If you were signed by a major league team, how would you give your dad the news?
Ron Cruz was at work as a mechanic, standing in an office at a Southern California Firestone auto care center. He was eager, as always, to see his son walk into the room. RobertAnthony Cruz flashed his father a Washington Nationals cap.
There was a moment of confusion, then one of recognition. Father embraced son, Ron’s eyes clenching hard. He removed his glasses to try and hide his crying.
Nobody could have foreseen how far the video his wife, Cynthia, had captured would launch their son. RobertAnthony Cruz gained hundreds of thousands of followers overnight after he posted the video. Though his minor league career with the Nationals ended in less than a year, the seeds for a social media sensation had been planted.
Nearly four years later, youth athletes seek out Cruz’s baseball advice — delivered in quick takes on TikTok — while fans flock to watch him perform as one of the biggest stars for the Savannah Bananas, the traveling professional baseball team that has swept America.
The birth of the narrative of “Coach RAC,” as Cruz is known to his 1.5 million-plus followers, doesn’t just reside in that one viral moment.
Kids have become hooked on his honest, reassuring voice, one that lets them know it’s OK to struggle at sports. It’s the same one Ron and Cynthia once had for him.
“They thought I was a success before I even showed up,” Cruz, 26, said recently via Zoom.
“RAC,” as you are free to call him, was sitting next to Cynthia in a studio. Ron was in another window, listening intently, as he has always done.
“When I was growing up, if I had a really bad stretch, if I didn’t have that support system, I might have quit,” their son continued, “but I had them there to encourage me to where quitting was never really on the table.”
I spoke with RAC and his parents as part of USA TODAY Sports’ new association with Youth Inc. Here are 10 tips they offered for young athletes and their parents that you can view in the story and video below.
Our shared goal is to help us better understand why our kids play sports, and how all of us can get the most out of them.
1. ‘We had no agenda’: Allow sports to begin and end with what your kid wants, not just what you want
“In the back of my heart, I wanted him to play baseball,” Ron Cruz says of his son.
Ron’s parents couldn’t afford to put him in organized sports. He still wishes he had played baseball in high school.
But his son dreamed of being an Olympic gymnast. He did the sport with his big sister, Sabrina, and he loved the backflips. It was only when long drives to the gym became too much of a family disruption that Ron had his kids write down a list of new activities they wanted to try.
RAC was eight when his father drove him to Reid Park in Riverside, California, to take in a Little League game for the first time.
“You think you could do that?” the father asked as they watched a kid make contact.
“He goes, ‘Yeah, I think I could hit the ball,’” Ron remembers, “not knowing anything about baseball. He didn’t even know whether he was going to be left-handed or right-handed.”
Cynthia laughed.
“Cleary, we had no agenda,” she said. “It was more led by what they wanted.”
2. ‘We were not good at this when we were born’: Think of yourself as the underdog. It gives you an edge.
Taking up a new sport at nine, Youth Inc.’s Greg Olsen kidded RAC last year, “is like starting at 30” in today’s super-specialized world. Even back then, the boy was three or four years behind the others.
“He was always the smallest kid,” Ron says. “And then coming into baseball, he got put on a team that was an All-Star team, and that’s the only way that he was going to be able to play at that park.
“He’s always been the underdog. His first day of school was in the 11th grade as far as public school. Most kids go into kindergarten when they’re four and five.”
Like his sister, RAC was homeschooled. Sitting with him as they went over his work one day, his mother realized an important lesson that also applied to his baseball career.
“We were trying to learn something difficult in school,” Cynthia said to her son during our call. “I think it was math. You were so frustrated, you didn’t even want to do it. And I realized that we are born thinking that everything is gonna be easy, and if it’s not, then that’s not what we’re supposed to do. And I feel like I had to encourage you that, no, we were not good at this when we were born. We had to learn it.”
COACH STEVE: How a coach can make or break your kid’s youth sports experience
3. Don’t buy into the ‘delusion’: ‘99% of the time it’s just because the kid should be batting ninth’
The way Ron and Cynthia looked it, when you joined a new team, you were automatically going to be hitting at the bottom of the lineup. It was your job to work your way up.
“In the limited coaching experience that I have had,” RAC says, “I’ve already seen how parents think their kids deserve the world, and so they’re like, ‘This coach has this thing against my kid. He doesn’t like my kid. That’s why he’s batting ninth.’ And, you know, 99% of the time it’s just because the kid should be batting ninth.
“If you’re a kid, one of two things will happen. One, you’ll buy into this delusion that your parents are spreading that everyone’s against you, or you’ll learn to kind of not fight your own battles.”
4. Allow your kid to have autonomy within their sport
As he and his son worked to catch up with the other kids, Ron would tell him, ‘You know what your teammates are doing now? They’re probably watching TV. We’re doing batting practice. It’s raining, the wind’s blowing.’”
Overly dramatic? Maybe. But he could tell by the eager calls for more batting practice he’d get from RobertAnthony that his strategy was working.
“It’s not like he’s dragging me out there,” RAC says. “I want to go try and try and hit baseballs over the fence. It was never forced on me in any way.”
When RAC swung and missed, though, his father would show nothing, even when the boy grew discouraged.
“If I asked him, ‘Hey, I feel like I’m doing this wrong,’ he would give his two cents,” his son says. “But if I didn’t ask, it was all up to me. It was an interesting process because there’s a lot of frustration on my part as I’m trying to get better and learn. But there was never frustration initiated by my dad.”
He would simply wait for his son to cool down, and throw another pitch.
‘He had some big goals, and he wanted to attain them and we didn’t have the money to go put him in some type of place where they can teach him everything that he knows now,’ Ron says. ‘So I just figured, ‘Hey, let’s just go hit the ball.’ He’s gonna figure it out. And he did.
‘We would go with the thought that, OK, we’ll be here for a couple hours, and three, four hours later, we’re beat up and tired, but we’re still going.’
5. Yelling coaching advice to your kid during a game makes him or her play worse
Over time, RAC learned the value of his parents being an audience – as opposed to participants – while he was playing.
“I thought it was just normal,” he says. “I definitely saw other kids and their parents always butting heads, and I saw the tension on the field, and I saw a lot of other players be really, like, scared to mess up.”
Our impulse is to instantly correct them. One of RAC’s fundamental instructions became: write it down and work on in practice.
RAC and his parents saw the toll it took on teammates whose parents did the opposite.
‘We ran a league for a little bit, and boy that was something; the parents were just wicked right from the stands,’ Ron said. ‘And you can see the kid as soon as the parents said something, and the kids are always watching their parents. I used to see as soon as they made a mistake, they’re looking at the parent for their reaction. I learned from that. The parents’ reaction right away, if it’s a bad reaction, it hurts the kid.’
6. Behaving during games takes a conscious effort on parents’ parts
Cynthia tried to always find positives even in her son’s worst days on the field, to the point where he’d have to tell her, “Mom, I stunk today.”
“I’m not sure where I picked it up. I can go negative, so I have to overcorrect,” she says. “You don’t become a parent and know everything. You just keep on trying, failing forward, right?”
COACH STEVE: 7 out of 10 kids quit youth sports before age 13. Why?
7. When parents embrace kids’ sports failures, those failures become an asset
When you’re watching your kid play, the number of outs they make in between hits can seem endless. Now think of how your kid feels.
He or she not only feels they aren’t playing well, but that they are letting you down.
It’s easy to be proud when they play well. As long as they gave their best effort, think of a bad game as the best opportunity to show them just how proud we are.
“I think that between the belief that they had in me and between the repeated encouragement that they’d give me, I think that developed more of a resilience, and I didn’t have as much fear of failure,” RAC says of his parents. “There was really nothing to fear on my part. I could have a few terrible weekends, and the worst consequences for that would just be me experiencing losing which, can actually be a good thing.
“The fear of failure was there at the higher levels, but growing up, it wasn’t there. They would encourage me every single day and so if I would ever be discouraged or I had a bad game, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s OK. You’re still good. Let’s go take batting practice.’”
8. ‘Keep your hands off’: Sometimes your kid needs a break from his or her sport
As parents of youth athletes, this thought can be terrifying. We think our kids will fall too far behind.
Now think of RAC, the future pro baseball player, taking a couple of months off from baseball at age 13 to play Minecraft.
“It kind of scared me a little, because I thought, ‘Is he going to want to play anymore?’ ” his mom said.
This is how Cynthia learned how kids also need space from us, especially when they’re teenagers:
“One of my girlfriends has older sons, and I said, ‘What do I do?’ And she goes, ‘You need to keep your hands off. Don’t be the one hounding him to make him do what he needs to do.’ ”
RAC independently tried out photography and spent time with his sister, who helped him with his writing and speech for the debate team.
His parents allowed him to make more choices, such as when he did his homework. He wound up making a crucial one on his own when he realized he missed baseball.
9. ‘Less roadblocks’ from parents lead to more mental strength in kids
After high school, RAC received an offer to play at his dream school, UC Riverside. When he couldn’t muster even a .200 average his first year, he asked to be released from his scholarship.
He played at Division II baseball for Biola University and caught the Nationals’ attention. It was a point in his life when he could lean on his parents’ influence again.
“There was no pressure on me to perform and earn anything,” he says of their approach to his sports growing up. “I didn’t have to earn anything. I wanted to win because I wanted to win. And there was no other factors at play.
“So when I got to the higher levels and started having a lot more higher pressure situations, and now career’s on the line and all these things, I think I had more mental strength because I had less roadblocks.”
10. Apply ‘banana ball’ to your youth sports experience
When Ron was struggling to speak that day when his son came into office, he managed to get out one line:
“Where is that going?” he said, pointing to Cynthia, who was recording everything.
It turns out he and his wife were headed to Nationals Park, where they would watch their son hit a walk-off homer last summer to win an inning for Savannah before a sold-out crowd.
The Bananas are a professional-level team, a modern-day version of the Harlem Globetrotters. They play other traveling teams with set of zany rules designed to make light of what is supposed to be a fun game.
In many ways, the team’s carefree style is an attitude we want to foster with our kids’ sports careers.
“Stay humble, be willing to listen, love on them,” Cynthia Cruz says of what she has learned along the way. “It’s such a short season.’
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.
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