Players cite coaching, lack of discipline
BOBBY COPELAND
The Ellis County Press
WAXAHACHIE - As many of you know the SAGU Lions baseball season came to an end without reaching conference play.
Being a student of SAGU the baseball team is one of the best sports on campus and for them to fall short of the conference was weird.
So I asked many sources around the club why they thought they fell short.
Quite a few of the sources told me they had the talent, but as most of us know baseball is played from the dugout and that is where the team lacked.
It is very common for a team to be upset for various reasons once the season has to come to a abrupt end, but for so many people around the team to point the blame in one area means something is wrong.
Coach Hayes is the reason, in most eyes around campus, the team is not meeting expectations.
One example is pitchers would just come to practice when they felt like it and pitch a little and then leave.
Yes, I do understand the pitchers are not going to do the same things the fielders are, but the pitchers do have to know their defensive assignments and that comes with practice.
Yes, we are talking about practice because sports and especially baseball is mainly mastered off repetitiveness.
When you conduct practice in that manner you can only imagine what other areas of the team are loosely managed.
The sources also point out the lack of discipline on the team as another factor of the team falling short of their goals.
The examples of lack of discipline are the throwing of bats and helmets when players were upset.
You would guess that because they are at a private Christian institution, discipline is an attitude which has to be exercised constantly in the Christian walk, that discipline would already be established from day one.
As I have learned from this assignment guessing is not something that should be practiced with SAGU.
The third example I was told of why the team fell short is the lack of team unity.
This is confusing to me because there is not a lot of variance on the SAGU campus because to go there you must fill out a sheet stating you have certain beliefs and that you will not break what amounts to almost fifty different rules.
So the team, one would guess, there is that word again, would not have to have a ton of different activities to become united because of their common beliefs, but as I found out it looks like Coach Hayes did not even go that extra mile.
Those examples are the ones which stood out because they were commonly voiced by my sources.
They did tell me all the team needs is some good starting pitching and a little bit of bullpen addition and they would be good to go, but they do want the coaching staff to be heavily looked over before next year.
The team will start back up next fall as they prepare to go further than they did this year.
