something new or to ultimately just run out of time for that day. Through these failures, athletes find growth, and our MJB students are no different. Failure, difficulty, and perseverance are tools that we use to ensure students are growing rather than just practicing or going through the motions.”

Cory: “I find myself being a bit more strict with my students whenever they have a time of struggle. Throwing equipment, negative self-talk, banging bats, and dramatizing failures are not something that we have found to be conducive to learning or personal growth, so I have worked as a coach to ensure that I don’t let students get away with it without offering up some help.”

“It seems like I say it pretty often – ‘This is a learning cage’ Of course, each player I’ve ever worked with WANTS to do well. They are not doing things to negatively affect their game on purpose, but when that failure gets in the way of advancing forward, the road to success lengthens. Letting our students know that failure is guaranteed and that in those failures is where we are looking for the changes necessary for growth.”

Cory: “It’s an absolute open-door invitation to take a bigger role in your child’s time with me as a coach by any means you see fit. That usually means different things for a wide array of clients which includes but is not limited to:
1. With your child’s permission, inviting you to sit closely to ensure you can hear some of the techniques, indicators, and strategies (without being intrusive or distracting),
2. Recording integral parts of their practice or games to help prioritize instruction.
3. Reviewing and tracking some of the data recorded by technology used in the session,
4. Ensuring questions and comments that came up in between sessions are asked and clarified through text, email, or in the facility during training,

“Parents have an overwhelming amount on their plates, and they are required to do so much more than just provide good values, principles, and examples to their kids. Now, parents have to find the right sports, the right teams, the right coaches, the right schedules, and all of this is happening with ever-changing goals for the child as they grow and mature.”

“Without getting too far into all of those details, I openly accept my responsibility to be a small part of all of those moving targets as a parent attempts to manage their child’s amateur career. I want to make it as easy as possible to lay out a clear view to reach the goals of the parents and the child.”

Cory: “I naturally find myself studying motion mechanics in sport as a passion, regardless of whether I had the responsibility of teaching it back to a community. I like to find the nuances that might set some athletes apart from others. Comparing data, watching and applying elite movement patterns, and reading into the details about fitness, nutrition, recovery, hydration, and sleep have been recent tools utilized in my tool belt. As a naturally curious person, I tend to want to learn more and more about things I’m interested in.

One of the most interesting things that it seems the general public and athletes put less emphasis on is flexibility, range of motion, and freedom of motion. These have been on the forefront of my reading list because it is something that I feel I can personally adapt to incorporate into our routines with our athletes, and we’re excited to roll out these programs.”