When talking to younger players, the ability to mentally slow the game down is a topic you’ll often hear discussed.
It’s quite natural.
That’s especially true for freshmen jumping into the shark-infested waters of the SEC. Facing the quality pitching one sees in the league can be enough to make any newcomer question their ability to succeed.
How quickly you can slow the game down in your mind will often determine how quickly success will come.
For Georgia sophomore Corey Collins, those lessons certainly ring true.
“When you’re hitting well, everything seems like a beach ball. It’s nice and slow. When you’re doing not so good, you see a golf ball,” Collins said. “I know people say the game speeds up, but realistically it stays the same. It’s your mind that speeds up. I’ve heard it and I’ve heard Coach Strick (Georgia head coach Scott Stricklin) say, good players can slow down the game. That’s going to be my goal – one game at a time, one pitch at a time.”
Collins actually addressed that part of his game fairly well as a first-year player.
The former North Gwinnett standout batted a very respectable .283 as a true freshman with eight home runs and a team-leading 37 RBI. His performance was good enough to earn him a spot on the SEC All-Freshman Team.
Now entering his second season, Collins and Stricklin both expect that relaxed approach to continue. If that happens, the Bulldogs’ cleanup hitter could indeed be in store for a banner offensive year.
“I think the biggest thing for him is just slowing the game down from a freshman to a sophomore. He’s so talented. You look at his numbers, he really had a good freshman year, although I think he will tell you he didn’t think he had a very good year,” Stricklin said. “But we’re excited. The ball jumps off his bat, he can hit to all the fields. He’s a pure hitter. He can hit to left field, he can lay a bunt down in the shift, he can do a lot of different things and he’s a true middle of the order hitter.
As a freshman, to come in and hit in the four hole right away is pretty rare, but he did it and handled himself pretty well.”
Like most freshmen, the big left-handed hitter (6-foot-3, 223 pounds) experienced a midseason dip. As more pitchers learned his weaknesses, Collins learned to make adjustments of his own.
“I went into the season knowing nobody was really going to know who I was, and they didn’t really know how they were going to pitch me,” Collin said. “So, I just kept it simple. As I saw guys, I would get better and better. I just had to slow down more. I went through a little something midway through the season, but I came back, told myself I just needed to slow down and play, just take what they were giving me.”
If fall practice was any indication, Collins is in store for a good year.
His grand slam against Florida in the team’s exhibition win over the Gators last October was just the kind of production the Bulldogs hope to see this spring. Collins puts his own goal in the simplest of terms.
“I just want to help the team win. That’s the simplest way to put it, knock in runs, do my job,” Collins said. “If I do my job, get better every day, then I’m helping my team out.”
Stricklin believes that mindset is exactly the approach his slugger needs. He hopes Collins will remember that throughout the course of the upcoming campaign.
“I think what you will see is more consistency. As a freshman when you struggle a little bit, it’s really easy to dig a deeper hole for yourself. But we just put him out there. He struggled a little bit with left-handed pitching, but I think he can be a really good hitter against left-handed pitching,” Stricklin said. “That’s something we’re hoping to see a little more of, have better success against left-handed pitching, but we think he’s an everyday, middle of the order SEC hitter and I think he’s going to be a really high draft pick next year.”
However, Collins isn’t worried about any pro career just yet.
The Bulldogs are a consensus Top 20 preseason pick. With so many position players returning to go along what appears to be a deeper pitching staff, a return trip to the NCAA Tournament would appear to be on the low end of the accomplishments this team could achieve this spring.
“It’s going to be unreal. At this point, all those guys are older guys and they’ve been through everything. They’ve been through up, they’ve been through downs, everything,” Collins said. “They did a good job showing my class last year and the guys below them with the struggles, how to get through it.
I feel that all of us will have one central mindset. We’re excited as all get out.”
The Bulldogs kick off their season in two weeks (Feb. 18) against Albany for the first of a three-game series.
