Many coaches in college athletics like to pontificate about their roles as 'teachers.' It doesn't take an expert to sniff out the cliche, but it is often difficult to tell which ones are genuinely telling the truth.
"That's like a politician saying, 'I am not a crook,'" said John Pinkman, a writer for Collegiate Baseball.
Pinkman doesn't think every coach is like Eliot Spitzer, however. That's why last year he founded Collegiate Baseball's Tom House Teaching Professional of the Year Award.
The award, named after its inaugural recipient, is distinct from Collegiate Baseball's annual Coach of the Year award. The latter is given to coaches who, for example, are "really good at managing pitchers during games," Pinkman, chairman of the selection committee, said in an interview. "The teaching professional award is given to someone who exemplifies the best skills as a teaching professional."
Collegiate Baseball is able to identify that individual through its large outreach of coaches and polling of previous winners of its awards.
Yesterday, Virginia pitching coach Karl Kuhn was named that individual.
"In a time where so much of our game is based on the success of wins and losses, it is truly refreshing to not only have but to receive an award for the real reason I chose to get into coaching - to teach," Kuhn said in a press release.
It may be a cliche, but it's no lie.
The turnaround
It might seem curious that a program which was nearly cut by the athletic department nine years ago has managed to turn in the best cumulative earned run average during the past seven years. Virginia coach Brian O'Connor undoubtedly has reeled in top-notch talent during his eight-year tenure: Look no further than last year's team, which produced nine Major League Baseball draft picks. But long before O'Connor recruited the likes of fifth-round pick Robert Morey and 10th-round pick Kevin Arico, he found a pitching coach who has sharpened the skills and improved the raw talent that has come to Virginia on a yearly basis.
He found Karl Kuhn.
On paper, Kuhn's record seems to speak for itself. He has guided the only pitching staff in the nation which has ranked in the top 20 nationally in ERA, strikeouts and fewest hits allowed in each of the past three seasons. He has coached eight All-Americans and sent 19 pitchers to the majors. It's often difficult, however, to draw the line between good talent and good coaching.
Revolutionary thoughts
That's where Pinkman, who runs an elite baseball academy in Sterling, Va. that has sent more than 180 athletes to play college baseball, brought expert analysis. Both he and Kuhn are disciples of Tom House, the former pitching coach of Hall-of-Famer Nolan Ryan. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Pinkman said, House ushered in a new age of thinking in baseball based on data and constantly improving technology. Pinkman added that House's approach places an emphasis on improving players, rather than simply using them - a symptom of industrial-age thinking.
"Industrial-age people tend to be very, very insecure - 'my way or the highway,'" Pinkman said. "'Hell, I played Babe Ruth when I was 14 in 1968 and I know everything.'"
It is in House's tradition of new-age thinking that Kuhn has followed and succeeded. By using digital computer analysis, identifying cause-and-effect relationships and applying a technical proficiency in diagnosing mechanical flaw, Kuhn has developed and protected the strong arms of All-Americans like Jacob Thompson and Danny Hultzen.
"It's like Alcoholics Anonymous," Pinkman quipped. "If you don't have a problem, there's no problem to fix. One of the good things a good teaching professional does is identify a problem before he starts to fix it."
Part of the problem in baseball - at both the collegiate and professional
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