59 - Matt Ittner; Cox High School (VA)

Bio

• Coach Ittner begins his fourth year at the helm of the Cox baseball program. 

• He is a 2008 graduate of Cox High School, where he was a 3-year varsity letterman for the baseball team. 

• Coach Ittner went on to play for two years at College of the Albemarle from 2010-2011 and then at Virginia Wesleyan College for his remaining two years from 2011-2013. 

• In the fall of 2014, Coach Ittner was hired as the junior varsity head baseball coach at Cox High School. 

• After a 9-1 campaign with the Cox JV baseball team in the spring of 2014, he was hired by Salem High School in Virginia Beach to be their varsity head baseball coach and spent three seasons there from 2015-2017.  

• July 2017 was named Frank M. Cox HS HC

• In 2019 Coach Ittner was named Region 6A co-coach of the year after compiling an 18-6 record and earning a state tournament berth for the Falcons.  Coach Ittner is currently a special education teacher with Virginia Beach City Public Schools.

Notes

• Raise your minimums!! D2 guy to a D1 guy. No baseball guy becomes a baseball guy!

• Brett McCabe’s catalyst school

• How do you deal with the player that question everything?

• How do you deal with the player that loses confidence?

• Live calls

• Ways to grow more than the X’s and O’s

• Notebooks on each player - logging conversations - knowing the athletes, looping back with the athletes - do you really understand the player?

• Story telling 

• Authentic and drawn to what keeps coaches up at night

• Tough Topics that head coaches have to deal with

• Are you reflecting with what happens the most?

• Story telling before each game - we want them to be in it

• “Out of the hat” app - random name that generates to connect with

• “Find out Fridays” - 2 minute conversation between sets with weightlifting and classroom session

• Fall and spring evaluation (google form) more formal than the informal Find out Fridays

• The coaches that do it at the highest level to deal with human beings?

• Am I given myself the best opportunity to build the person?

• Program pyramid - standards of the program

• 3 tiers 

• Greatest level of respect is taking a coaching cue and doing it!

• Coaching staff built the pyramid

• Culture bulbs your program, identity builds your team

• Finding a common theme that guys buy into to make the year special

• “Mission 23”

• Expedition 6-13 - climb to last day of the year

• Bring it home 2021

• Talked to SEALS about the process 

• 5 games goal

• QAB champion - 

• F3P champion - 

• Offense

• Big Inning

• BB/K = 1:1

• QAB = 50%

• Create 7 or more freebie

• 4 or more in 7 inning

• Defense

• Win the freebie war

• Deny the big inning

• Less than 120 pitches

• F3P - what you do the first 3 pitches

• Get off the field in less than 20 pitches and stay on offense for more than 20

• Color code what happens during the game (green good, and red bad)

• Strings of QAB to produce a big inning

• mittner2@gmail.com

• @falcons_skip