Bertman addresses belief in self, motivation at local event

Always believe in yourself, even in the face of adversity, and motivate others.
That was the message of legendary ex-LSU Baseball Coach Skip Bertman to a packed house at the St. Mary Outreach’s Motivation for Life. A Night with Skip Bertman.
Bertman addressed the crowd for approximately an hour, delivering a speech filled with stories from his collegiate coaching career as well as ways his message could be tailored to the local community.
“I want you to never forget your vision of when the oil was at the right spot and everything was in place,” he said. “Don’t forget that vision. It’s coming. It’s going to come again. It’s going to be there for you.”
Bertman said baseball is about “using sports to teach lessons for life.” The collegiate coach said he did just that.
He told the crowd it’s important to never forget its vision in life.
While he had a successful role at Miami as an assistant coach where the squad won two national titles and had been to the College World Series six times, he said the LSU baseball program was “mired in mediocracy and they loved it there,” when he first arrived.
He said the school played “50-50 baseball,” meaning they would finish about at .500.
“Nobody cared. No students ever came (to games) unless they wanted a quiet place to study,” he quipped.
However, he said he had a vision for his team to go to Omaha, something that became a regular appearance with five national titles by the time he retired in 2001.
“I could see the purple and gold uniforms there,” he said of his beginnings with LSU. “Boy, I wanted that. I thought I was worthy of it. The boys, too.”
He said his team worked harder than the team had ever worked to achieve that goal.
“If you sincerely think you’re worthy of it, then you enthusiastically act upon it (and) … It must come to pass,” Bertman said. “So I had us going to Omaha. I had us winning a national championship. All I had to do was get the boys to believe me, and to be honest with you, it wasn’t baseball that they didn’t know. It was they didn’t know how special they really were.”
Bertman said the common thing that successful people share is simply they believe in their abilities.
In addition to belief in abilities, people must motivate and teach others, too.
“A decision to do nothing is based on motivation,” he said. “Motivation is contagious, but you can’t see it. You know when it’s there, and you know when it’s missing and you never know when you can touch somebody.”
Bertman said that means a person must be positive all the time.
The LSU coach also told the crowd that failure is inevitable and something that people should not fear.
He gave a litany of examples of those overcoming failure, including ex-NBA stars Shaquille O’Neal and Michael Jordan as well as current NBA superstar LeBron James being cut from their high school hoops teams in the ninth grade, Dr. Seuss having his first book rejected more than 20 times and Henry Ford going bankrupt five times.
“Failure is a prerequisite for success,” he said, later adding that people should not let challenges in life discourage them.
Bertman also discussed teamwork, something he said is important and is when you teach people that something is greater than any individual person.
“That means you have to give up something to realize it’s greater than you,” he said.