Carty: no extra team punishment for off-field incidents

Georgia College baseball Head Coach Tom Carty is old-school.  Talking baseball puts an extra authority in his voice and a little more seriousness in his eyes.

Carty’s general philosophy leaves little room for interpretation among his players.

If you’re 18, you’re a man. You make decisions based on being baseball player and a representative of Georgia College.

If you want to show up late for practice—field duties.  If you want to take a couple plays off in practice—field duties. If you want to break the law, society will bring its own hammer down.

He doesn’t have time to babysit.  Leading a college baseball team to a No. 7 national ranking according to College Baseball Lineup top-30 and current 24-10 record leaves little time for such frivolity anyway.

“I treat the players like men,” Carty said. “The things our guys can’t do, no one on campus should be doing either. The difference is, someone on campus is underage drinking—it might never show.  Where as having the privilege to be on an athletic team, there is more responsibility.”

Carty also said that he won’t be “going down to Hancock Street and hiding in the bushes with I-spy glasses and video cameras.”  It’s not his or his assistant coaches’ responsibility

“It’s unfortunate in sports that the perception has been, as a coach, we have to take care of 18- to 22-year-olds 24/7,” he said.  “Parents decided to let you go to school, part of it was to grow up. Part of growing up is handling getting up in the morning.  No one’s going to wake you up. Your mom isn’t going to wake you up, so I’m not going to do it.”

Away games are taken with a bit more caution.

Athletes are representing Georgia College in towns and cities filled with screaming fans cheering for the Bobcats to lose, creating an atmosphere where off the field errors are just as noticeable as the ones on the field.

“It’s unfortunate in sports that perception has been, as a coach, we have to take care of 18- to 22-year-olds 24/7. Parents decided to let you go to school, part of it was to grow up.”

Tom Carty, Head Coach

But Carty and company take special precautions to prevent putting athletes in questionable situations.

The players get roughly two hours for dinner or lunch with parents or friends while on the road.

Lights are usually out by 11 p.m.

“We’ve never had an issue on the road, knock on wood,” Carty said.

Concerns hitting closer to home almost never get an athlete cut from the team, depending on the severity of course.

According to Carty, a player who volunteers to read at the local schools, works hard in the weight room and isn’t late for games or practice has much more leeway if he makes a mistake or gets himself in a bad situation.

It’s not so easy for freshmen.

They have to prove the baseball skills and values that got them recruited are not simply facades for a deeper behavioral problem.

“A young player who, in the fall maybe got a call from the dorm and they had alcohol, that’s kind of one strike,” Carty said.  “But you don’t really count strikes. It’s just a matter of what you give to the program, what did you put into the program and how much damage are you doing to it off the field or in some cases within the team?  You have to make decisions whether or not it’s suspending a guy or cutting him.”

Most minor transgressions will cost players field duties like picking up rocks or pulling weeds from the field.

Handing all behavioral problems internally is preferred.

Carty points to penalties and punishments handed down by city and state law enforcement as enough of a reprimand for most serious indiscretions.

Conditioning and running is not used as a penalty as it is in many other programs, and Carty believes it should be viewed as a positive part of training in Georgia College baseball.

“I’m not a big believer in punishing guys with running,” Carty said. “I’ll run the team if the team is messing up in areas and we are having issues with more than one guy, like our team is getting lazy or we’re not taking care of our responsibilities on and off the field. Then you get them up at 5:30 in the morning and see if their nervous system from their legs to the brain is attached.”

Academic philosophies for athletic programs can vary widely from university to university.

However, most schools require their students to simply meet the minimum NCAA requirements to play.

An athlete must complete 24 hours of classes and maintain a 2.0 grade point average to be eligible to play his or her respective sport.

Carty believes there is no reason to put his team “at any more disadvantage” than the other teams he competes against.

“If a coach feels like he has a higher moral obligation to do that, to each his own. We don’t do that in baseball. There’s enough things in place where if you don’t follow them, it will catch up to you,” he said.

It’s hard to argue with Carty’s results.  The team is off to an impressive start this year, maintaining its ranking in the top 10 nationally.

In his six years as an affiliate of Georgia College baseball, Carty can’t remember having one repeat offender.

“I don’t want to paint a scarlet letter on them,” he said. “I don’t think you have to live with that for the rest of your life.  I know in our few instances, guys have changed their behavior. I think they get it.”

Athletic Director Wendell Staton believes Carty handles the baseball team with fundamentally correct policies and authority.

“Tom does a great job for us,” Staton said.  “I think he runs just an outstanding program all the way through. That’s the thing about it when you are running a program, it’s very similar to running a business. Tom is the CEO of that company in essence.”

Staton has never had to step in when it comes to Carty and player regulations and compared discipline to playing time, saying “it’s the coach’s decision.”

He has allowed all Georgia College teams to operate with their own autonomy and move in directions most imperative for each program.

The only blanket policy he attempts to ingrain in all athletic programs is to always protect the integrity of the university.

“The sports page gets a lot of exposure across the country,” Staton said.  “I don’t care what town you’re in. It does. So I think having folks understand the importance of the image of the university and the integrity of the university and as long as we’re consistent with that, I think it should take care of most of the thought process about ‘well is this what we need to be doing,’ that type of thing.”

Carty said that college is about maturing and experiencing many different situations.

“You go to college to become an adult,” Carty said. “You want to learn. Ultimately, I think everybody’s lost sight of that.”

Posted by MitchellDavis on Apr 7 2011. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.