You go to a USA Baseball national team identification event. You play your best. You get noticed. You get invited to the chance of a lifetime: An opportunity to represent your country as a player on the USA Baseball national team.
That's the common path for a player.
But what about the coaches for the USA Baseball national teams? A coach cannot go 8-for-19 with three home runs over the course of a weekend tournament. So, what do they do? What is their path? How do you become a coach for USA Baseball?
It is a question we get asked a lot.
The answer: Honestly, there is no "path" for the best coaches in the country to carefully weave through, marking off accomplishments from a cultivated list in order to get closer to their coaching dreams. The answer is more complex than that. There are any number of ways someone with the right heart, attitude and abilities can end up wearing U-S-A across their chest and, hopefully, a gold medal around their neck.
For proof of this, look no further than the 2018 15U World Cup champion coaching staff. Four men with wildly different paths to our coaching ranks found themselves all sharing a medal stand in Panama.
The Scorekeeper: Assistant Coach Troy Gerlach
Troy Gerlach is the head baseball coach at Chaparral High School in Scottsdale, Arizona. Before that, he held the same position at Arcadia High School in Phoenix. Being around the game his entire life, Troy was drawn to USA Baseball and what it represented as the leading youth baseball federation in the country and the world. He needed to be a part of it, and he'd be honored to help in any way possible. Literally.
In 2012, USA Baseball needed a scorekeeper at the National Team Championships in Arizona. For Troy, living and coaching close by, it seemed like an easy fit.
Troy was an astute scorekeeper, keeping track of players that impressed him and putting down hand written notes on a separate sheet of paper. He wanted to have information at the ready in case any scouts came by asking for his input. So he wrote down pop times and velocity numbers that stood out among all these players fighting for the opportunity to play for a national team.
And those scouts did come by, asking Troy if any players caught his eye throughout the day that started at 7:00 a.m. and featured 110-degree heat beating down from the Arizona sun.
"I had this stuff all written down. Guys would look at it and I think just having that info down and knowing that I was putting in that effort, when I told them 'Hey there is this guy over here, he looks pretty good,' I think they trusted that I did know what I was talking about and they would go check him out."
The scouting bug had caught Troy, and he wanted to help in an even more direct way. One day, atop the field tower, Senior Director of Baseball Operations Ashley Bratcher was talking to Troy about what he had seen that week. During the conversation, Troy told Ashley he was honored to do anything USA Baseball wanted him to do, but if there was ever an opportunity to do more, to scout one of the tournaments, he would love a shot.
"Troy expressed to me that he would like to help out with scouting or be on a task force if there was ever an opportunity. So, the last week of the tournament, something happened with one of the guys who was supposed to scout that week and so we had an opening. I asked Troy if he wanted to do it," Bratcher remembered.
For one tournament, Troy had graduated from scorekeeper to scout. A tournament of 14-year-old ball players working to be seen by the right scout, to get invited to that next step, to have a chance to put on a jersey that read U-S-A across the front. And as one of those scouts, Troy had a similar opportunity.
"I think I wrote every single thing down that week. I was in panic mode. I didn't want to screw this up," said Troy.
At these tournaments, each scout on the USA Baseball task force handles one field per day. Watching four games each day, scouting all eight teams at once. At the end of the day, the four members of the task force get together with national team coaches and USA Baseball personnel to discuss their day's worth of findings.
"The other guys said he did a great job and that he was fully committed, so the next year, instead of hiring him as a scorekeeper, we hired him back as a scout," said Bratcher.
A week of scouting turned into a year of scouting, which turned into years of scouting. From National Team Championships to National Team Identification Series (NTIS) to National Team Development Programs (NTDP) to National Team Trials, Troy kept up with the grind and never lost passion for the gig, the players, and the ultimate goal of winning a World Cup.
And then in 2017, Troy was asked to be on the staff for the 14U NTDP. Also working the NTDP that year, Jason Maxwell, who would go on to be named the manager of the 2018 15U National Team.
"The relationships we built in that 14U National Team Development Program year, those relationships played a huge role in winning the World Cup," Maxwell said of the two-year process. And those relationships went from coach to player, player to player, and coach to coach. "When Ashley had asked me to be the manager for the World Cup team, she asked who I wanted to be the coaches, and the three coaches we took came from that National Team Development Program."
Passion. Hard work. Selflessness. Relationships. These things are invaluable to a coach on a journey to becoming a representative of USA Baseball, and all are attainable for anyone that has that dream. Doesn't matter if you are a former big leaguer, or a former scorekeeper.
Troy Gerlach's story is the second of a four-part series on "How to Become a USA Baseball Coach." The remaining two stories of the series will be released on USABaseball.com and @USABaseball on Facebook, Instgram and Twitter.