STRIVING FOR EXCELLENCE
The LSU Tigers reached the championship game of the College World Series more than any other team in the 90’s, including five College World Series titles. The LSU tigers posted a perfect 17-0 record in the final round Of NCAA postseason play. Players, coaches and fans alike all know the success is due to Skip Bertman’s unyielding devotion to excellence.

EXCELLENCE
Thanks for allowing me an opportunity to help you and your team achieve excellence. I’ve been on baseball fields for over 35 years trying to do a few simple things: Get more hits, throw more strikes, catch more balls, score more runs than the other guy. But as you know, achieving excellence isn’t easy. It requires motivation and teaching real teamwork. Making your team fully aware that a great team is more than just a collection of great players.

To build that awareness, that very real sense of teamwork, we need to start with your ability to inspire a sense of team and motivate your players. Real teamwork and true motivation — those are the tools you need to be excellent and succeed to win often and to win the big one. I’d like to show you how I put those tools to work to create some championship teams.

BUILDING CHAMPIONS AROUND EXCELLENCE
I believe building championship teams starts long before taking the practice field because champions do more than just score more runs or more points than their opponents. To make champions, you’ve got to build their entire lives – their bodies, their hearts, their minds – around excellence. And that’s why I start with a very clear, very strong mission statement that applies to my players’ lives. You and your team should have a mission statement too.

LSU BASEBALL MISSION STATEMENT
Our mission statement is this: Excellence, both off and on the field. Perfecting any skill starts with an attitude of excellence. Here’s a lesson you can teach your team: Excellence is quite simply the continuous, relentless, never-ending commitment to improve. Excellence is the gradual result of always trying to get better. It comes from the Latin word “excel,” which means to rise up,

Excellence is getting to the field earlier, training harder/ practicing longer, working smarter and preparing more than others care to or expect to. To achieve excellence, you have to believe and make your players believe in the value of every available moment of every day and in the quality of each teammate. Excellence doesn’t come with any amount of expected effort. Excellence means making a special effort, doing more than is asked — expecting more of one’s self.

DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC OF EXCELLENCE
Here’s the defining characteristic of excellence, and you have to try to instill it in your team as I try to do with mine. Excellence is not a sometimes thing. You don’t achieve excellence through a series of afternoon practices. Excellence is an all-the-time thing. You can’t just do things right some of the time. A near-miss isn’t almost right. Doggone it, it’s wrong!

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD AND EXCELLENT
In America we spend a great amount of time and money to achieve the very small difference between very good and excellent because excellence is the highest standard by which we measure human achievement. Excellence is a habit. Winning is a habit. So, unfortunately, are losing and mediocrity. And like all habits, they affect our lives.

THE SECRET TO A LIFE OF EXCELLENCE
If there is a secret to excellence, it’s this point — and you should make it perfectly clear to your players. Excellence-seekers aren’t 20% better in any single area. They’re 1% better in 20 different areas. And the first rule of our program is: Good enough never is. We seek excellence both on and off the field.

MIKE BIANCO TESTIMONIAL:
“One thing that he does different in that strive for excellence is that he’s just relentless in his approach to practice, that it’s never enough. It doesn’t matter what time it is, there’s things that got to be done and things that got to be done a certain way, from making sure that the field’s clean when the opposing team comes in to take batting practice, to the way you take batting practice and the way the team runs on and off the field. There is nothing too small in his mind.”

REVIEW
• Start your program with a mission statement
• Make your team fully aware that a great team’s more than just a collection of great players
• Excellence is quite simply the continuous, relentless, never-ending commitment to improve. Excellence is the gradual result of always trying to get better
• Excellence is an all-time thing.
• Good enough never is

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.