Coaching Kids Taught Me About Strategic Patience

The Pitcher asked me to pull her. I didn't. Here's why.

I coached youth sports for 26 seasons. Baseball, softball, and basketball. Boys and girls, ages ten to fifteen. Different sports, different kids, same essential problem: how do you develop people who aren’t ready yet, in front of an audience that only cares about the scoreboard?

The parents on the sideline were my “board of directors.” Some of them understood the mission. Others had come to see wins and were prepared to explain to me, at length, exactly how to produce more of them. With their kid in the starring role.

I learned more about leadership from those seasons than from much management literature I’ve read.

WHAT A COACH IS ACTUALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR

Every youth coach has the same conversation with the parents at the start of the season. I had mine 26 seasons times almost every week.

My job, I told them, was not primarily to win games. It was to develop players: their capabilities, their confidence, and their sense of how to function as part of a team. Winning was a byproduct of doing those things well over time. It wasn’t the product itself.

Most parents nodded. Some meant it. The ones who didn’t would find me after a loss to explain which substitutions I’d gotten wrong and how they had some “plays” that would definitely work.

The dynamic is identical in business. Shareholders and boards want results. That’s legitimate. But a CEO who manages only for this quarter’s results, at the expense of building the team and the capability that produces next year’s results, is optimizing the wrong variable. The problem is that the wrong variable is the one everyone can see.

The scoreboard shows the result. It doesn’t show the development that makes the next result possible.

THE CHAMPIONSHIP GAME

Final game of the softball season. We were playing the other undefeated team for the league championship. Our pitcher was one of the best I’d coached, and we went into the last inning two runs ahead.

She started walking batters.

Four runs ahead became three. Then two. The other team had bases loaded and the crowd was doing what crowds do. She called a timeout, and I walked out to the mound.

She was near tears. She asked me if I wanted to pull her.

I thought about it for about two seconds. We had another pitcher. The percentage move, if you were managing for the scoreboard, was probably to make the change. She was struggling. The lead was shrinking. The math wasn’t complicated.

But I’d watched her pitch all season and I knew she was capable. And I knew that if I pulled her in that moment, in front of the whole league, with tears on her face, she’d carry that for a long time.

I asked her whether she thought she could get back to pitching the way I knew she could. She said she’d try. I told her that her team and I only asked her to do her best, whatever that turned out to be.

She wiped her face. Gritted her teeth.

Walked in one more run. Then got the next two batters out. We won.

I didn’t know she’d get those last two batters. That’s what made it a decision rather than a calculation.

THE ESSAY

Years later, I heard from her mother. In a high school English class, she’d been asked to write about an adult she admired. She wrote about that moment on the mound.

She wrote about what it felt like when someone believed in her at the exact moment she’d stopped believing in herself.

I think about that essay when people ask me what leadership is actually for. You can describe it in strategic terms: developing capability, building resilience, creating the conditions for long-term performance. All of that is true and useful.

But what it actually looks like, in the moment, is deciding to trust your team when the safer move is to replace them or do it yourself.

THE TRADEOFF MISSING ON THE SCOREBOARD

Over 26 seasons, I made a lot of decisions like that one. Not all of them ended as well.

I played kids who weren’t ready, because they needed the experience. I left struggling players in games longer than the scoreboard logic suggested (or parents vigorously “suggested”), because pulling them would have cost more than the points it might have saved. I gave the ball to the kid with the least natural talent on the team because it was their turn and they’d earned it.

Some of those decisions cost us games. I never apologized for any of them.

The parents who wanted wins saw those choices as mistakes. The players who were on the receiving end of them learned what it means to be part of a team where adults treat you as more than a piece on a board.

Business leaders face the same tradeoff constantly. You can optimize for this quarter or you can invest in the person who isn’t ready yet. You can pull the struggling executive or you can stay in the conversation a little longer. You can staff the initiative with your best people or you can use it to develop the ones who need the stretch.

This is where readers will screech to a halt and feel that business is all about financial performance. This carries heavy weight, but long-term performance does rely on building asset value, culture, and loyalty.

There isn’t a formula. It’s judgment under uncertainty, with incomplete information, in front of an audience that’s mostly watching the scoreboard.

The leader’s job isn’t to win every game. It’s to build something that keeps getting better at winning.

WHY THIS CONNECTS TO STRATEGY

The SPRINT sequence we’ve spent the past six weeks on is a framework for making better decisions under uncertainty. Problem statements, Possibility Sets, WWHTBT, priority uncertainties, and CEO Summary. All of it is designed to make the reasoning behind strategic choices more explicit and more testable.

What it can’t do is make the choices easy. The moment on the mound wasn’t an analytical problem. I had information, I had judgment, and I had a kid looking at me with her “career” on the line, in her mind at least.

The frameworks are how you prepare for those moments. They help you go into the hard calls with a clearer picture of what you know, what you don’t know, and what you’re actually trying to achieve beyond the immediate result.

But the call itself is still yours. That’s what makes it leadership rather than management.

Next week: Who Owns Strategy? Why inputs are widely distributed but the decision belongs to one person.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Haas is a strategy advisor to CEOs and boards of mid-market companies, with more than 30 years of experience across healthcare, defense, finance, social services, and biomedical research. He is the founder of Haas Strategy Solutions, a Certified Management Consultant, former Chair and CEO of the Institute of Management Consultants USA, and recipient of the IMC Lifetime Achievement Award. Mark also served as Ethics Officer for 20 years and holds degrees from Colgate and Harvard Universities.

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