Baseball instructors aim to keep game fun

Al Herback probably could fly around the world with as many frequent flyer miles as he has racked up. There’s just one problem.
“I never get to use them because the times I want to go anywhere, the seats are already all booked,” laughed the Kincaid, Sask. native who has made his livelihood teaching the game of baseball to players and coaches across North America and even Russia.
Herback and his partner, Al Price, have been making the rounds since 1996 as the instructors for the Little League Official Education Program for Managers and Coaches.
Their travelling road show made a stop at Falls High School on Saturday, where a dozen coaches from both sides of the river turned out to soak up Herback’s wealth of expertise on America’s national pastime.
“For too long, there hasn’t been a program for the most important group in baseball—the coaches and managers,” said Herback, who gave his instructional act solo as Price was unable to attend.
“We’ve found it to be an extremely popular and rewarding program for coaches and managers,” he added. “The comments we’ve heard along the way is that these coaches didn’t realize how much there was to this game.
“It’s an extremely difficult job working with kids and keeping them active.”
As a former elementary school teacher and high school principal, respectively, Herback and Price were well-suited to take on the task of bringing the finer points of the game to the masses.
They began conducting clinics for players and coaches in the 1970s and even spent two weeks in Moscow in July, 1988, where their efforts helped provide the foundation for the eventual selection of the former Soviet Union’s 1992 Olympic baseball team.
Herback estimated that to date, their message has been heard by more than 50,000 coaches and managers, and another 50,000 players.
The pair’s current role sees them fly every weekend for four months, starting in January, from their Calgary homes to different sites across North America, beginning with the southern U.S. states and gradually moving north.
While skill instruction is an important facet of what they do, the diamond duo stress to the coaches that the game doesn’t begin and end between the foul lines.
“We stress the fact that if you don’t play the little guys as much as the big guys, the little guys are going to go someplace else,” reasoned Herback.
“No one in history became a good player sitting on the bench,” he added. “Our philosophy is when we get to picking all-star teams at the end of the year [to compete in regional competitions], then we’ll worry about winning.”
Herback said he’s found that while the five- to eight-year-old age group competing in T-ball usually is overcoached, the opposite occurs in the nine-to-12 group.
“Coaches think by that time the kids know the game, so then they undercoach them,” noted Herback. “There’s not a time when you can stop teaching.”
At 59, Herback isn’t quite sure how much longer he’ll continue with his gruelling travel schedule after his current contract with the Little League program, based in Williamsport, Pa., expires in 2005.
“My family’s been okay with me being away,” he said. “But airline connections seem to be getting tougher, especially if your only flight for the day to your next destination is at 3 p.m. and your clinic isn’t over until 4 p.m.
“At the end of the day, though, we just want the kids to have fun [playing baseball],” he added. “That’s really what we’re looking for here.”