Darrell,

I think you answered the question as well as anyone could.  And the best part was the "I am going to keep on trying".  That's a coach and a competitor talking.  Love it. 

I more or less made peace with this issue earlier in my coaching career.  It used to really bother me that my players didn't seem to have the same level of competitiveness as I did.  When I played I absolutely lived to beat you – and if I couldn't beat you, I wanted to fight you.  That probably wasn't a normal personality even in my day.  But, it's even rarer in today's players – who I believe are more outwardly passive for a lot of cultural reasons.

After much frustration with my players, I put some serious thought into it and decided this:  Being a true competitor is not about how you act – it's about what you do.  Players have different personalities and most of them aren't as demonstrably competitive as the kind of guys who usually go into coaching but everyone can be a competitor.  The way I decided to help my players learn to compete was to introduce them to the concepts of team first, and playing this pitch, right now, with 100% focus and 100% effort.  If you can do that from the first pitch to the last pitch – you're a competitor no matter what your personality type is. 

Do I connect with every player?  Absolutely not.  Any coach who says he does is lying or clueless.  But, I find that if I can get a core group of a team to buy in, it spreads to the rest of the team.  There's nothing more fun than to coach a team (or a pitcher) who fights on every pitch.  And it all starts on the mound – which is why I love coaching pitching.

So, I don't know if you can teach competitiveness either.  But, you can help players find it if they have it, and show them how to focus it.  And I'm going to keep on trying, too.