The Passion That Keeps Coaches in the Game

He says just when I thought I was out , they pull me back in . Back on March 3rd 2021 , scott Manahan joined me on the show and he talked about how he's enjoying retirement and having fun . He's enjoying retirement and having fun . Then he takes a phone call from a coach , an alum from Capital University .

Now , three years later , scott's trying to build the program at Capital University . Sometimes you return to the game you love and what you do best , and that's coaching .

In this episode , you'll discover why you should think long and hard about making the jump from high school to college coaching ranks , why good players struggle when they go to college , and great stories from fellow high school coaches . Next , on Baseball Coaches Unplugged .

We're covering it all . Whether you're a high school coach , college coach or just a baseball enthusiast , we'll dive into the tactics and techniques that make the difference on and off the field . Discover how to build a winning mentality .

Inspire your players and get them truly bought into your game philosophy Plus , get the latest insights on recruiting , coaching , leadership and crafting a team culture that champions productivity and success . Join Coach every week as he breaks down the game and shares incredible behind-the-scenes stories .

Your competitive edge starts here , so check out the show weekly and hear from the best coaches in the game . On Baseball Coaches Unplugged .

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We put out a new episode every Wednesday and if you really enjoy it , text it to a friend or a fellow coach and tell them to check out our show . We would love the support . Now to my sit-down with head baseball coach at Capital University , scott Manahan . Hello and welcome to Baseball Coaches Unplugged .

I'm your host , ken Carpenter , and joining me today is Scott Manahan , head baseball coach at Capital University . Coach , thanks for taking the time to be on here . Baseball Coaches Unplugged .

And the first , the first year , you know , it was all dealing with all the COVID stuff . And then all of a sudden , you know , then the next year I'm going and watching games and I was there for two or three innings because it was just frustrating . And so you start to think to yourself I wonder if I could get into it again .

And all of a sudden the old coach at Capital had resigned right in the middle of the season . And then Tom Marker who I blame a little on Tangy Orange , the guy that graduated from Capital , so he's an alum and he called me and said would you like to take the team for the rest of the year ? I've already reached him up to the AD .

So I worked with the people at Waterston and they thought it was good to do . And now I'm going into year four .

So anybody that people that's going to look at you , your grades are going to be important , but in the Division III level grades equals money . So you know , I think the first thing I always talk about is if you have interest in playing at the next level , you better be ready , active and work Then after that that's your work ethic .

And don't tell me you want to play if you don't want to work at it . There's so many guys now that want to play baseball but they don't know what work ethic is . They get to college and they play .

For a guy like myself who's asking them to come in and do the things I'm asking them to do to get better shape physically , mentally , and it's a lot of time and they're not ready to do it . So you have to be academically set and you have to really make sure that you're working hard on your game weight room and all those kind of things .

And I went home and talked to my wife about it and she said , no way , we can't afford to live on that . And I was on a Catholic school salary , so it wasn't like we were making a lot in the first place . So it became really out of my mind and then this whole thing is different . Now .

I don't want to say they're overpaying me , but it's really going to be a good wage for what I have to do .

We're going to go to Vero Beach again this year , jackie Robinson . So we're going to Cedar Point raising money at Cedar Point and I'm staying at a dorm real much . My guys go to work for three days and that takes away time . But September and October is really busy , really busy .

And then November , december and most of January we're not allowed to do anything with the guys . And then , boy , when it starts in January , you know , february , march , april , everything's crazy . So it's as you know , in the summertime you're recruiting and you're doing the other things that you're doing , but that's really pretty much a weekend thing .

But with high school I spent a lot more time Just because of all the six-man hitting stuff . You know the great thing that Urban Meyer built the illness batting cage . All of a sudden , that batting cage . All of a sudden that batting cage was there . Everybody wanted to use it . Now , guess what ?

I didn't have it in me to just give a code to anybody If we were going to do it . Somebody was going to be there for liability reasons . I was usually .

We've had them for four years so I won't say I won't get involved with the transfer portal , but I really haven't too much right now . We've lost a couple guys over the last couple years now and it's a good move for them , so good for them . Not a problem with bringing in guys and helping them move up levels .

What would you tell their parents to kind of get them to kind of start talking that up with their son ?

You know , in this world we live in , these young men , they want to be young men , but sometimes they want to be high school students and I'm not . You can't be both . You're in college now , so you're 19 years old , and if you have situations that we need to deal with , my door is always open .

My assistant coach's door is always open , and I talk to the kids , not to the parents .

Number two is academics , because that's why you're here , and if you're here just to play baseball and your academics fails , you're not going to be here long . And then baseball is number three , because who's going to go out and play at the next level ? We don't know , but not most of them . Yeah , so we really .

I just really put the , I put it on the kids and I'm saying , calling them kids . I'm 61 years old , but they're not kids , they're young men , so you can't be both though . You can't be a high school kid , you can't be treated like a college guy . So we put it on them to take care of all that .

Their time management is not bad . You know , when we have all this free time , they got to come over and work on their own and you'll get a couple of guys that aren't interested in doing that . That's why you have a big roster . If you don't want to do it , you don't want to put the time in , it'll show and then we make decisions off of that .

So baseball the guys are really cool to get it , getting over here and getting their work in and they're in practice and they work hard and everything . But in that time in between you got to start playing video games and then get lost . All of a sudden it's 9 , 20 o'clock at night and then you try to get ready for class the next day and it's tough .

So we sit down with our freshmen right away and we get them a planner . I have an old OHSAA to-do list right on my desk that I use . We give all these guys a copy of this , make copies for them and use it , check it off and do all the things that you need to do . Some do a good job of it .

Those guys don't care , they're going to beat you , they're going to play the game . The way that they play . It's a great league . I've never seen anything like it . Of course the Catholic League was such a small little group that I co-founded for Waterston , but that was a great league . There just wasn't that many teams .

But you look up and down the OAC , you know it is year in and year out , one of the best leagues and we've been kind of hanging on up there in the bottom trying to work those things up . And you know , last year we got our first big win . We went and we were able to beat Paul and Wallace who were number two in the country .

So then the second game we played , we lost 4-1 . So you can see a little bit of confidence building in our guys . And then we finished with a win against Canyon and a real tough doubleheader against Marietta that we lost both of them . But you just can see that we're getting a little bit better . So the kids came back with a little bit more confidence .

This year we got a real good freshman class that we're excited about . So now , hopefully , we take another step . We won 10 games and the kids' goals are to win 20 . So every time we start slacking in the weight room or anything , I will see guys over here getting our score . All I just said on group is number 2-0 .

You guys said you want to win 20 games . It's not going to be easy . Our schedule has changed . You know . We tried to play some teams early just to get wins and we weren't getting those wins . So it's like it's time to get better . And then let's go ahead and let's take our chances and play hard and see how we end up this year .

So it's frustrating , but at the other time go ahead and let's take our chances and play hard and see how we end up this year . It's frustrating , but at the other time the pressure that I felt like I had all the time on Waterston was probably self-induced . If we didn't win the state of Waterston , it was a bad year .

Now I'm just trying to take this group to another level and I've never been involved in anything like it . I have no ego . I have no ego . I have no ego , I have no . It's all gone . I'm starting over again and I've probably lost more games in the four years of capital than it took me 15 years of water , and that's tough , but get over yourself .

But get over yourself . You get over yourself . It's not about me , it's about these guys . You know we're doing things in our field . Now that we're improving some things , I think we're doing some things the right way . So I didn't retire and get out of here . I can look back at it and say it's better than it was when I first started .

I just go back to the day when it was the Worthington , it was 239 American League and you had the best players from Thomas , roentgen , watterson at the time and Kilbourne , you know , but it was like that all-star team of four or five guys that came together and they were pretty good and then everybody else played summer baseball .

Remember we'd have summer baseball leagues . I had three teams in Waterston at one time in the summertime .

And I just laughed at them and said no , I'm not doing that again . That was a lot of work to do that and these kids wouldn't commit if somebody picked them up to go somewhere . Then all of a sudden they were not coming to play for us at Waterston .

So where's it at now , man , being in Columbus , I don't have to travel the state of Ohio because everybody somewhere comes into Columbus for one of these tournaments . So for me I'm not going to complain much about travel ball because it gives it an easy way for us to see these guys . I remember George Powell back in the day .

He would be at everybody's summer games . I'd never seen a guy run along so much . He would show up and do all these different things . Now I can just go to one spot , my assistant can be in another spot , my other assistant can be in another spot and we're recruiting . So back to the travel ball question .

The only thing that bothers me , the travel ball question , the only thing about travel ball anymore , is the overuse of the pitchers . We've got so many kids that come to us as incoming freshmen . We had one kid last year , 50 innings in the summer , 50 innings in the summer after pitching in the spring . So guess what His arms hurt .

He's seeing our athletic player before we just got to school . So whose fault is that ? It's the summer coach's fault , it's the parent , it's the kid . Somebody just say , no , this is too much . So you know , you get the position guys , they're getting swings , they're getting reps , they're getting as many ground balls as they can get in a game .

But I guess the only other issue that I have with travel ball is the fact that these guys show , don't practice , show up on Thursday , you know , play Thursday , friday , saturday , sunday , go home on Monday , tuesday , wednesday , do nothing , no-transcript . But the pitching thing is really my biggest concern .

We have kids in our roster from the Dominican Republic , from Puerto Rico , from Florida , louisiana , california , all over the place . So those guys are even those guys . Just to even recruit them now is usually through Twitter or some kind of videos that they'll send me .

But then I'll reach out most of the time or my assistant coach will reach out to the high school coach or the travel coach . If it's a real good travel coach and I don't have a high school bag , I may call the travel coach .

I usually if a guy's got a 3.5 and this or that thing , he's usually probably not a problem in high school , so that helps me a little bit . If I have somebody on the 3.0 that we like , I'll call the coach just to make sure it's not because of a lack of effort or anything like that . 3.0 may be the best thing to do , so good for him .

I try to reach out . Yep , I try .

So I love winning more than I hate losing , but I hate both . I hate losing . That was fun .

I can tell you a lot about losses . I remember a lot of them . I remember a lot of them Now at Capital . I can tell you about the wins . We haven't had them as many as two . I mean you really appreciate it . I mean , when we got done at Baltimore last year , I really felt , finally we had this made it . It was a good feeling .

You know we were finally able to do something and taking it step by step , you just have to be really patient .

You know , in Tangier Horns , central District Hall of Famer last night , ryan Alexander , craig Kyle those guys would be so into it and so serious I could just sit back and watch . Practice would be done All these young guys and it would be done . Stats analytics all these young guys and it would be intense . Now can we have fun ?

Okay , I'm going to have Ray Benjamin , tom Newbert and for somebody to pick on all the time , tim Saunders .

But you asked me I don't know how much I'd ever be home if I had Ray and Tom and Timmy on my side . It probably wouldn't be good for my 37 years of marriage , but we'd have fun .

And Joe looked at him and said well , it's actually my 75th birthday and I was kind of going to do something with my family . And he's like ah , you've had 74 of them . He goes you're good , you know , save a little money and come have a hot dog . Yeah .

So I'll have a hard time missing the clinic because I've learned so much from so many great coaches , on stage , at the bar and then in the rooms , you know , sitting here and talking baseball .

One of the greatest pictures I'll have is sitting in the lounge in the state clinic with Donnie Thorpe from Lakewood and Rich from Florida West Mr Christian , I don't know his name . He was A-Rod's coach , two of the most winning coaches in the country , and I'm just sitting there with my notepad and somebody took a picture of us .

I'm a 42-year-old coach and I'm still , you know , I'm still learning from these guys and we're having a drink . We're having so much fun . Yeah , I've never been in a lot of other clinics , but baseball coaches are the best .

A week later you're like ready to die and I'm talking to you and you're like , oh , you know , I'm in really bad shape and I'm like , well , you dumbass , you were eating chicken and dumplings at Planks and when you made it and you were okay , then it was really easy to give your shit about that one . So that's really my best one .

Can I tell my second favorite one ? Sure , why not , let's go . So we're going to play a district tournament at Dublin-Coffman and you remember it well , and we won't even use any names of the umpires that did that , but they happened to be from your county and I was really excited because I think I knew who the umpires were and you didn't .

Yet I think Tim told me or something . So we're standing and talking or doing whatever , and here come these two umpires around and I'll never forget the look in your eye like , oh my God , we are screwed . And you were .

Every call went my way and I think TC's in the dugout with me and I'm like , I know this is the district final , but I kind of feel bad for Ken , but I think you brought it all upon yourself .

Yeah , you brought it upon yourself in earlier games , but I'll just never forget those two umpires showing up and the look in your eye was just like my God , we're already playing Water Center and now we got these two guys .

But hey , that's life and you know I .

You know , and a lot of those guys are all my former high school coaches that we played against and you know there's , like I said , there's so many good coaches around here and what they're doing with their programs are deeply and above levels , you know , with the things they have and the facilities they have and the time that you guys , that high school guys ,

have , man , I'll tell you what they're intense . So I'm still learning . I'm still learning and hopefully I can teach my kids .