Tulane's Friedman Helps Baseball Chiefs Create Cohesive Teams

When the boys of summer come to New Orleans, there’s one law professor they often seek to help them blend together into a cohesive team: Tulane Law’s Joel Friedman.

For years, Friedman has worked with the Los Angeles Dodgers’ minor league managers and coaches to help them improve teaching and communication skills. Friedman is an expert on employment discrimination and labor law, mediation and communication. What can a law professor teach coaches and players? For starters, with more than 40 years of classroom experience, Friedman shows managers how to be effective teachers and recognize how their players learn.  He works with players to communicate and listen effectively, and has developed a specialty in helping players overcome psychological obstacles to their physical performance.

Friedman did more of it this summer, working with the Oklahoma City Dodgers, a AAA-minor league team on their two visits to play the New Orleans Babycakes in May and June.

Coaches and managers deal with scores of players who have different approaches to learning and who respond to information in different ways.  So, Friedman spends time watching the coaches work and then offers advice to those who ask for his help.

“This has been one of the most enjoyable and professionally satisfying experiences in my professional life,” Friedman said, adding, “Of course, it doesn’t hurt that I have been in love with the Dodgers since I was born in Brooklyn in the 1950’s.”

Friedman also has previously worked with several of Tulane’s athletic teams, including the baseball, football, swimming, diving, and bowling teams.

“It was tremendously rewarding to me to be able to be of service to these incredibly hard-working, talented, and dedicated student-athletes.  I have spent the entirety of my professional life as a faculty member at Tulane and being able to assist my University in this way was a real thrill.” Friedman, is usually teaching law students labor and employment law, mediation, discrimination law and civil procedure. He also is Director of the Online Master of Jurisprudence in Labor and Employment Law at Tulane Law School. And while he loves teaching law, he relishes his “summer job” with baseball.