Interview With Head Baseball Coach Sonny Hansley – Part 2 of 3

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Click Here to Read Part 3 of this Interview

Now we will pick up with the second part of our interview with Coach Sonny Hansley.

Anthony: What was the most difficult part of coaching?

Coach Hansley: Parents. (chuckling). After you hear it all the time, and having been a parent having gone through that whole thing with my son, I understand what their trying to do, but I think sometimes they have to step back and understand what we’re trying to do.I don’t think parents can do that sometimes.

I think parents have tunnel vision and that’s just part of the relationship they have with their kids, that they want the best for them, and I don’t fault that, but I think somewhere along the line they have to step back and say ok, if you’re going to have your son or daughter playing for a coach, then you have to have enough confidence in the coach to let them do their job

Does that mean they are always going to find really good coaches? Not necessarily, but for the time being that coach and his staff are going make decisions and they are going to play who they think are the best players. Now, does that always agree with parents? No it doesn’t. That’s never going to change, but that’s the hard part, because I think that from a coaching point of view, I’m going to play the best players.

Here we had six coaches. At Nova (Southeastern) sometimes we had four or five. It wasn’t unilateral, it’s never a unilateral decision. Everybody is going to go around and have what they want to say, but ultimately I’m going to make the final decision. I may or may not agree with what they say, but if the pitching guy comes to me and says so and so should get some innings because he’s really doing a great job, you should reward him, then I’m going to do my best to try and do that.

For parents to somehow think that we don’t play their kid because we don’t like them, well if we didn’t like them we wouldn’t have them on the baseball team. So anybody we kept was in a situation where we thought they would be able to help us in some form or another. Players play themselves in and they play themselves out.

Anthony: One of the frustrations that all coaches deal with is when you get players that you know have more potential than they give in effort. How have you learned to deal with that over the years, dealing with kids that really could be ruining their careers by their attitudes and some of the other stuff that they do?

Coach Hansley: Well again, we’re going to reach some of those kids and we’re going to take them aside and my voice or my assistant’s voice is getting in their ear. We see some changes in players and none in other players, no matter what you say, because they don’t believe what I’m telling them to do. They believe they have all the answers.

When there is a butting of heads, as you know, the player ends up losing out because as I’ve said many times, I haven’t changed things a lot in 40 years, I’m still the same aggressive guy that I’ve always been. I’ve mellowed in some ways I handle it now, but I have not mellowed in terms of “Players are going to do it the way we want it to get done.”

And I’m not just talking about on the baseball field either; I’m talking about their responsibilities of being a good citizen in school, because if they can’t deal in school, then we are going to have the same kinds of issues out here.

You know, you’ve coached and you know what I’m talking about, if a kid is misbehaving in class, he’s going to misbehave here. So we have to try to get a happy medium between that and try to get kids to understand that this is for their best interest, so if they have consequences in school, then end up getting suspended or whatever, then can’t play, so that hurts everybody. So we try to do it that way, sometimes it works, other times you have to take the hard line and I’m not opposed to doing that. I’ve done that enough in my life, and I’d still do that.

Anthony: As a follow up, trust is such an important factor in the game of baseball, between coach and player, how do you go about gaining that trust while still being the authority figure with the players?

Coach Hansley: Well I think you have to address, not the person, address the action. There are times when you have to come down on a kid, but you’re really coming down on the way they act, not who they are.

If you can have them understand, which is sometimes hard for them to understand, then you know you’re going to have a pretty good opportunity to change them. And I think being there for them. You know, being out here, I never have ever, in my whole life as a coach, asked a player or another coach to do something that I wouldn’t do. I’m not opposed to picking up balls off the ground, or picking up bats or helmets, raking fields or cleaning. I’m not opposed to doing that, so I don’t have a problem with saying, “You need to do this to be a part of our program,” there are certain things you need to be able to do, you and if you can’t do those things, you can’t be a legitimate part of the program. That’s where the trust comes in.

You have to be there if they want to do extra batting practice or hit extra ground balls, and also the little conferences you have with them about their academics that nobody else knows about it, or if there are any other problems they want to talk about. I’m not a warm and fuzzy guy, I never said that I would be a warm and fuzzy guy. I wish I could be like some other coaches who have that kind of personality. I’ve never been that, but if the players do need me, I would be there for them and I think that’s where the trust factor comes in.

Anthony: Every generation says the kids have changed. How much in your time coaching, have the players changed over the years?

Coach Hansley: I think there’s kids that think their entitled and kids that don’t think their entitled. The entitled kids are kids sometimes the ones you have to really work harder with, because they come up through the ranks and always been really good where they have been. Then they get to a situation where their struggling, that’s when you have to really be hands on, take them aside and talk to them, try to get them to change the way that their thinking. We’re not going to try to make them worse, we are going to try to make them a better player.
Travel baseball the way it is today, with the exposure some of these kids get, everybody’s telling them how good they are all the time. Reality sets in that sometimes because it’s a moneymaker, in these travel programs, so they’re being told things that are not really factual.

So when they get into a tough situation or into a program like ours or they get to college and then oh my gosh, I’m not starting anymore – so what happened?

Well, you have to look at yourself and think, are you doing all the little things the coaches want you to do in order to play?

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