Bob DeMayo was the North Haven (Conn.) High School baseball coach for 63 years and recorded 937 wins and five state titles. One of his former players, Frank LaMonaca ‘75, reports on some of his strategies:

Every spring, Bob brought together his pitching staff and his infield and laid out one of his key building blocks to winning: no inter-squad resentments:

From his memoir:

“Another part of my philosophy is that you never follow a walk with an error, and you never follow an error with a walk. I taught my players to stay supportive of one another, no matter what. Their job was to pick each other up, sustain each other, and not build up resentments when the game isn’t going well.”

The message he delivered was about FOCUS. He demanded complete focus every time we walked on the field, every practice, so that when things got tense in a game, we were prepared to perform under pressure. And what he was saying to his pitchers and infielders was that we had to bear down and double our efforts after a walk or an error, to prevent the big inning. It was not uncommon for a pitcher to turn back after an error and say, “No problem, I got this.”

Fact is, Coach was fortunate in ’75 that his two main pitchers and his entire infield earned All-League honors. That is, there weren’t many walks or errors!