The weather was awful today which means practice got canceled which freed up my day. I popped into Alex office to see if there was anything I could help her with today since it was not a scheduled day but unfortunately she was already out of the office taking care of several things and was not coming back in until tomorrow. Since Alex was out of the office I stopped by the media and marketing offices to see if any one else needed help with anything and ended up rolling t-shirt to be tossed at an upcoming game and helping Ms Anna stock the athletics supply closet.
One of our media employees was working on making changes out schools athletic website, I sat down and watched him work for a bit just out of curiosity. When I was done in there I went over to the field and organized all of the travel bags and extra equipment for road trips and then spent the rest of my afternoon looking at velocities and exit velo.
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Getting ready for our game tomorrow an easy one, we are only playing about 30 minutes from HPU so there is not too much prep required to get us on the road tomorrow. We will do majority of our early work at home and then take the bare minimum on the road for pre-game making it extremely easy. Playing close to home cuts down on so much packing! It also eliminates the need for two meals and I only need to worry about food for post-game.
Everything ran so well today that we decided to take some time to do mechanical screening on all of our position players, similar to what we did with the pitchers. So I helped the staff get everything they needed set up and I ran inside to print off the screening sheets and grab the iPads. Nothing overly exciting but I have started to find a real interest in the data analysis portion of baseball so I really enjoy days like today. After practice was over I ran off campus to grab a few things from the printer and the local shop that does all of our screen printing and embroidery. The Pawscar Awards are coming up at the end of this month, so today we completed all of the final pieces. We started out going over where the tables would be set up and what teams we would seat where. With the seating layout and chart completed we moved on to the senior dinner portion where we once again had to discuss table layouts and where the food would be placed. We then had to call our contact with campus dining to select the menu and confirm the number of people we would need to feed during this portion of the awards ceremony. This included us creating a “guest list” of who would be attending this portion of the event. Picking the menu was easy and working with campus dining is always simple. Once that was taken care of we put together a quick outline of how the night would run, who would speak when and how many individuals needed time with the microphone to make sure that no one gets skipped and everyone to effectively complete their segment.
Next we moved on to deciding on the awards categories and selecting all of the individuals within athletics that would vote on who the award goes to. We selected our sports media employees to select the winners. We then designed the physical awards and certficates and set them off to the needed venders to get them produced. Taking care of all these details now will allow for us to rush less the day of and to spend majority of our time now focusing on the golf tournament. Registration was due on 04/12 so now the true planning can begin. I am very grateful to have been playing at home as much as we have recently but tomorrow we are on the road again for a mid-week game. I did much better getting an itinerary out early for the guys and we had a short practice today making it very easy to get things packed and ready for the players to grab and go in the morning. I called the sub shop we were supposed to get lunch from only to find out they are not able to accommodate an order as large as ours and that the individual I spoke with several days ago should have never accepted it because of their staffing shortage. When I pick out places for meals when we travel I like to try to find local places to try for a few reasons, it helps them out and it gives my guys some variation in the meals.
With this last minute setback I had to rush to find a place that could take on 50 boxed meals with less than 24 hour notice. Thankfully Mellow Mushroom was able to take on the task and gave me until 11:00 am to get an order over to their catering coordinator. So I sent out a last minute Google Doc to allow everyone to select what they wanted from the limited menu we were provided. I will handle getting that order to the restaurant in the morning and worry about it getting successfully completed until I have the meal in hand and passed out. I was really looking forward to the activities we did today. Based upon the practice and game data we have collected over the past several weeks we have been able to pick up on some poor movement patterns in our players so our staff decided to dig a little deeper into it and found a visual screening option we could do to help hone in on the exact factors that may be influencing the patterns we are seeing. It takes roughly 15 minutes to run each athlete through the set of screenings and then and additional 15ish minutes to break down the results so this will be a multi day process but the information will be beneficial to player development in the long run and well worth it for the improvements we plan on seeing as a result of our efforts.
We will be screening both pitchers and position players over the next several days. Once the data is collected I would be responsible for helping with the breakdown of the screens, the online storage of the data and assisting in establishing certain portions of their developmental plan. Being a part of the data collection process has really put my computer skills to the test. I have become so much more comfortable navigating through utilizing excel. I used to (and still sometimes do) find excel to be extremely frustrating but now I have figured out a great system and have ever figured out how to use all the features I have always avoid to save my sanity. I realized once you take the time to figure it out everything is a lot easier than I thought. Patience is a skill I am learning as I go. The rings we collected sizes for a couple of weeks ago arrived today and they look great! We spent the beginning portion of the morning unboxing them and making sure that we had the correct number of each size and then we separated them into boxes by teams. These arrived much sooner than we thought they would. Once we were done getting the rings put way I got to sit in on a meeting with one of our donor families before I left for the day. The meeting lasted about an hour and I loved how easy it was for Alex to effortlessly engage with the donor and how quickly she was able to answer all of his questions without hesitation. It was impressive how much knowledge she has and how well she uses it when talking to people.
She did a great job presenting him with the information he was seeking about the teams he was looking to make his donation and really painted an appealing picture of what projects his donation would be funding for them. She really had to sell the appeal of the team to him but he left her office this morning ready to provide us with a donation. It was very interesting to see how a meeting like that played out. I feel like tastefully asking people for large amounts of money is not an easy task in the beginning but over time is appears to get easier. After that meeting we grabbed a quick lunch and headed our separate ways for the remainder of the day. Today was a very busy day Athletic Training wise so I got very little additional work in. I did get to spend practice in the stands running trackman but nothing overly exciting. Our pitcher’s numbers we actually down and their ability to locate pitches was off compared to normal but our hitters were showing elite levels of self-control and did a great job at refraining from swinging at pitches out of the zone. At this point in the season they have played a lot of baseball and the numbers are reflecting that. One of the cameras was slightly off so I quickly fixed that once we finished for the day.
I stopped by the office on my way out and talked with Alex for a bit, nothing too interesting. Just some housekeeping things an a quick rundown of how the past few days went. Another day of cramming getting ready for a four day away series, every time getting an itinerary ready and packing for extended days away is a gentle reminder of how much I love playing games at home. It is some much less stress! I got out schedule out late for this trip but overall if that is the worst thing I mess up on I am doing a pretty good job. We had a large amount of high school students on campus this evening so I had to go directly from practice to go help Alex in the arena with entertaining and engaging with what we call VIFs which are well known on campus as “Very Important Families” aka very very wealthy and giving donors. I loved being able to talk to everyone and be a part of the networking process that Alex is extremely good at. She does a phenomenal job selling High Point University to anyone who will listen.
When the event came to an end I helped her clean up and then I headed back to the clubhouse to pack everything we needed for the road series. I ran out of time to make phone calls to confirm all of our reservations and meals but I will take care of that first thing in the morning. I’m optimistic everything will be fine with the reservations and I will not need to use my back up plan. So far I am pretty impressed with how well I have been able to take on all of this extra work. I definitely thought I would struggle a bit but I feel far more in control. Thankfully we were able to get all the IT issues resolved and all the equipment up and running today with no additional problems! I was not mentally prepared to work through more tech issues before practice. I have great phone skills but lack patience when it comes to technical problems. Today we had ten of our pitchers throw live so there was a ton of data to be gone through and organized once we finished up for the day.
Once my guys went to weights I began to go through the numbers and break down each session so that I can highlight the changes and that coaches can use them to help tailor their approaches. I also had to send updates to the performance company that worked with our pitchers this past fall. They have been using the plays numbers to provide them with custom workouts and drills based on their individual needs and deficits. It is amazing to see what a group of baseball focused brains can do with this information. To an untrained eye this content is confusing and overwhelming. I sometimes still struggle to understand some of it even after working in baseball for as long as I have. We got some bad weather last night and it messed with the Trackman connection and our ability to connect to the Wifi as well. All of my down time was spent at the field with an individual from the IT department while on the phone with customer support. Needless to say this was the most challenging thing I have needed to do in regards to data collection. I am terrible with technology that I am not familiar with so this seemed almost impossible to figure out but once I was able to connect the customer service rep and the trained IT professional they were able to find a temporary solution to the issue and get everything up and running before practice got underway.
With the tech crisis out of the way I was able to get some time in the office where I was greeted with a stack of brochures, flyers, newsletter and campus magazines that all needed to be put into envelopes, addressed and taken to the mail room. On top of this we needed to we needed to make a special events packing list for an upcoming event to give to our show pros to allow our donors access to their promised packing spots. When we finished prepping the mail we put everything in the care and made it to the mail room with little time to spare. After we got back to the office we cleaned up our packing mess and got started on our next task. Alex needed to complete a schedule for undergraduate interns. She let me do it on my own for her first. This allowed me to practice my ability to evenly distribute coverage to various different areas of importance. I not only had to make sure that I had enough individuals assigned to each task but I also had to really think about their individual personalities/abilities to ensure that I was setting them up for success. Once I was done everything looked great but Alex made a few small changes to try and challenge a couple of the interns to branch out of their comfort zone. |
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