Friday, December 12, 2008

With cooling temperatures comes the warmth of baseball’s hot stove league news, and the Tradewater Pirates continued to stoke the fire and the fans’ anticipation of a new season by announcing the hiring of assistant coach Brad Cowan this week.

One month after hiring head coach Brandon Kitch, the Pirates welcomed the addition of Cowan, who works as an assistant coach for Pensacola Junior College (Fla.).

Although Cowan’s official title is that of assistant, his duties will include the responsibility of overseeing the pitching staff.

Kitch conducted the hiring process and from nearly a dozen candidates, he chose Cowan for his energy and winning resume.

“He’s young, he’s enthusiastic and he’s at one of the top junior colleges in the country,” Kitch said. “Those are the type of people that I want to be around. I want to be around winners, guys that know how to win and are from programs that expect to win.”

At 22 years old, fans may confuse Cowan’s youthful looks with those of the Pirate players, but Cowan said he feels he’s ready to follow Kitch and brings a lot of knowledge to the team.

“I want to learn, I’m still young,” Cowan said. “I’m not much older than the guys that will be playing for me, but at the same time I know the game.

For the 31-year-old Kitch, he said Cowan’s enthusiasm for acquiring knowledge and experience reminds him of his introduction to coaching.

“I can look back when I was 22, 23 years old and getting into coaching – I was hungry and just wanting to get new information because we all have different types of philosophies,” Kitch said.

Being not far removed from his own playing days, Kitch said Cowan should be able to “be on the same page” as the players when trying to relate.

During Cowan’s tenure as a player, he worked as a left-handed pitcher at three different schools: Wallace State Community College (Ala.), Calhoun Community College (Ala.) and the University of South Carolina at Aiken.

It was during Cowan’s freshman season at Wallace State, when he went to the JUCO World Series in Grand Junction, Colo. and played before crowds of 10,000, that he decided to pursue coaching.

“Ever since then I wanted to be a coach because I wanted other kids to experience that,” he said. “It’s stuff you tell your grandkids.”

Cowan said he knows he will not have a lot of time with the Tradewater pitchers in the short summer season, but still has high hopes for their development.

“I want to get these guys to where they’re in good shape, so when they show up back to their schools their coaches are going to say ‘Wow, these guys really worked this summer,’” Cowan said. “I want them to improve in every aspect of the game whether it’s conditioning, mechanics, whatever it is.”

Playing for different coaches during the summer can be an advantage for college players because the young men may hear the same information, but understand it better coming in a new form of explanation, Cowan said.

During phone conversations with Cowan, Kitch told his assistant he will have free reign when it comes to the pitching aspect, but stressed repetition, not necessarily instruction, is the main goal for most athletes in a summer environment.

Competing in a wooden-bat league, Cowan said he plans to teach the pitchers how to work the inner half of the plate.

“You come in on a guy with a wood bat and it’s going to break his bat and he’s just going to ground out to the pitcher or the third baseman,” he said. “I want these guys to be aggressive and it’s a perfect time for them to attack hitters and get used to that.

“The way baseball is played these days, these guys are too focused on pitching away, away, away and I want these guys to get aggressive and learn how to pitch inside.”

Whether it’s learning how to pitch inside, improving mechanics, or comprehending situations in a new light, Cowan said he wants his players to add to their repertoire and his youth may be just the thing to help him communicate better with the Tradewater pitching corps.

“A lot of times it takes somebody like me for these guys to understand,” he said. “I can relate to them better being young and these guys might look at me and say, ‘Oh he’s our age, he just knows as much as we do,’ but sometimes it takes somebody looking at them.

“They can feel certain things, but they can’t see themselves pitch and when I watch them I can tell them exactly what they’re doing. It’s not that I know so much more than them, it’s having somebody on the outside watching from a different angle.”