For David Piper, coaching is an opportunity to share his passion and love of sports with his children and their friends and teammates. His coaching philosophy is simple: teach players to be good teammates and good people, foster a love of the game, and always focus on the person before the player.

David grew up in southern Minnesota, where he developed a love for baseball and hockey at an early age. He loved sports and the thrill of competition, although learning to manage the frustrations that came with competing took a little longer. Today, David works at Ohnstad Twichell, P.C.

When David was five or six years old, his dad would throw batting practice to him in the backyard. If David swung and missed, he would sometimes become frustrated and blame his dad for not throwing a good enough pitch. This happened often enough that David would occasionally be sent inside for five or ten minutes to cool down. Those forced breaks ultimately produced at least one positive result: waiting to go back outside is how David eventually learned to tell time.

Looking back, those backyard battles taught an early version of a lesson David now tries to pass along to his own players. You can't control where every pitch is thrown or everything that happens during a game, but you can control your attitude and how you respond.

David continued playing both baseball and hockey through college at a small Division III school in Minnesota. While no official award was ever presented, David is confident he will go down in history as the most mediocre two-sport “athlete” Minnesota Division III college athletics has ever seen. His college career may not have produced many headlines, but it did change the way he thought about sports. It was during those years that good coaching finally convinced him that an athlete's self-worth isn't tied to wins, losses or statistics. What matters is whether that athlete competed to the best of his or her ability.

That lesson has become an important part of David's own coaching philosophy.

Having coached children from ages five to seven, David believes youth sports at this stage should be about fostering a love of the game, teaching kids how to play and helping them learn to be good teammates. He wants his players to compete, but he also wants them to learn how to win with humility and lose with grace. There will be plenty of opportunities as they get older to worry about standings, statistics, and championships. At seven years old, David believes one of the most important measures of success is whether the kids enjoyed themselves enough to want to come back and play again next year.

For his 7U team in 2026, David's primary goals were to have fun, be good teammates and focus on the things the players could control: their attitude and their effort. He encouraged them not to spend too much energy worrying about the things they couldn't control, such as where a pitch was thrown, whether a teammate made a play, or whether an umpire made the correct call. David quickly discovered that these can be difficult lessons to teach seven-year-olds, particularly when most of them are very interested in knowing the score at all times. Still, he believes learning to distinguish between what you can and can't control is one of the most valuable lessons sports can provide.

His secondary goals were to teach the players as many of baseball's rules and nuances as possible and to help each player improve. But improvement didn't mean identifying the best players and putting them in the most important positions. In fact, David and his co-coaches, Nick Brenneman and Colin May, took the opposite approach.

Throughout the season, every player batted in every spot in the lineup and played every position an equal number of innings. David, Nick and Colin believed that was especially important at this age. Every seven-year-old wants the opportunity to play the premium positions and bat near the top of the lineup, and every player deserves that chance.

David believes coaches should be careful not to decide too early what a young athlete can or cannot become. Nobody knows which seven-year-old will develop into a talented player several years later. More importantly, preventing a less-skilled player from ever playing a favorite position could be enough to discourage that child from returning the following season. David wants every player to keep coming back because sports have much more to teach than simply how to throw, catch or hit a baseball.

Sports teach children how to win and how to lose. They teach them that every position and every role on a team matters, even when it isn't the “star” position. They teach responsibility, perseverance and how to respond when things don't go your way. David believes that giving every child an opportunity keeps them engaged long enough to experience those lessons for themselves.

Creating that kind of environment requires two qualities David considers essential for a coach: patience and empathy. During the 2026 season, however, David also learned an important lesson about his own influence. He realized that the attitude he brought to the field often became the attitude of his players. If he arrived frustrated or carrying a bad attitude for whatever reason, the kids seemed to pick up on it. If he arrived positive and enthusiastic, they seemed to play better, smile more and have more fun.

For a coach who constantly reminded his players to control their own attitudes, the message was obvious: practice what you preach.

That realization reinforced David's belief that coaching young athletes is about much more than teaching the game. Coaches have an enormous influence on how children experience sports. A patient, encouraging coach can help a child fall in love with a game, while an environment focused too heavily on results can have the opposite effect.

Ultimately, David wants his players to improve at baseball, but he hopes the most important things they learn have little to do with baseball. Years from now, they probably won't remember where they batted in the lineup during a particular 7U game or whether their team won or lost. He hopes they remember how to be a good teammate, how to treat others, how to compete with effort and a positive attitude, and how to handle both success and disappointment.

David is thankful to Nick and Colin, as well as all the parents who helped make the 2026 season a memorable one. He looks forward to coaching the group at 8U next year and continuing to share the game he has loved since he was a kid in southern Minnesota blaming his dad for bad pitches in the backyard.

And if David could give one piece of advice to a new youth coach, it would sum up everything he has learned along the way: focus on the person, not the player.

After all, the goal isn't simply to develop better athletes. It's to use sports as an opportunity to help kids become better teammates and better people.

David plans to continue doing exactly that at 8U next season—assuming, of course, Major League Baseball continues to overlook him for a managerial position.