Baseball coach: ‘If we win 14 games, I’ll let you name my kid’

We enjoy highlighting the creative motivational strategies coaches use with their players, but this one might be the most daring.

“If we win 14 games, I’ll let you name my kid.”

Those were the words of Heritage High (Florida) baseball coach Rob Querry prior to this season, and on Wednesday the team picked up victory No. 13. FloridaToday.com reports that this would be the Panthers’ first winning season in program history. Last season, Querry’s first with the team, the Panthers finished 9-16.

Currently, the team is 13-6 with six games remaining.

From FloridaToday.com:

Fourteen wins would assure the elusive winning season, so maybe it was more safe bet than risk. 

Querry laughed when he thought about the kind of pickle in which he finds himself now. Wife Julia, after all, should play a rather significant role in naming her child, though she did participate in a bit of taunting.

“She would come to practice and rub her stomach and say things like ‘five more wins, guys,’ and I told her she probably shouldn’t do that.”

Querry’s bet with the team isn’t even the best part of this story. After players learned their coach was having a boy, they chose a name: Benjamin Smalls Querry. The name is a nod to the 1993 film, The Sandlot. Two of the movie’s main characters were named Benjamin Rodriguez and Scotty Smalls.

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