I have coached a lot of games and I have been nervous before almost all of them.
Not the kind of nervous you can see. I learned a long time ago how to hold my face still. The kind of nervous that lives in your chest and your shoulders and the way you pace from one end of the dugout to the other without realizing you are doing it. The kind the kids feel even when they can't name what they are feeling.
I played pro ball. I was nervous before almost every game I ever played too. I didn't have it handled then either. I just learned to hold my face still and push through with force. That's its own story for another piece. The nerves never went anywhere. They just went underground.
For a long time I told myself the nerves as a coach made sense. I want these kids to do well. I want my son to do well. I care. Of course I am nervous.
That was the easy answer. It wasn't the real one.
The real answer took me forty years to find, and I want to give it to you here, because if you are a coach reading this on a Wednesday night before a game you actually care about, I think you might need it.
Here is what I finally figured out.
The nerves I feel in the dugout are not mine. They belong to a nine-year-old kid who has been standing at the rail next to me my entire coaching life. He has my name. He is wearing an old uniform. He is the kid I used to be, before I knew anything, and he is still in there, and he still thinks every game is the most important game in the world.
He is the one whose chest is tight. He is the one who paces. He is the one who can't sit down. He is the one tugging my sleeve in the third inning going do something, do something, do something.
For years I thought that kid was me. I thought his nerves were my nerves and his fear was my fear, and I tried to push through them the way I pushed through everything as a player. Force. Aggression. Hold it down. Don't show it.
It never worked. It just buried it. And when you bury that kid, he does not go away. He runs the dugout from underneath. He turns into pacing and over-coaching and the tight voice you don't hear coming out of your own mouth until it's already out.
The first thing that ever actually moved the nerves for me was the day I realized he was a separate kid. Not me, the coach. A kid. Standing next to me. Scared.
That changed everything.
Here is the part that matters for Thursday.
I cannot impact the catch. I cannot impact the swing. I cannot impact whether the ball finds the 8-year-old at short with two outs in the last inning. I cannot impact any of it. The game is going to happen exactly the way it is going to happen, with me or without me, and no amount of nervous energy in my chest is going to change a single pitch.
I knew this as a player. Every player knows it. You cannot want a hit into existence. You cannot fear a strikeout away. The game does what the game does.
But somehow as a coach I forgot. I started believing that if I cared hard enough, if I worried hard enough, if I prepared hard enough, I could reach out from the dugout and bend the game toward these kids.
You can't. Nobody can. That isn't what the dugout is for.
So what is it for.
It is for the kid at the rail. The nine-year-old. He is the one I can actually impact. He is the only thing in this whole experience that is mine to coach.
The nerves don't go away. Let me say that clearly. They don't. He doesn't leave. Forty years he's been there, he'll be there Thursday, he'll be there when these kids are grown and I'm coaching grandkids. He lives in there.
What changes is what you do with him.
When the nerves spike, and they will, I don't fight them anymore. I don't take a deep breath and try to push them down. I don't tell myself to relax. None of that ever worked anyway.
What I do is turn to him.
I picture him standing right there next to me at the rail. Nine years old. Same height as the dugout fence. Same hat I used to wear. And I talk to him.
I'm not making this up to sound poetic. This is what I actually do. In my head, in real time, between pitches. I talk to the kid.
And here is what happens. The chest loosens. Not all the way. A little. The shoulders drop. The pacing stops. The voice that was about to come out tight comes out normal instead. The kids on the field get a coach who is actually with them instead of a coach who is half in the dugout and half thirty years ago.
That's it. That's the whole technique. There is no breathing exercise. There is no mantra. There is no visualization. There is just a coach finally noticing that the nervous one in the dugout was never him, and turning to the kid who has been carrying it the whole time, and telling him he can rest.
I want to be honest about something before I close this.
The first time I did this it felt ridiculous. Talking to an imaginary nine-year-old in my own dugout. I am a grown man, a former pro player, a coach with experience. I am not supposed to need to picture a child to get through a rec game.
Except I was.
And so are you, if you are nervous before games for reasons you can't fully explain. The fact that you don't know why your chest is tight is the proof. Adults know why they are nervous. Adults are nervous about specific things.
Not a mantra. Just talking to the kid who's been white-knuckling the dugout rail since before I had a license.
And here's the part I didn't expect. When I started doing that, my son got a different coach. Not a calmer one exactly. A more present one. Because I wasn't half in the dugout and half in 1987 anymore. I was just there. With him. Watching the game.
If you're a dad reading this and your chest is tight Thursday night and you can't figure out why because the stakes are objectively nothing, I want you to try something before the game.
Find a quiet second. Could be in the car. Could be walking from the parking lot. Could be tying your cleats. And say this, out loud or in your head, doesn't matter.
Say it to the kid in your dugout. Not the one on the roster. The other one.
Then when the nerves spike in the third inning, and they will, you don't have to fight them. That's just him tugging your sleeve again. You already know what to say.
I know, buddy. I got him.
Your son does not need you to not be nervous. Your son needs to know that if he goes 0-for-4 and boots the ball at short and the season ends Thursday night, you'd walk to the car with him exactly the same as if he went 4-for-4 and the team carried him off the field.
He needs to know the kid in the dugout finally got told he was okay.
That's the whole job.