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GREENSBORO -- Minor-league baseball is a different animal.

Every year, thousands of young men toil in stadiums like Greensboro's NewBridge Bank Park. Promotions, demotions, releases, signings, rookie ball, Double-A, fall ball -- it never ends.

And the uniqueness of this system extends past the guys on the field and into the dugout.

For every group of players striving to make The Show, there's a small coaching staff responsible for shepherding them along.

Unlike the NBA, 19-year-olds full of raw talent come to the bottom rung first -- refreshing, isn't it? -- and are nurtured by a group of instructors.

These coaches are in a unique position: Their job is to help the young talent placed in their possession reach the major-league level.

Their ambition is to eventually make it there themselves.

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Ask a Greensboro Grasshoppers coach about the challenges of Class A ball, and the word "mental" is pretty much guaranteed to be part of the answer.

And why not? The coaches are taking players who haven't failed much and putting them in a much more competitive league with a season that's far beyond what they've ever experienced.

That'll rattle your brain.

The biggest obstacles are "just the day-to-day grind, the waiting, the work," Greensboro hitting coach Bobby Bell said. "It's the mental toughness that you've got to prepare them for to get through a full season."

The results on the field are a big part of that, too.

"There's so much failure in this game, especially with hitting," said Hoppers manager Darin Everson. "You know, you can do everything right and line out."

For example, take a game a few weeks ago. Greensboro pulled off a dramatic walk-off victory, but just minutes after the celebration, Bell was right back in the indoor batting cage to work with a frustrated hitter.

"Facing adversity or failure, or dealing with not being as successful as they're accustomed to, is part of the professional gig," Hoppers pitching coach Charlie Corbell said.

It's quite different from young athletes in other sports who go straight to the top level. Even the best baseball players usually spend two seasons in the minors, and coaches have to deal with a group ranging in age from 18 to the mid-20s (some fresh out of high school) who are quite new to a system where results dictate future employment.

Eight players on the Grasshoppers roster have yet to turn 21.

Everson considers himself a "supervisor" to young men figuring out their lives in baseball.

And the coaches are closely tied to the evolving faces behind the results.

"When they fail, you fail. And that's the way that I know I go about it," Bell said. "So you get a kid that's not doing well, you're not doing well right along with them. So it's more humanistic than it seems, because we're right there with them."

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There are three baseball-specific coaches on the Grasshoppers staff, along with two fitness trainers.

Contrast that with eight coaches for the Atlanta Braves, or five for UNC.

The point? These guys do just about everything.

"I guess we're just kind of used to it," Everson says.

They come from different playing backgrounds -- Everson primarily caught and played first in the minors, Bell caught, and Corbell pitched. But they still have to help Kevin Mattison run down balls in center field.

Everson did just about everything as a high school coach; supervised hitters, catchers and outfielders as a college coach; and has been coaching pros since 2006.

He said it's possible to improve as a player if you have coaches who stress fundamentals.

"As a player going in, you think you know a lot. But you find out there's a lot of things you need to definitely refine," Everson said.

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What about the coaches' own career ambitions?

They find themselves in a situation where their job is to help these players reach a destination where they'd like to eventually end up, too.

"One of the things that I heard a while back that I kind of go by is, you never want to be trying to beat your players to the big leagues," Everson said.

Going from Jamestown in the New York-Penn League to Greensboro this year was a promotion for Everson.

Corbell made it all the way to Triple-A as a pitching coach with the Montreal/Washington organization.

"And (I) felt like I was knocking on the door. But it didn't happen," he said. "And I took steps back, not necessarily back, but I ended up moving to a different organization."

Although Corbell initially moved up the ladder quickly, the long-term goals for coaches have to be put on a slightly different timetable.

Players want to move up as fast as possible. As Everson pointed out, their heads can go a mile a minute about where they might move, and who's going where.

He's been in that situation himself as a minor leaguer, but as a coach -- and a young coach, at 38 -- well, perhaps it's a little more tortoise than hare.

"Everyone likes to move up," he said. "The thing with us is we know we're going to be here all season long. With a player, they can move throughout the season &ellipses; they can go ahead and think that way, which is fine. But for us to think that way, we're not even at the halfway point. It's not right for me to start thinking what am I going to be doing next year."

An important part of getting your break, as in any business setting, is who you know. But the promotion process for a coach is more gradual. The day-to-day mentality for someone like Bell is getting "every kid to do what you weren't able to do."

"You have to be in the moment with them. You have to be working with them to work on their weaknesses, to try to cover them up as much as possible and build on their strengths," Everson said.

"And our job is to get them to the big leagues. And if people that are in charge, in front offices and that type of thing feel like we've done a good job and are able to move up with them, or move up eventually, that's great too."

Contact Jesse Baumgartner at 373-7091 or jesse.baumgartner@news-record.com