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Thursday, May 1, 2008
Staying on the Warpath
Fort Worth, TX
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The Marin Warriors came within one game of the state baseball tournament last season. Coach Curt Culbertson has his team challenging for a place Round Rock again this year, but he’s also keeping an eye on the future.
This is my third head coaching position. My first head baseball coaching position was at Weatherford in 1990-’91. When they reopened Arlington Bowie, I went over with Mike Stovall and was there for eleven years. From Bowie I came here.
When I left Bowie I was basically just looking for a job. I wanted to stay in the area. My wife teaches at Bailey and my kids are engrained in school here, and we were all born and raised here.
I came here in 2003 as an assistant under Eric Kemp and we made the playoffs that year. Then, in 2004, we kind of took a turn. We didn’t make the playoffs in ’04. And, when you don’t win around here there is some grumbling. Eric left and I took over. In 2005, we won the district championship and made it to the area round. We haven’t looked back since.
(On coming within one game of the state tournament last season…) You don’t get that many chances to get that far and do those sorts of things. To lose who we lost to and when we lost, it was pretty tough because we were ahead in both of those games and our pitching that got us there didn’t quite close the door and finish the job. We felt like we were better than Midland Lee, but losing two games to them, that was tough to deal with.
I would say [that experience] made the kids more aware of just how fortunate we were last year and how much they would like to go back there and give it one more try. They got a taste of it. Our junior pitchers, that are now seniors, are much more determined.
Nobody can put more pressure on me than I already have put on me. We don’t change our style from year to year. We coach the fundamentals. We drill the basic fundamentals in them. We work hard, we try to have fun, and we try to stay up on our game.
They way we deal with our expectations is to be ready to play every game, because we’re going to get everybody’s best game. We’re going to get everyone’s best pitcher, so the way we deal with it is to just be ready for it.
If we get everything out of our kids every game and get as far as we can get, the season has been successful. You have to be lucky to get to the regional finals. You have to be lucky to get to Round Rock. Very little separates those last eight teams.
In my mind, and probably in these kids’ minds, if we’re not fighting for a state championship, they’re probably not going to feel real good about the season. Once they step back away from it and reflect on it, they’ll realize that we’re probably going to have a pretty good year regardless of whether we’re in Round Rock or not. But, that’s where our mind is set and our goals are set, and that’s where we’re going to try to go.
It’s very difficult to maintain a winning program. You can’t develop and maintain a program without kids. The kids make your program, and right now we’ve had a run of great kids – baseball guys that have a passion for playing baseball. Without them, we wouldn’t be developing and maintaining a great program.
You have to have the kids. You have to have the pitching. You have to have the arms, the attitude. We can develop a certain amount of that. You can make high school kids pretty good players just by your work ethic and your attitude, but year after year, to get into those upper level teams, you’ve got to have the kids to do it.
We look three years down the road every year. We try to put a three-year program in once we see what freshman class we have. Who are our arms? Who are the pitchers we’re going to be leaning on? We find those kids first. We find that catcher, and then we build around that.
Really, when you look across the state, this is as good a baseball school as there is any place. And for a baseball guy like myself, this is where you want to be. So, unless they kick me out, I’m going to try to stay.
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