More than anything, Lowe wants kids to love the game. PHOTO: COACH BALLGAME

As Lowe can attest, even the best youth players are highly unlikely to go pro. But that hasn’t stopped coaches and parents from turning youth sports into a win-at-all-costs pressure cooker that produces far more quitters than all-stars. That’s the culture that Coach Ballgame is out to change. 

At player and coaching clinics he holds around the country, Lowe stresses a fun-first philosophy. His ethos reflects some advice Lowe got from a friend and fellow coach early in his career: “None of these kids are going to make it to the majors,” Lowe recalls his friend saying. “But they’ll probably be mothers and fathers. They’re all going to be servers of their community. We need to be life coaches first, and baseball coaches second.”

Lowe says he learned the secret to great coaching at Brown—from beloved theater professor Lowry Marshall. “She taught me to listen, to get outside of my own head by giving and listening to others,” Lowe says. “Same applies as a coach. You have to listen. My number one pillar is to build trust.” 

Lowe builds trust by getting to know every kid he coaches. He learns a little about their lives, their personalities, and their interests, and gives each of them a nickname to match. Once trust is built, the formula is simple: Reward hustle, teamwork, and character, sprinkle in a few fundamentals. The goal is to nurture kids’ love of the game and keep them on the field long enough to learn all the life lessons baseball has to offer. Chief among them: how to deal with adversity. Every strikeout, every tough game on the mound, every dropped fly ball is an opportunity for growth. “Baseball isn’t life or death,” Lowe says, “but dealing with adversity—that could be.”