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Coaching Baseball Successfully - Mike Curran and Ross Newhan
Coaching Baseball Successfully
by Mike Curran and Ross Newhan
NEW, 208 pages
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About Coaching Baseball Successfully
Build a winning baseball program both on the field and off! In Coaching Baseball Successfully, one of the nation’s top high school coaches, Mike Curran, shares his expertise on all aspects of coaching. From establishing a coaching philosophy to player development to in-game decision making, this is the approach that has made his program a perennial powerhouse on the national scene.
Coaching Baseball Successfully covers it all:
- Off-season planning
- Evaluating your players
- Choosing and utilizing your coaching staff
- Motivating your team
- Communicating on and off the field
- Organizing productive practices
- Hitting, pitching, and baserunning skills
- Infield and outfield defensive skills
- Offensive and defensive strategies
- Scouting and game preparation
- In-game decision making
With dozens of drills, practice plans, and advice for handling off-the-field challenges, Coaching Baseball Successfully is the most comprehensive resource available for novice and experienced coaches alike; it’s your blueprint for building a championship-caliber baseball team.
About Mike Curran
Mike Curran has coached high school baseball for more than three decades and currently serves as the head coach at Esperanza High School in Anaheim, California. His career record of more than 500 victories makes Curran one of the most recognizable and highly regarded coaches not only in the state of California but in all of the United States. He led Esperanza to win the 1986 national title and California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) titles in 1986, 1993, and 1997 and earned CIF Coach of the Year honors during those three years as well. Curran was named National Coach of the Year in 1998 and served as the District 8 representative for the National High School Baseball Association from 1990 to 1995. He holds a master's degree in education from Azusa Pacific University. Curran, his wife, Lucy, two daughters, Christie and Jamie, and son, Casey, reside in Placentia, California.
About Ross Newhan
Ross Newhan is an award-winning sportswriter who dedicated 40 years of his life to covering baseball in southern California. He began his career in 1961 with the Long Beach Press Telegram, covering the Los Angeles Angels. Over the course of his career, Newhan won numerous writing awards, including several from the Orange County and Los Angeles press clubs. He won the Associated Press Sports Editors Award for the top news story of 1997, relating to the sale of the Dodgers, and he won the Los Angeles Times Editors Award for sustained excellence the following year. In 2001 Newhan was elected to the writer's wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and in 2002 was named the California Sportswriter of the Year. Newhan resides in Corona, California, with his wife, Connie. The couple has a son, David, who plays for the Baltimore Orioles, a daughter, Sara, and four grandchildren.
Reviews of this book
"Coaching Baseball Successfully is a must-read. One of the top high school coaches in the country provides firsthand experience, insight into the game, coaching strategies, and techniques that any coach can implement into a program."
Tim Montez
Jacksonville University Pitching Coach and Recruiting Coordinator
2006 Atlantic Sun Conference Champions
2006 NCAA Regional Participant
"Having played for Coach Curran, I cannot say enough about his program. With Coaching Baseball Successfully he shares his expertise, and he details every aspect of a winning program, both on and off the diamond. This is essential reading for every baseball coach.”
Mike Gallego
Colorado Rockies Infield and Third-Base Coach
About Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond. Players on one team (the batting team) take turns hitting against the pitcher of the other team (the fielding team), which tries to stop them from scoring runs by getting hitters out in any of several ways. A player on the batting team can stop at any of the bases and later advance via a teammate's hit or other means. The teams switch between batting and fielding whenever the fielding team records three outs. One turn at bat for each team constitutes an inning and nine innings make up a professional game. The team with the most runs at the end of the game wins.
Evolving from older bat-and-ball games, an early form of baseball was being played in England by the mid-eighteenth century. This game and the related rounders were brought by British and Irish immigrants to North America, where the modern version of baseball developed. By the late nineteenth century, baseball was widely recognized as the national sport of the United States. Baseball on the professional, amateur, and youth levels is now popular in North America, parts of Central and South America and the Caribbean, and parts of East Asia. The game is sometimes referred to as hardball, in contrast to the derivative game of softball.
In North America, professional Major League Baseball (MLB) teams are divided into the National League (NL) and American League (AL). Each league has three divisions: East, West, and Central. Every year, the major league champion is determined by playoffs that culminate in the World Series. Four teams make the playoffs from each league: the three regular season division winners, plus one wild card team. Baseball is the leading team sport in both Japan and Cuba, and the top level of play is similarly split between two leagues: Japan's Central League and Pacific League; Cuba's West League and East League. In the National and Central leagues, the pitcher is required to bat, per the traditional rules. In the American, Pacific, and both Cuban leagues, there is a tenth player, a designated hitter, who bats for the pitcher. Each top-level team has a farm system of one or more minor league teams. These teams allow younger players to develop as they gain on-field experience against opponents with similar levels of skill.
Coaching Baseball Successfully
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