96: John Fitzpatrick - Indianola HS (IA)

Jon Fitzpatrick Notes

 

Bio

• • Current Assistant AD and Head Baseball coach at Indianola High School in Indianola, Iowa
    • Starting 2nd season (30-11)
    • Below .500 year before
    • Kasey Blake, Brady Blake is junior
  • Former Head Baseball Coach at Martensdale St. Marys (public school)
    • 10 years, 12 years total 
    • Part of 88 win streak as an assistant coach (under Justin Dehmer)
    • 9 of 10 years as state finalist 
    • Ethan Westfall played professionally (Rockies)
  • 3rd year as a Mental performance coach
    • Author of Don’t Shoot the Young Buck: Living in the Present Moment

• Worked with 3 college teams - Concordia, Central College, Simpson College

• Multiple High school teams in all sports

• Provides 1 on 1 coaching to many athletes

 

Notes

• The mental game is a separator
• Brian Cain total immersion
• Mental minute at the beginning of practice
  • Awareness, strategy, action
• Build in routines during practice
• Practice green lights, yellow lights, red lights
• Release routine - physical, breath, self talk
• Practice striking out
• End of practice journal - well, better, how or start, stop, continue to reflect on themselves, the team.
• Well, better, how for more of a weekly to kick start your week
• Start, stop, continue post game to get us closer to where we want to be at the end of the year
• Does the kids thinking align with the coaching staff thoughts 
• APE - Attitude/Appearance, perspective/preparation, energy/effort
• Be clark kent and turn into superman when you get to the ball field and change into your uniform. Journaling post game helps them turn back from Superman to clark kent
• APE - stuffed animal to visualize APE
• Signal lights 
  • Green lights - GO! When things are going smooth, 
  • Yellow lights - caution - pump the brakes or speed up through the light
  • Red light - STOP or you will crash
  • Recognize as respond to get back to green light
  • What does our body language look like in green lights?
  • How does that change when adversity hits?
  • Where is our focus?
  • What does our self talk?
    • Have kids write it down
  • Release language
    • Get big - take a deep breath on a focal point, 
    • GOOD
    • SO what!
• First place to start with team was signal lights, then build routines based on those lights
• Shadow bullpens - no ball, just visualize, and lost in a routine
• Leadership drives culture, culture drives behavior, behavior leads to results (performance pathway)
• Go from coach fed leadership, to player led leadership
• Created 4 key principles to culture
  • PETE - process, energy/effort, trust, excellence
  • Define each of the principles
• What you do on the daily basis will get you the results
• Everything we talk about in baseball goes way beyond the field
• Person, student, and player and what is “above the line” and define it, there is no grey area
• “Was that above the line or below the line?” simple question to ask and hold each other accountable to
• Carving out time every single day
• What is driving your program? What are those things we are going to be really good at?
• What are your core values? What do they look like on the field
• Signal lights
• Strategies to handle signal lights
• 3-8 hitting chart - hard hit ball chart
  • Defined each number of hard hit and find out which numbers you hit when you are going good
  • What works best for you, and then get really good at that!
• Pitchers first pitch % (60-67%), and quality innings
• Figure out what pitcher is really good at and what they need to go with in certain situation
• A3P - After 3 pitches is the ball in play or is it a 1-2 count?  
  • Pitching is about being efficient due to pitch counts
  • 2 out of 3 - 67% of at bats
• Reverse engineer what we want from our program
  • Graduate
  • State championship
    • Get to the park
    • Win sub state
    • host/win a district
    • Win the conference
    • Go 1-0 today
• Everyone has that same goal, how are you going to get there?  How are you going to separate yourself?
• www.coachfitzpatrick.com
• 515-339-5490
• Twitter - @Fitzpatrick_MP
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