Chapter 3 – Overcoming Failure
Bertman has enjoyed great success on an international level, having served as the head coach of the 1996 United States Olympic Bronze Medal Team and as an assistant coach on the 1988 USA Gold Medal Squad. Skip Bertman led the Tigers to the College World Series four times before finally winning a national championship. And often, his team became champions after suffering big losses. That’s because Coach Bertman knows how to get his team to overcome failure.

AFRAID TO FAIL
People won’t get fired up, won’t set high goals and won’t try new things because they’re afraid they are going to fail. And truly, the number one obstacle to success in adult life is fear of failure. But everybody fails. Learning to be resilient, persistent, relentless is what the players must learn because failure is a part of winning. Excellent seekers see failure as a temporary setback and part of the natural laws of life.

QUESTIONS PLAYERS SHOULD ASK THEMSELVES
After all, everybody fails. But when my player fails, I ask him to ask himself the two most important questions:
1. What did I do right that got me this far?
2. What could I have done differently to make the situation come out a little better?
No negatives, no beating yourself up – just learning and growing and moving on.

JOHN WOODEN
Legendary basketball coach John Wooden introduced the “fast break” to college basketball. In that year, they set a record for turnovers at UCLA. But, of course, they stayed with it, perfected it, and the rest is history.

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
Sports Illustrated did not make any money for 11 straight years, but they stayed with it. And that, too, is history. You can’t give up and you can’t give in. You have to be relentless.

SUPER BOWL COACHES (NOLL, LANDRY, WALSH)
Chuck Noll, Tom Landry and Bill Walsh – three of the greatest NFL football coaches – counted for 9 of 16 Super Bowl victories from the years 1974 to 1989. These three coaches also have another record in common. They all have the worst record for a first-year coach in NFL history. But they stayed with it. They were resilient, they were relentless, they were persistent.
You can never give up. You can never give in. People remember you for your successes, not for your failures. Ty Cobb is a great example of how we remember people for their successes and not for their failures.

TY COBB – RISK AND BEING REMEMBERED FOR SUCCESS
For many years, Ty Cobb was considered the greatest base stealer of all time with 96 stolen bases. But he was safe only 70% of the time. That means he was thrown out – that is, he failed — nearly one-third of the time. But we don’t remember that.

MAX CAREY
The Major League record for baseball’s highest percentage of stolen bases (51-of-53) is held by Max Carey of the 1922 Pittsburgh Pirates. That’s 96%, but nobody remembers that because he didn’t risk enough.

RICKEY HENDERSON
When Rickey Henderson finally set a new stolen base record, he was thrown out 42 times. That, too, is a Major League record. So you see that risk is not just important – it’s essential. It must happen for you to be successful.

THOMAS EDISON
The most prolific failure of all time was Thomas Edison. As everyone knows, he tried thousands of times to perfect the electric light bulb and a storage battery. This guy was relentless, he was persistent, he was really resilient. So much so that by 1930, fully one-sixth of the people in America used a product that was marketed, distributed and produced by this so-called failure who obviously saw every failure as a learning experience of how not to do it. Failure. It’s part of winning.

Remember, risk isn’t just an option. It’s imperative. You might want to teach your players, as I do, that they will fail. We all fail and we simply need to use it to get better. The more familiar players are with failure, the more easily they can rise above it.

THE POSTER BOARD
I use a couple of techniques that have been successful for me. One is placing newspaper articles of tragic circumstances on a 36” poster board – often failures of one kind or another that have actually happened recently. Then I usually put the poster board at the end of the dugout near the back rack for the players to see. When a player strikes out, throws a home run pitch or makes an error and is really down, I give him a few moments to compose himself. Then I refer him to the poster as a reminder of what can really go wrong in the world and how he can rise above tragedy in life as well as on the baseball field. My players practice telling themselves, “I’m better than that; I can overcome this.” Then they pick themselves up and get back in the ball game.

MARK TWAIN – GET COMFORTABLE WITH FAILURE
Players have to learn to be comfortable with failure. After all, it’s part of the game. Mark Twain once said, “The ability to forget is often more important than the ability to remember.” And that is very true if you just delivered a pitch that was hit for a homer or you struck out and left a couple of runners on base. Our players have to develop mental muscles that allow them to be flexible enough to make a mistake and then say to themselves, “I’m better than that. Next time, I’ll do better.”

FLUSH IT — TOILET BANK AND KEY CHAIN
A great technique to get back into the moment, to shake it off, is literally to flush it. That technique was given to me by Dr. Ken Ravizza, who worked with us on the USA Olympic team in 1996. He was a sports psychologist with the California Angels and a professor at Cal State Fullerton. In the back of our dugout sits a bank in the shape of a toilet with a battery in it that allows it to flush, where a player can literally flush away his mistakes. This symbol is so successful that I’ve gotten each player a key chain with a smaller version that he can take with him. And whether on or off the field, he can flush away his mistakes.

You want to help your own team do the same. Recognize, first, that you can’t succeed without risk. But risk brings failures, so help your players get comfortable with failure. Use those unavoidable failures to overcome, learn and seek excellence. And the vital thing is that failure really is part of success. Be relentless.

CHRIS DEMOUY TESTIMONIAL
“I can remember our game against Tennessee where I was pitching and the score was tied. The lead-off guy came up and hit a home run, and they went ahead by one run. I still had three more outs to go and coach left me out there, and that gave me confidence. What he says is, ‘You’ve got to flush it and move on to the next pitch and the next out.” And that’s what I did. He also said, “All you can do is all you can do, and all you can do is enough.’ When you’re out on the mound, you learn from that, and he gives you the confidence to go out there and get the next out. And that’s what I did. I got the next three outs, and my teammates picked me up. And we eventually ended up winning the game.”

CHAPTER REVIEW
• Two key questions players should ask themselves:
1. What did I do right that got me this far?
2. What could I have done differently to make the situation come out a little better?
• Failure is an unavoidable and necessary part of success.
• People remember you for your successes, not your failures.
• The more familiar players are with failure, the more easily they can rise above it.
• You must be able to flush it and get to the next pitch.

The Baseball Collegian is proud to present the wisdom of coaching legend Skip Bertman for coaches and players to help take their game to the same championship level as he did in his coaching career at LSU and Miami.