Chad Barton

If you're serious about your baseball career, you need to watch this video.

This.

When Blue Jays manager John Schneider returned to his office last week, an envelope awaited him. A letter had come from Warriors head coach Steve Kerr. “I don’t know you,” he wrote, “but I felt compelled to reach out after watching your incredible leadership on display during the World Series.

The professor who invented "growth mindset" works at Stanford, and most people have no idea what she actually discovered. Everyone quotes the phrase. Almost nobody understands what the research behind it really showed. Her name is Carol Dweck, and the finding that made her famous came from watching how children responded to failure in real time. She gave kids a series of puzzles, and when the puzzles got hard, two completely different behaviors emerged. Some kids leaned in and tried harder. Others shut down and gave up. The IQ scores between the two groups were nearly identical. The difference had nothing to do with intelligence. It had everything to do with what each child believed about intelligence itself. Kids who believed ability was fixed treated every failure as evidence of who they were. Kids who believed ability could grow treated every failure as information about what to do next. Same puzzle. Same difficulty. Completely different outcomes. Here is what Stanford now officially teaches its students based on her work. The first tool is deceptively simple: add the word "yet" to any statement of failure. "I don't understand this" becomes "I don't understand this yet." That single word shifts the brain from a closed verdict to an open investigation, and the research shows it measurably changes how long students persist on hard problems. The second tool is reframing what effort actually means. Students with a fixed mindset interpret needing to try hard as proof they aren't talented. Students with a growth mindset interpret effort as the mechanism through which talent is built. The same amount of struggle means two completely different things depending on the story you tell yourself about it. The third tool is how you process criticism. A fixed mindset treats negative feedback as a personal attack to be avoided. A growth mindset treats it as the most useful data available because it points directly at the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Dweck spent decades proving that the belief you hold about your own potential is not just a feeling. It is a self-fulfilling operating system that determines almost everything about what you're willing to attempt and how long you're willing to keep going. The students who thrive at Stanford aren't the ones who never struggle. They're the ones who decided that struggling means they're learning.

Completely fix baseball in four words.

CGSO!! Jaden Bedford faces just one over the minimum, not giving up a hit until the 6th inning! Javen Divine goes 2-3 at the plate with a double and an RBI. They are your KNOCKOUT players of the game! BA- 4, Norman North-0.

Thank you Doug Weese. Your time as an American Legion baseball coach played a pivotal role in the development of several former Jackets.