‘Meet me at the stop sign’: How Clemson coaches stay in touch during pandemic
It’s a sunny and beautiful day in early April, a spring day baseball coaches dream about this time of year.
But instead of being at Doug Kingsmore Stadium, where they are usually found, Clemson head baseball coach Monte Lee and his assistants Bradley LeCroy and Andrew See are meeting at a stop sign in their neighborhood in Seneca, South Carolina, just outside of Clemson.
Six feet apart, of course.
This is the new reality for Clemson’s baseball staff and many coaches around the country during the COVID-19 outbreak.
There are no games to manage, practices to attend or recruiting trips to go on as the coronavirus pandemic has shut down most of the country and all of college sports.
Instead, coaches are spending their time with family members, communicating electronically (and in Clemson’s case at stop signs), taking part in outdoor activities, questioning the future and sharing a new appreciation for the sport that they love.
“It’s been hard not having the day-in, day-out practice and games and competition. Just never been a part of anything like this,” Lee said. “You certainly miss what you eat, drink and sleep, which is the game of baseball.”
Different roles
LeCroy just completed his 20th season as an assistant college baseball coach, the last 10 of which he has spent at Clemson. The 42-year-old recruiting coordinator and hitting coach has his routine down during the season.
LeCroy is on the road recruiting on Monday, coaching the Tigers during a midweek game or at practice on Tuesday and Wednesday, either traveling or going through a practice on Thursday and coaching the Tigers during a weekend series Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Then Monday, he gets up and starts his week all over again.
“Usually in the spring time my wife jokes that she’s a spring widow,” LeCroy recently told The State. “Because we’re gone and we’re playing and traveling and recruiting and all that kind of stuff.”
However, this spring LeCroy has a different role.
He and his wife, Meredith, serve as teachers to their two boys — 9-year-old Crew and 7-year-old Cooper — now that schools are closed because of the coronavirus. It’s a role LeCroy is embracing.
“It’s been a smooth transition, and I give a lot of credit to Pickens County Schools with the way that they were prepared for this,” said LeCroy, whose students attend Clemson Elementary School. “The communication has been outstanding. And to be honest with you, I have to give my wife a lot of credit. She’s on top of it.”
Current routine
Crew and Cooper start their day with breakfast, then Crew logs into his Chromebook around 8:30 or 8:45 a.m. and begins his schoolwork for the day.
There’s math, grammar, science and social studies to complete.
Bradley and Meredith have split up the subjects they are working on with their kids. Bradley takes command in math, while Meredith leads the way in English. But even though Bradley considers himself “the math guy in the family” there have been some struggles during their home-schooling.
“We were doing some math the other day, some long division. We’re all used to just calculators now. I started doing a problem with (Crew) and I did it totally wrong,” LeCroy recalled. “He looked at me and he told me, ‘Uh, dad, you’ve gotta do it this way.’ I said, ‘You know what? You’re right.’ It was a good learning experience for both of us. But we had fun with it.”
Cooper has less work to complete and his is, of course, less challenging, but keeping two kids on task and working on schoolwork for an entire day has given LeCroy a new appreciation for the job teachers do as they oversee an entire classroom full of kids.
“The organization and the patience and just the love they have for being there for kids from all different kinds of backgrounds ... It takes a special person,” LeCroy said. “You see all of these things on social media about teachers should be paid a lot more. And they should for what they do for young people in our community, in our state and in our country. They should be paid a lot more.”
Outside activities
Crew and Cooper typically finish their schoolwork for the day by early afternoon, and then PE begins.
Bradley is in charge of PE. Activities include bike riding, playing catch, shooting basketball, fishing and wiffle ball games with other kids in the neighborhood.
For the LeCroys that means wiffle ball games with Tigers offensive coordinator Tony Elliott and his sons A.J. (6 years old) and Ace (4).
The LeCroys and the Elliotts have always been friendly, but the pandemic has allowed them to grow much closer.
“We play with them every day. I’ve seen Tony every day. We’ve been friends for a long time, but now we get to see each other every day. He asks me about baseball and I ask him about football and recruiting and how we do certain things, how they do certain things,” LeCroy said. “It’s been good to connect with somebody outside your sport. Where we’d just see each other and pass each other driving in the neighborhood, now we’re spending some time together and getting to know each other better.”
Lee has also been spending plenty of time outdoors, but for him it’s a little different. Clemson’s fifth-year head coach has four daughters ranging from age 16 to 24, so his days aren’t spent playing outside with them.
Lee is up before 6 each morning and has some breakfast, a cup of coffee and walks his two dogs around the neighborhood.
He hunts, goes fishing and works out regularly, while also spending plenty of time talking baseball. There are Zoom calls and conference calls with his players, Clemson administrators and other coaches around the country discussing the current state of baseball.
“The hardest thing has been it’s like time is at a standstill. What I mean by that: This thing has moved so rapidly and so fast, at first it started off as we’re shut down for the month of March. Well now our season is closed. Now we’re off campus until June. It’s like these things just keep extending on top of that. So we don’t know when we’re going to go back to work,” Lee said. “As far as the draft, we don’t know how the draft is going to affect us. Is it going to be five rounds? Is it going to be 10 rounds? Are all of our guys going to come back now? Are all of our incoming guys going to come in now? We don’t know.”
‘Meet me at the stop sign’
Lee has spoken with his assistant coaches, LeCroy and See, every day since Clemson’s season suddenly came to an end last month.
They talk about a variety of topics, from the feedback they’re receiving from players, to what they’re hearing from MLB teams about the draft to when major league and minor league baseball might take place in 2020, if at all.
A lot of times those conversations start out as Zoom calls or texts and Lee throws out a suggestion.
“I’m like, ‘Look, why don’t we just meet right there at Bradley’s at the stop sign. We can keep our six feet apart and we can talk about it,’ ” Lee said.
See lives on one end of the neighborhood and Lee lives on the other. In the middle is LeCroy’s house.
“It’s kind of like having an outdoor office,” LeCroy said. “Get together and talk about some things when it comes to the draft and our roster management, things like that.”
Lee is usually dressed in an old workout T-shirt, a camouflage hat and what he described as “some old jorts.”
“I look like an old redneck landscaper,” he said.
See “looks like he hasn’t shaved in a week and he’s got his hat on backwards,” according to Lee.
While LeCroy is: “the GQ of the staff. Usually he’s dressed up pretty good.”
The meetings are far from what Clemson’s coaches would prefer to be doing at this time of year, and they don’t occur daily. But it’s a good way for them to stay in touch with each other and the game of baseball during this difficult time.
“More appreciation for when we do get together and we talk about our team and how they’re doing, how we’re doing, we kind of appreciate seeing each other a little bit more because we’re not getting to do it,” Lee said. “We’re keeping our distance. I’m not going in their house. They’re not going in my house. We understand what we’re looking at. We respect the social distancing measures that are going on. So it’s just different. I think we appreciate it a little bit more when we see each other.”
While Zoom calls, text message and stop sign meetings are a great way to stay engaged, and LeCroy, Lee and other coaches around the country are enjoying more family time, they are also counting down the days until they are back with their team and competing again.
“When we get back on the field, when we get our team together and we can practice, it’s going to be so exciting. And you’re never going to take anything for granted,” LeCroy said. “When something like that is taken away from you, you figure out how important it is to you. How much it means to you to be on the field with the kids trying to win a championship.”
This story was originally published April 9, 2020 at 6:22 PM.
