Two Goals Down, One To Go

The Titans celebrating their Českomoravská liga championship last weekend.

On Saturday, our club fought back to win our league's championship game, 3-2, with an eighth-inning two-run double proving to be the difference against a very good team from Hluboká, which is located two hours south of Prague not far from the Austrian border.

The Českomoravská liga championship game took place eight months from the day I arrived and had my first practice with our team, and since then my players and I have certainly shared some growing pains together. They've had to adjust to my stubborn ways and the program I wanted to put in, and I've had to learn their strengths and weaknesses on the fly while adjusting to them in attempt to mend some of the cultural differences we have on the baseball field.

My coaching mentor, Pudge Gjormand, always said that 'it's a marathon, not a sprint', and that has never been more true than this season. We'll end up playing about 55 games between 'friendlies', tournaments, league games and postseason games, and have been practicing three times a week since February, minus a two week break in July. Over the course of that time, I've battled to get guys to buy in, and it's a great feeling when you see that happening and them understanding that what I'm preaching really does work more often then it doesn't. It certainly hasn't been a smooth ride at times, but results are what matter in this game and we've been able to check off goals we've set while stringing together some very good stretches of baseball.

We won 16 straight league games during May and June, won the regular season championship, our first goal, knocked off a surging team from Třebíč in the semifinals, and then defeated a former national team pitcher to win the league title, our second goal. We've competed well in games against the U18 Czech national team as well as the senior national teams from Croatia and Hungary. We led the league in hitting, and when the hitting cooled off at times in the playoffs, our pitching came up big for us.

With the championship trophy and Andrew Rodgers, our import
player from Australia, who has been a major part of our success.

And now, we have an opportunity to get this club back to the Extraliga, the country's top division, when we open the promotion/relegation series (they call it the Baráž here) against Olympia Blansko this weekend. That's our third goal, an annual one the past three years for our club, which dropped from the Extraliga in 2009 after 17 seasons of competing in the league.

I'm not afraid to tell anyone who will listen that I'm proud of my guys. Proud of them for putting up with me when I hammer them about 'doing the little things right', keeping the 'baseball Gods happy', always being 'the hardest working team in the Czech Republic', or when I let fly an occasional outburst of curse words, toss a fungo in the air in frustration, or go fire up an umpire who may or may not even speak English. Proud of how they all arrive on time now, and when they're running late, that I'll get an SMS letting me know that's the case, something that wasn't the case when I arrived. Proud of how we can fly through a practice plan, knock out drills that simulate game speed that we were dragging through back in March and April, execute in situational hitting drills, and for the most part, make adjustments in practice quickly so we can move on to the next task (this also wasn't the case early on, when EVERYTHING would be discussed at nauseum, something I've discovered as part of the culture in my time in Hungary and here in the Czech Republic).

Like I told my guys when we traveled to Třebíč with our best-of-five series tied at 1-1, I wasn't ready to go home and had no intentions of doing so while there were still goals left to accomplish. They agreed, and preceded to win the next two games and win the series. Then, at practice last week as we prepared for the championship game, I read them one of my favorite quotes, from Michael Jordan: "Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen". And they made it happen, winning the club's first championship since the Czech Baseball Association was formed in 1993.

While I know the Hluboká club is very good and very well-coached, my guys deserved that championship. They have put in the work, and they were rewarded for it. And that's how it should be. They partied until the early hours of the morning after the game, chanting and singing songs and giving toasts I could only guess the meaning of, with some guys even passing out and sleeping in the locker room after a few too many postgame 'pivos'.

A goal had been checked off. We celebrated. Now, it's time to get back to work as we strive to reach the next one.