Mitch Young

@CSOonX Just 2026??

Ohio State pulling up to the 2026 NCAA Tournament:

@mitchgoldich Arizona wins 99 to __?

The biggest game of the first round is on Friday, when Long Island battles Arizona for iced tea supremacy

If your head is spinning from all the studies about problems facing young people, here's a list of 30 of them in one place. Thanks to @tedgioia for giving us permission to reprint from his excellent substack, The Honest Broker afterbabel.com/p/30-facts-abo…

If you are longing for a simpler time that is now gone forever, this video will likely hit HARD… 🥲

The person you will be in 5 years depends largely on: 1. The books you read 2. The food you eat 3. The habits you cultivate 4. The people you surround yourself with 5. The conversations you engage in 6. The mindset you adopt 7. The risks you take and lessons you learn

I saw a quote that said “to procrastinate is to willingly endure the discomfort of anticipation, rather than the discomfort of action. Both are burdens, but only one leads to progress” and if that didn’t light a fire in me.

If you use GameChanger, you’re probably looking at the wrong stats. Most players and parents focus on batting average, hits, ERA… the scoreboard stuff. Those numbers tell you what already happened. But they don’t tell you if you’re actually getting better. The best players I coached at the Division-1 level weren’t obsessing over those numbers. They were tracking process stats. Things that actually predict future success. The late Mark Marquess at Stanford used to say: “You can’t change the spots on a cheetah.” Meaning your habits show up later. If you throw strikes now, you’ll throw strikes later. If you strike out a lot now, that usually follows you too. Development leaves clues. Here are a few examples of better things to track. Hitters Quality At-Bat % (strong is around 65%+) Pitches seen per plate appearance (elite hitters are around 4) Walk to strikeout ratio Pitchers Strike percentage Pitch efficiency First pitch strike % Tarik Skubal was 71.5% last season! The point is this. GameChanger tracks a lot of stats. But development usually comes down to mentality and approach. If we as athletes can focus more on what’s controllable and less on what’s uncontrollable, we’ll be mentally healthier and make better progress inside our own process. Keep playing the long game. PTLG. @GetGameChanger

@ZacharyLevi Just reading this made me feel winded and out of shape.

🤯🤯🤯

Nobody tells you this: Dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug. It’s the dopamine from reading, planning, or learning, but never doing. Stop looking for more information and start acting on the information you already have. Get your dopamine from action.

Sorrow and grief drive you into God and show you resources you never had and never knew you needed.

"It doesn't matter how many years you lost....Save the rest of your life." No regrets about the past. Face Forward. Make the rest of your life what you want.

The rise of Dopamine Culture

I’m in love with this sentence: “Discipline feels boring until you witness what it creates.”

Chris Farley, who was deeply committed to his Catholic faith, would carry his favorite prayer with him in his wallet. It was called “The Clown’s Prayer” and this is how it reads, Dear Lord, As I stumble through life, help me to create more laughter than tears, dispense more happiness than gloom, and spread more cheer than despair. Never let me become so blasé, that I fail to see the wonder in the eyes of a child or the twinkle in the eyes of the aged. Never let me forget my work is to cheer people, make them happy, and make them laugh, make them forget, at least for the moment the unpleasantness in their lives. Never let me acquire success to the point that I discontinue calling on my Creator in the hour of need, and in my final moment, may I hear you whisper, ‘When you made my people smile, you made Me smile.’ Source: I am Chris Farley (2015)

I see you @taylorbaseball

@SteveLovesAmmo “6” is right where it should be. In Wisconsin. The other states in the region could sit this one out and still come away victors.

@stevemagness But what about their e-sports programs??

Norway is once again dominating the winter Olympics. And this is their youth sports program: Participation trophies for all kids. No keeping score until 13. No national travel competitions in youth sports. No posting youth results online. Motto: “Joy of Sport for All.” They let kids be kids. And it works. But…it’s the winter Olympics,right? Recently, they have had tremendous success in summer sports. Karsten Warholm demolished the 400 meter hurdles world record. Kristian Blummenfelt broke the Ironman triathlon record and won Olympic gold. His training partner, Gustav Ivan, won the 2022 Ironman World Championship. Casper Ruud reached world number two in tennis. Viktor Hovland is a top ten golfer in the world. Erling Haaland set the record for the most goals in a season in the Premier League. Beach volleyball champs, a surge of elite runners. By any metric, Norway’s elite athletes are achieving on a global stage. Yet, if we turn to their youth sports, their programs are the opposite of the US. Norway doesn’t allow for official scorekeeping until the age of thirteen. They dissuade early national travel teams in favor of local leagues. You can’t even post the results of youth games online without being fined. And almost sacrilegious in certain American circles, Norway doesn’t allow trophies unless everyone gets one. As Tore Ovrebo, Norway’s director of elite sport, told USA Today writer Dan Wolken, “We think the biggest motivation for the kids to do sports is that they do it with their friends and they have fun while they’re doing it and we want to keep that feeling throughout their whole career.” Their youth sporting model can be summed up with their chosen slogan, “Joy of Sport for All.” But not keeping score, giving out trophies, not being “win at all costs”...that’s anti-American! How can they be competitive? Research backs their approach up. 1. The fire has to come from within If you look at ​research​ on prodigies who eventually become standout adult performers, a deep intrinsic drive is paramount. Researchers found that intrinsically motivated football players were 3.5x more likely to make it to the next level, and athletes in general 2x more likely. The problem is that early success often pulls young people away from this inner drive. Kids start playing soccer (or violin or chess—this isn’t just about sports) because it is exciting and fun. As they improve, they gain accolades and praise from their parents, coaches, and teachers. They start winning trophies or seeing their names in online commentary. Without even realizing it, their intrinsic drive gets replaced by external validation and a need to please and impress others. The quickest way to kill that internal motivation? Hype achievements and be a crazy controlling parent or coach. The best way to create and maintain intrinsic motivation is to let kids dabble, explore, and find something with which their interests and talents align. Then, let them enjoy it without an undue emphasis on success. Praise effort, character, and teamwork, not results. This is easy to talk about but hard to do. Find ways to reward and incentivize the values you want to instill. That means not taking the easy road and talking about who set a new mile best or scored the most points, but instead highlighting who hustled during the fourth quarter, rallied after it seemed like the match was over, or displayed exemplary sportsmanship. 2. Go Broad over Specialization Even if the entire point of youth sports was to create future champions (which it’s not), we’d still adopt something similar to the Norwegian model. An ​analysis​ of over 6,000 athletes explored what separates athletes who reached world class and those who came up short. Those who reached world-class had during their youth: -More multi-sport than specialized practice -Started their primary sport later -Accumulated less overall formal practice -Initially progressed slower than national class peers Those who performed well when young, but didn’t progress: -Started their primary sport earlier -Specialized, engaging in more practice in one sport -Made quicker initial progress Norway doesn’t have 300 plus million people and an NCAA system to funnel talent. They have to develop theirs. And they realize the best way to do that is keep as many people in the system as possible. Why? Because you can’t predict talent development very well! Just go look at the age group record books. It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking early performance equals talent and potential. The kid running a 6-minute mile at 10 looks way better than the one running 6:45. But if the faster one is at track practice 5 days a week and the slower one rolls out of gym class in jeans and runs it off “fitness” from just playing, well I’m betting on the slower one! When we assess performance early on, we’re not measuring talent, we’re looking at training age and opportunity. And we’re crowning winners based on who started grinding first. America gets away with the insane achievement model because we can burn out 9 kids to get 1 survivor. Norway can’t afford to do that. They take the longer, more sustainable model. Rethinking Youth Sports: The whole point of youth sports should be for kids to learn, develop, have fun, and want to come back and play again next season! The best chance of developing a D1 scholarship athlete is essentially to do the exact opposite of what our current youth sports fiasco promotes. Even the poster child for early specialization, Tiger Woods, ​acknowledged​ it’s not a good thing for parents to push their kids too hard: “Don’t force your kids into sports,” he says. “I never was. To this day, my dad has never asked me to go play golf. I ask him. It’s the child’s desire to play that matters, not the parent’s desire to have the child play. Keep it fun.” While youth sports in America aren’t going to adopt the Norwegian model anytime soon, we can rebalance the equation. As I outlined in my book, it’s not getting rid of competitiveness, it’s rebalancing the equation to make sure that crazy mom, dad, or coach don’t extinguish the fire that makes great competitors (and sport fun!). In research on performance orientation and grades in school, a teaching environment that supported and emphasized mastery[PA1] , where students focused on the process of learning and comprehension instead of a comparison to others, was also linked to better grades. But it wasn’t the direct relationship that an outcome orientation had. Instead, in one study on college students, a mastery approach was linked to challenge-seeking, which in turn predicted end-of-the-year grades. In another study, mastery goals predicted higher levels of interest and enjoyment. Mastery works on our approach system without activating avoidance. It frees us up to take on a challenge and pursue our interests without getting bogged down by the pressure or judgment that often comes with an obsession with outcomes. The same findings hold true when looking at sport or the workplace. In a large meta-analysis that analyzed the impact of goal setting in sports, process-orientated goals had a large effect on performance. Outcome goals had little to no effect. These two paths represent a fast versus slow road to success. Both a mastery or outcome focus can lead to better performance, but the latter is akin to taking a shortcut. Obsession over outcomes is the most direct path to improvement, but it comes with some downsides that shift us toward avoidance. The slow path takes a longer, indirect route. It helps improve our performance not by focusing on the results themselves but by supporting the foundation that ultimately leads to better performance. It stokes the fire of enjoyment and interest to sustain our curiosity and work ethic over the long haul. It pushes us toward challenge-seeking so that when we inevitably hit a roadblock, we’ll take it on instead of trying to protect our ego. Both approaches work. One is more sustainable, providing success with less angst. Society has thrown us so far out of balance that we can’t even see the slow route right in front of us. We can either instill a love of sport in our youth, or we can turn sport into a burden where kids are exhausted, stressed, and scared. We’ve seen this go both ways, and the results couldn’t be more different. One leads to happy, healthy, and better young athletes. The other leads to burnout, family tension, mental health challenges, and quitting. As parents, volunteers, coaches, and community members, let’s all do what we can to minimize the latter and champion the former. -Steve

Stop looking for the perfect church. Instead, go worship the perfect God with a congregation of flawed people who need grace just as much as you do.

The work of the church is not the call to ministry. Our true work is that of manifesting likeness to Christ in all things, whether in success or failure, criticism, or praise. If numbers, growth, and fame were God’s measures, then Jesus would be deemed a failure.

@spectator Jesus “appears to have a ‘God complex.’”

Many teenagers today find Christianity off-putting because Jesus seems too fond of ‘mansplaining’. He appears to have a ‘God complex’, while the Almighty is alienating on account of being ‘really violent and aggressive’. These are the findings in the report Troubling Jesus, the third part of Youthscape’s ‘Translating God’ project, based on a recent survey of 14- to 17-year-olds. Drawing on five reading groups, in which teenagers reacted to passages of scripture traditionally understood as conveying ‘good news’, Youthscape faced reactions ‘radically different’ from what it says might have been expected. ✍️ Patrick West