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Win The Next Pitch!: Essential Mental Game Skills for Young Baseball Players
Win the Next Pitch!
Essential Mental Game Skills for Young Baseball Players
Parents, help your child develop a great mental game with this exciting book!
Baseball is a mental game. It is a game that is played one pitch at a time. Helping young players stay calm and focused between pitches is critical to success. The most important pitch in any game is the next pitch. The goal is to mentally prepare in order to have the best chance to Win the Next Pitch! This book helps players do just that!
Author and sport psychologist Dr. Curt Ickes wrote this book in the hopes of helping parents better prepare their 8-12-year-old baseball players to crush it on the field. This book introduces players to sport psychology techniques usually reserved for older, more advanced athletes. The lessons are taught using concise and easy-to-understand language, through a relatable, engaging story. This book will help young players elevate their game and make playing the baseball even more enjoyable!
Young readers will meet Jack, a new player on the Oak Groves Owls team. He loves baseball but his excitement wanes after a disastrous first practice. As the Owls play their first games of the season, Jack experiences the same struggles with anxiety and confidence that most young baseball players do. Through Matt, a new friend on the team, Jack discovers ways to quickly overcome anxiety, reset after failure, improve concentration, and increase confidence. These same mental game skills can be applied to any performance situation, not just baseball!
Young players will Sports are important for skills like teamwork, character and moral development, building of physical skills, body and mind health, self-esteem forming and so much more. This book will help you better prepare your child for the challenges that come with playing sports while giving them tools to become their best.
Don’t hesitate; scroll up and one-click buy your copy now!
Essential Mental Game Skills for Young Baseball Players
Parents, help your child develop a great mental game with this exciting book!
Baseball is a mental game. It is a game that is played one pitch at a time. Helping young players stay calm and focused between pitches is critical to success. The most important pitch in any game is the next pitch. The goal is to mentally prepare in order to have the best chance to Win the Next Pitch! This book helps players do just that!
Author and sport psychologist Dr. Curt Ickes wrote this book in the hopes of helping parents better prepare their 8-12-year-old baseball players to crush it on the field. This book introduces players to sport psychology techniques usually reserved for older, more advanced athletes. The lessons are taught using concise and easy-to-understand language, through a relatable, engaging story. This book will help young players elevate their game and make playing the baseball even more enjoyable!
Young readers will meet Jack, a new player on the Oak Groves Owls team. He loves baseball but his excitement wanes after a disastrous first practice. As the Owls play their first games of the season, Jack experiences the same struggles with anxiety and confidence that most young baseball players do. Through Matt, a new friend on the team, Jack discovers ways to quickly overcome anxiety, reset after failure, improve concentration, and increase confidence. These same mental game skills can be applied to any performance situation, not just baseball!
Young players will Sports are important for skills like teamwork, character and moral development, building of physical skills, body and mind health, self-esteem forming and so much more. This book will help you better prepare your child for the challenges that come with playing sports while giving them tools to become their best.
Don’t hesitate; scroll up and one-click buy your copy now!
- GenresBaseball
125 pages, Paperback
Published March 18, 2022
4 people are currently reading
67 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 22, 2023
2 fundamental practices that can be applied to any aspect of life, to include sports at EVERY age. share this book with every young athlete you know.
June 10, 2024
My seven-year-old loves and is very good at baseball, so this was an attempt to interest him in reading and get some good life lessons in on the way.
The good: The main good thing about this book is learning how to reset when things don't go your way or if you're anxious. There's a mnemonic device (the 3 Ts) that my kid latched onto right away and memorized quickly. Actually, I found myself using the 3 Ts sometimes! The Ts are awkward long sentences, but still okay to memorize. They are: take a deep breath; throw away the mistake; tell yourself positive things.
The bad: Okay, I realize I know nothing about baseball (the first game I ever sat through was my kid's a few years ago), and I don't understand some of the rules and lingo. That could be the issue, but honestly, the amount of baseball slang was extreme, to the point where I've never even heard people use most of those words. It was hard to read and I know my kid didn't understand a lot of it.
The story sections (i.e., the long, LONG sections narrating multiple innings of a game) were excruciating. My kid was completely uninterested in what were supposed to be suspenseful demonstrations of the two main techniques (resetting and pre-pitch routine). I had to, as I so often do with long-winded, tedious children's books, truncate the unnecessary BS. Even with my efforts, it was SO BORING. That combined with the aforementioned incomprehensible slang made the book basically a brain-numbing exercise for my kid, who didn't even realize the team we were supposed to be rooting for won (and had been humming and playing with his toys the whole time, which doesn't happen when he's engaged).
The manuscript needed editing. I realize the author self-published it, so solidarity with that, but if you're going to do that you need to hire an editor - or more than one editor. At least a developmental editor and a proofreader. Those two professionals could have ironed out a lot of what was wrong with this, and if so it really could have been an awesome book. But as I read I was annoyed, envisioning my kid, a first grader who reads at a third grade level, seeing the errors and thinking that is how you punctuate that or spell that. Early readers don't need any confusion about what's correct, so children's books in my opinion should be even more scrupulously edited than those for adult readers.
The good: The main good thing about this book is learning how to reset when things don't go your way or if you're anxious. There's a mnemonic device (the 3 Ts) that my kid latched onto right away and memorized quickly. Actually, I found myself using the 3 Ts sometimes! The Ts are awkward long sentences, but still okay to memorize. They are: take a deep breath; throw away the mistake; tell yourself positive things.
The bad: Okay, I realize I know nothing about baseball (the first game I ever sat through was my kid's a few years ago), and I don't understand some of the rules and lingo. That could be the issue, but honestly, the amount of baseball slang was extreme, to the point where I've never even heard people use most of those words. It was hard to read and I know my kid didn't understand a lot of it.
The story sections (i.e., the long, LONG sections narrating multiple innings of a game) were excruciating. My kid was completely uninterested in what were supposed to be suspenseful demonstrations of the two main techniques (resetting and pre-pitch routine). I had to, as I so often do with long-winded, tedious children's books, truncate the unnecessary BS. Even with my efforts, it was SO BORING. That combined with the aforementioned incomprehensible slang made the book basically a brain-numbing exercise for my kid, who didn't even realize the team we were supposed to be rooting for won (and had been humming and playing with his toys the whole time, which doesn't happen when he's engaged).
The manuscript needed editing. I realize the author self-published it, so solidarity with that, but if you're going to do that you need to hire an editor - or more than one editor. At least a developmental editor and a proofreader. Those two professionals could have ironed out a lot of what was wrong with this, and if so it really could have been an awesome book. But as I read I was annoyed, envisioning my kid, a first grader who reads at a third grade level, seeing the errors and thinking that is how you punctuate that or spell that. Early readers don't need any confusion about what's correct, so children's books in my opinion should be even more scrupulously edited than those for adult readers.
August 22, 2023
I am helping to coach my son's 9U baseball team and another coach recommended this book (he is asking the kids on his 11U team to read it). I had noticed so far while coaching that certain kids, regardless of skill level, have had a hard time keeping their composure on the field after suffering a bit of adversity - particularly while pitching. After a couple of walks or a hit batter they get inside their own head and quickly spiral out of control. So, I figured this book could help give me some tips on how to coach these kids to overcome this issue. I could potentially even give it to some of the kids to read themselves.
On the positive side, this book gives two helpful series of steps to take when facing a challenge on the field: one 3-step process for forgetting about an error or other bad play, and one 4-step pre-pitch routine to go through before every pitch while batting. These two things could easily be summed up in a couple of pages (and in fact are, with crudely drawn pictures, at the end of the book) and are fairly self-explanatory.
The problem with this book, at least for me as an adult reader, is that the author tries to fit these ideas into the package of a kids novel about a boy named Jack who is taught these routines by a teammate named Matt. The writing is not great, the dialogue is cheesy and unrealistic, and the book is riddled with typos. Granted, I know this book is intended for child readers; however, I do feel like most 8-12 year-old readers (the target audience) would notice some of the same things. The book is not long by any stretch, but it is still much longer than it needs to be because these concepts are just repeated over and over again. On top of all of this, there aren't really any tips for kids who are struggling with pitching, which is the primary reason I wanted to read it ("win the next pitch" is really more in the context of hitting).
I will probably see if my son wants to try reading this, but unless he reads it and likes it I will refrain from making my whole team read it. I may try to incorporate a couple of the tips into a practice, though.
On the positive side, this book gives two helpful series of steps to take when facing a challenge on the field: one 3-step process for forgetting about an error or other bad play, and one 4-step pre-pitch routine to go through before every pitch while batting. These two things could easily be summed up in a couple of pages (and in fact are, with crudely drawn pictures, at the end of the book) and are fairly self-explanatory.
The problem with this book, at least for me as an adult reader, is that the author tries to fit these ideas into the package of a kids novel about a boy named Jack who is taught these routines by a teammate named Matt. The writing is not great, the dialogue is cheesy and unrealistic, and the book is riddled with typos. Granted, I know this book is intended for child readers; however, I do feel like most 8-12 year-old readers (the target audience) would notice some of the same things. The book is not long by any stretch, but it is still much longer than it needs to be because these concepts are just repeated over and over again. On top of all of this, there aren't really any tips for kids who are struggling with pitching, which is the primary reason I wanted to read it ("win the next pitch" is really more in the context of hitting).
I will probably see if my son wants to try reading this, but unless he reads it and likes it I will refrain from making my whole team read it. I may try to incorporate a couple of the tips into a practice, though.
August 31, 2023
Loved the book. My son was able to understand what he read and couldn’t put it down. The lessons were taught several times throughout which helped an 10 year-old remember them. He then put the practice in, with my help, and you could see the difference when he played. I also liked how there were review questions in the back that we could talk about, especially the ones that asked how you could apply the mental game skills to real life.
July 10, 2025
This was so great! Mandatory reading for every young baseball player. Everett loved it, starting applying the principles immediately, and already started rereading it.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews