Thank you for visiting Fastpitch-Softball-Coaching.com. My name is Dan Spaventa and I am the owner and webmaster of this website. I got involved with fastpitch softball when my older daughter started playing in the local recreation league. I am not quite sure how, but I ended up being a coach for her team.
Over the next fifteen years, between her and my youngest child, I ended up coaching at the recreation league initially and later at several travel league levels from the U-10 through U-14. We’ve enjoyed our good years and our rough years, been able to take several teams to nationals and throughout the process met many great people: players, parents, other coaches, umpires, tournament officials, and so forth. In addition, I have had the good fortune to come in contact with people who have helped me learn the fine points of the game. The biggest teachers of all were my very own players. This may sound like a clique, but it is true that you do get back far more than you ever give when coaching a team. If you have an opportunity to coach, do it. Do it for those bright shiny faces that look up to you, want to learn from you, and will do just about anything to succeed for you.
Don’t get me wrong, coaching is about discipline, but it is about delivering discipline in a way that is calm and re-enforcing. There is no need to belittle a player. There is no reason to scream at a player. Trust me; they know they screwed up long before you can formulate a single word. If you do these things, you will lose that player forever. Everything you do MUST be about enhancing that young lady as a player, but more importantly enhancing her as a person. When taking on the responsibility of a coach, you have made a commitment to every player on that team that you will make them a better player and person.
That is why we have tried to instill this concept as the core to the website:
Establish a funteaching environment that results in winning(eventually).
It will give you great joy when you see your team play well and winning in their games. There may be no greater joy then down the road when you see your player’s name in the paper for performing well at the high school and possibly college level. But the ultimate will be when, years later after you have stopped coaching them, and they have moved on to other things in their lives, that when they see you from time to time and come up to you and thank you for teaching them about life. That, fellow coaches, is more than anyone can ask for. You will know, far beyond the winds and loses, far beyond the tournaments won and hardware secured, that you were truly a successful coach.
Why Build the Fastpitch Softball Coaching Website?
Well, it really is quite simple. Having experienced these things mentioned above, it is only appropriate that we give back to Fastpitch Softball because of not only what we learned but because of all those who helped me along the way. Without experienced coaches helping me when I was learning the game, I would not have been able to help my players. It is time for me to do the same. It would be one thing to do it on just a local scale, but I believe that this will enable me to reach even more people. And more importantly, I hope the experienced coaches out there will leverage the ample opportunities on Fastpitch Softball Coaching to share their knowledge with their fellow coaches.
Thanks for listening, and I hope to speak to you soon.
Kind regards,
Dan Spaventa
P.S. It is now February 2010, and I have had my other site, Outer Banks Revealed up and running for about a year. The company that provides the hosting and all of the tools (process for naming the website, process for what and how to build pages, submission to the search engines, the blog, the newsletter, and so forth) I use is called SiteSell. They encourage people who use their services to tell others about it. Before I did that, however, I wanted to prove to myself that I could actually make money at this thing. Being an accountant by training, it was important to me that I prove to myself that I could actually at minimum break even the first year if not be on the net positive side before I would recommend this program to other people.
Well, lo and behold, I cleared that hurdle in November, only eleven months in. And here is the thing, I did it using the tools they supplied. I won't lie, it was a LOT of work, but it was worth it. You would be amazed at all of the people I've met in this past year who have further enhanced our stays when we visit the Outer Banks. It was so worth it, in fact, that it caused me to start this site, Fastpitch-Softball-Coaching.com.
The key is having the passion about something, anything really, and you too can make a small business (yes, I said business) from something you enjoy doing. Check out this link to SiteSell.com to find out more information. Could be the best $299 you ever spent and next year this time you may be writing something similar on your About Us page.
******* June 2010 Update ******
I would like to welcome a new website into the fold. This website is everything you ever wanted to know about ... basil. Basil? Yes, basil. Basil Basics covers everything from the different varieties of basil, to the growing and care and finally recipes and other things you can do with basil. Why a site about basil? Well, you will have to check out the About Us page to find out the answer to that.
