The-Slight-Edge

The 7 Slight Edge Principles 79
Head baseball coach and The Slight Edge reader Russell Stockton of Houston
knows firsthand how constant repetition pays off for his team. In his 20 years
as a head baseball coach, mostly at smaller colleges, he never had the luxury of
landing a “blue chip” recruit for his team. To equal the playing field a few years
ago he instilled the Slight Edge principles into his coaching philosophy. And it
has produced amazing results, earning him a conference title and a trip to the
NCAA Regional tournament for the first time in 10 years.
Stockton has also been very successful in getting his team to buy into
mastering the simple fundamentals of the game. In a letter he sent us, he tells
of one pitcher, who wasn’t expected to break into the starting rotation at the
beginning of the season, but ended up being one of the most valuable players on
his team come playoff time. Here is his story.
I was a new assistant coach at the university and was assigned to the
pitchers. The head coach gave me the rundown on all the guys and told me
who to spend the most time with. This one player, we will call Tom, he told
me not to spend much time with him, as he was a non-factor. However, this
player bought into the Slight Edge concept that I taught him and he did
the drills religiously. By the end of the year, because he applied the Slight
Edge principles and had improved his game so much, he was drafted in the
third round and signed for a little less than $500,000. He should be in the
big leagues next year.
Stockton has also been very successful in getting his team to buy into
mastering the simple fundamentals of the game. The best example Stockton uses
in how he implements the Slight Edge philosophy is with his hitters.
I tell my hitters, when practice is over, if they choose to, go to the
batting cage and hit two buckets of balls, approximately 100 swings, it will
only take about 20 minutes (easy to do). However, most leave and go home
(also easy to do). But if they take 100 extra swings five days a week they
will have 500 extra swings by the end of the week. I tell them they probably
will not be much better. But don’t stop, do that all four weeks of the month.
So by the end of the first month they should have 2,000 extra swings.
You might start seeing a positive change. But don’t stop; if you do
this for all 10 months of the school year, by the time we hit the playoffs
you should have 20,000 extra swings. But if you can take at least five
teammates with you to the batting cages, then our team will be getting
100,000 extra swings. The year we won the conference title I had six to
eight hitters who bought into this idea.