Abandoned - Chapter 7 Losing Sucks

  You probably did not see this one coming. Maybe this serves a multiple purpose and gets away from the continual calming message of we want to keep working to get better, keep on with trying to do the right things even if we don’t get the hopeful results, and not get bogged down with won-loss records.

Secondly, I wanted to make it clear, crystal clear, that even though I knew the correct path and a plan was in place, the losses don’t disappear, and a new day does not automatically bring hope. Nope. They hit you right in the gut over and over (slight pause) and repeat while you wait for a remedy (a win). You can’t shake what has already happened. Losing takes your spirit and like a tug-of-war battle, you are on the team with the skinny 13-year-olds and you’re pulling against a bunch of Penn State defensive linemen.

 I was not a gracious loser as a young athlete. I took losses very hard, maybe because the teams I played for didn’t lose often. I don’t think I ever played on a youth league team that had a losing record. 

Little League, Babe Ruth and American Legion baseball and high school football and basketball- it was one of those cycles of good athletes who fell in the same age group who had a lot of success. I didn’t show any defeatist emotions on the court or the field. I just took those painful defeats home with me.

My behavior after a loss when I was a little guy, maybe six or seven years old, did not differ before team sports were part of my life. My dad would get the better of me in a card game, and I’d quit and run off. If we visited a relative’s house, I took a cardboard box with my plastic bowling ball and pins and set them up in the largest room available. I never threw the pins at anyone when I lost, but I did throw them back in the box with as much force as a first grader could generate and the plastic bowling ball followed.

The losses as a teenager brought pouting to the forefront. My modus operandi was quite simple. I went home and said nothing or gave replies as short as possible to everyone. Any question directed my way usually received a “yeah”, “no”. or “I don’t care.”

I was fortunate to have very good coaches as a young player. Most of them were teachers in our school district and even though some of them were not familiar with all the x’s and o’s, they were good people who never did anything to embarrass us or themselves. They never stopped teaching and they were wonderful role models.
I saw their actions every day and took it for granted. Occasionally, we’d see an opposing coach who didn’t seem to enjoy coaching and thus his players didn’t seem to be having much fun. I appreciated my coaches, but it took years to fully understand the ultimate effect they had on me.

Several of my players who I spoke to in 2024 remembered some games and individual mistakes that left them disappointed and embarrassed back in that ’89 season. Some were glad that we had our locker room concourse hidden behind our dugout at Q-Stadium that provided a good spot to let off some steam during inning breaks or between games.

I wasn’t blind to their emotions in 1989. I understood the feeling. I hated losing. It was repugnant. It was hellish, but it wasn’t strangling me so badly that I couldn’t remain optimistic. I had it much easier than my players. I knew what I was stepping into and that I could make it better. I had done it before, but admittingly the QC baseball program was unique in the fact it was nearly demolished, bull-dozed to the ground in less than seven months.

There are not many collegiate programs that are torn down to their roots in such a short amount of time unless they’ve committed serious infractions. 

That was not the case in Quincy, but this might have been more infuriating. These young men had done nothing wrong, and they had only two choices if they wanted to attend Quincy College- not play baseball at all or play in 1989 and probably lose a ton of games. 

Some people might think if those young players who chose option two knew they were going to be 0-25 and lose one game, 32-0, they may have chosen option one instead. After spending a season with them, I don’t think they would alter their decision. 

I’ve never been a proponent of all the cliches and aphorisms about winning and losing: 

“Winners never quit, and quitters never win,” 
“We wanted it more than they did.”
“We had a greater will to win.” 
“Losing builds character.”

And 5,000 more adages and trite phrases are on posters, bumper stickers, etc. 
 I never was a one size fits all person. I think you must coach your personality, instead of creating a metamorphosis every time the situation changes. If a coach at any level wants to quote Vince Lombardi, Mike Krzyzewski, or Dusty Baker to motivate his players, that’s cool. Go ahead. It’s just not me.

What I did learn and thought about often was some of the wisdom that was directly delivered to me through the years by coaches who I considered my mentors. 

I was eating at a fast-food restaurant in the spring of 2024. It was late morning and there was a table with two youngsters in baseball uniforms, probably 13 or 14 years old, and one adult. They were in town for a youth tournament at a state-of-the-art baseball complex that hosts these travel teams.

The kids were wiping away the crumbs and taking their final sips of what appeared to be a 128-ounce bucket of soda when I walked by and said hello, asked if they were participating in the tournament and wished them good luck. They said thanks and as I started to move away, I said, “Have some fun.”

That was a trigger for the coach/dad who told me, “We didn’t come here to have fun. We came to take home some hardware.” Case closed.

In my 2024 conversations with my 1989 players, many of them including Jim Wissel, Mike Egenes, Mark Trapp, Joe Nardi, Jeff Swigris, and John Cassidy told me about coaching their own children and kids of close friends in sports. Some of those ex- Hawks’ players coached baseball, but lacrosse, soccer, softball, and football were also on the list.

I never saw them directing their players from the dugout or the third base coaching box, but I’m confident these ex-players were fine coaches and unlike the coach/dad in the restaurant, not overly concerned about taking home hardware. If they coached their personality, then the kids would have learned a lot and had fun.

Some ex-players even told me they talked about the Iowa loss and framed it as a teaching moment with their youth league teams. 

 I used to adamantly say that coaching baseball is always about development until you reach the big leagues where you must win. There’s not a lot of front office patience and major league organizations don’t want to hear about the “five-year plan” you have. The monopoly money in play adds to the decision-makers’ inability to tolerate delays in putting a winning team on the field.

Minor leagues are a developmental platform. Winning is a part of the development process that could eventually take a young man to the big leagues, but it’s only a part of the process.

There is a strong aroma of “need to win” with baseball programs in major and probably mid-major conferences. You’re still developing, but now you’re dealing with boosters, alumni, and athletic directors and they can carry some weight. 

I had no pressure in 1989. I wasn’t going to get fired for starting out 0-25. I don’t think many members of our administration cared one iota.  Our daily paper always published a report of our games and there were a few player profiles, but any criticisms that any campus personnel had must have been behind closed doors. 
I made an unspoken comparison of some professional organizations who just wanted to put a team on the field. They were not going to sign any free agents or give long-term contracts to their best players-just trade them for “prospects”. There would be no stadium repairs and prices of game tickets would not be reduced. In other words, they would do anything possible to create a scenario that would allow them to move to a new city of riches.

The QC baseball program was not going to be eliminated or moved, but there would be little help provided. College officials allowed players to leave without concern and provided minimal support to those who remained. The stadium was not going to undergo any renovations in the foreseeable future. The coming times would be determined by what we did on the field and that started with how we performed in 1989. We had to construct our own fate.

We were developing, we were striving to get better by doing the right things and, oops, we’re right back to paragraph one and the chapter’s title. Losing still sucks. I couldn’t deny it, but we also couldn’t let it shape every aspect of each player’s life. They were college students with other concerns; academics, financial/tuition worries, a girlfriend 500 miles away and countless other apprehensions. 

We were still going to do the right things and unlike dad/coach, we didn’t go to Iowa, SIU-Carbondale, Illinois Wesleyan, and the other stops to take home some hardware. We went to play hard and if we returned with one loss or two, we’d still come back with something learned.  

Note: It’s not mentioned in earlier chapters, but Quincy College baseball was not in a conference. We had a Division 2 classification, but played an independent schedule which literally meant we could play any of the three division levels and NAIA schools.
Quincy University was admitted to the Great Lakes Valley Conference in 1994. The value of being in a conference is multi-fold with one of the positives being that half (give or take a game or two) of your seasonal schedule is already in place each year. Conference titles, conference playoffs, and added incentives for universities to improve facilities are just a few of the upsides.

There’s still enough space in the schedule to play traditional rivals, some Division 1 schools and/or travel south for some early-season games (talk to me about that last example- a ridiculous staple of college baseball).

The addition of the Quincy Gems to the Central Illinois Collegiate League (CICL) in 1996 was a tremendous baseball boost for the community. They drew 1,500-2,000 fans for many of their home games, added new dugouts, and put in seats and decks in foul territories for parties. They upgraded the press box, and each year made another improvement.

When I was working on our 1990 schedule, I called three of the colleges who had defeated us in doubleheaders at their home fields in ’89. Surprisingly, none of the three schools had “any open spots on their schedule.”

Why would you not want to play a doubleheader versus a program that you beat relatively easily the year before?

I didn’t ask that, but I had some beliefs, and they weren’t about open spots on their schedule

1. Any opposing coach who had at least a moderate level of observation skills could tell, despite the scores and the number of losses, that our players knew how to play, but the execution was well below a standard Division 2 program in 1989
2. Any opposing coach should have understood that I knew what I was doing. I had read the book, and I knew how this was going to come out in the end. I’m not saying that anybody should have feared us, but there was no way we were not going to be more competitive soon. These opposing teams needed assurances they were going to come in and sweep us and those guarantees would not be present any longer.
3. I must be fair. Maybe one or all three did have scheduling issues that prevented them from coming over and playing us. Maybe.