Extensive Goal Setting Major Tool For Catcher Bryan Holaday
By Ashley Dunkak
@AshleyDunkak
LAKELAND, FLA. - Ever since college, when he watched peak performance coach Brian Cain speak to his baseball team at TCU, catcher Bryan Holaday has gone about his business a bit differently. What stuck with Holaday, now a Detroit Tiger, were Cain's words on setting goals.
"It's easy enough to sit down and think of stuff you want to accomplish," Holaday said Wednesday, the second day of full squad workouts at spring training, "and you write them down, and then I did it the first year and I hit almost every single one of my goals, and it was just kind of cool, so I was like, 'Okay, let's see how far I can take it and keep trying to get better and better.'"
Since college, Holaday has set baseball goals, off-field goals and personal goals. He writes them in a journal, and at the end of each year, he looks back to see whether he met those marks. In the meantime, he posts the goals all over the place, reminding himself of all the ways he wants to improve.
For baseball alone, Holaday has about 20 different goals - most of the initial statistics one finds on Baseball Reference, he said. He takes several elements into account when deciding for what numbers he will shoot.
"It's a little bit of everything," Holaday said. "I take what I want to do, I take my past performances, how I want to improve them, and I will definitely look at league averages and stuff like that, so I just go from there and it just depends on different ones, I guess."
The catcher, who played in 62 games for the Tigers in 2014, has found the process of setting goals and striving to meet them not only a productive one but an encouraging one.
"I've actually done pretty well with the majority of them, and that's kind of the funny thing about it," Holaday said. "When you set goals like that and you see them constantly and remind yourself of them constantly, it opens your eyes to see how many goals you can actually reach.
"It's definitely had a huge influence on me," Holaday added, "and I think it's a great tool, and especially when you do it at the beginning of the offseason, you have offseason goals, and it's a great way to prepare yourself for the season."
