Like many softball programs, our Mundelein Thunder organization just completed tryouts for the 2008 season. Man, that can make for a grueling couple of days. But in the end it’s worth it when you know you have your team together and can start plotting and planning for the next year’s tournaments.

During the tryouts I was observing a pitching tryout. The girl was someone new, a 12U. I was chatting with her mom and bit and she told me where she’d been taking lessons and from whom. As I sat there, the girl seemed to go through an elaborate (to me) warm-up, beginning with some wrist snaps and then staging her throwing arm through about four or five starting locations. At no time did her feet move during these. Finally, her last drill was from full distance; she did what is usually called the “stork” drill, where she stood on one leg and then launched herself and pitched. So one leg at least got involved.

I guess different people have different philosophies or ideas or whatever, but it didn’t make much sense to me. I subscribe to the Bill Hillhouse school on warm-ups and drills — the more you make it like the actual pitching motion and get the whole body involved, the better off you’ll be. It looked like the girl was practicing to be an arm pitcher. When she went to full motion that’s exactly what happened. No leg drive, no body drive, just an arm thrower. It was too bad, because she looked pretty athletic and it seemed like she could get a lot more out of her body than she was getting.

I mentioned all this to another of our coaches, and he said that maybe she was being taught that way because it would be easier to throw strikes if she wasn’t going fully into it. I suppose that’s true. If you’re only using one body part there’s less to go wrong. But that seems like a shortcut to a dead end. Sooner or later if she wants to compete she’ll have to learn to throw her body into it, at least if she wants to develop speed. At that point she’ll probably have some setbacks and will have to relearn how to pitch. By then she’ll be behind the other 14Us who started out learning a more dynamic way of pitching and who were willing to walk a few more batters early to become better later.

Of course, that’s only one assumption. For all I know her pitching coach may be telling her to use her legs and she just doesn’t like to do it. But again, based on the warm-up drills I saw, that doesn’t appear to be the case. It seems like the arm is the focus, and the weak muscles in the wrist, and nothing else matters much.

There are no shortcuts on the road to success. It takes a lot of the proper work to learn to do things right. Parents, before you go shelling out for lessons, see if what your daughter is being taught is what you see from the players in the NPF or the Women’s College World Series. If it doesn’t match up, you may want to find another coach.

When the Mundelein Thunder team I coached this year was getting ready to head down to Northern Nationals I was thrown for a last-minute loop. We were scheduled to head to the tournament on a Tuesday. The Saturday before two players said they weren’t going to be able to attend. With one other already unsure if she’d be able to go due to a family emergency, things were looking bleak. I had exactly nine players going. It was time to start scrambling.

I called a girl named Kathleen who had played for me the year before, and who I had worked with on her hitting during the high school and travel season. (Kathleen had left due as much to a political issue with her high school as anything. Things happen, ya know?)

In any case, I knew her summer team wasn’t going anywhere for Nationals since I’d already snagged one girl back, so three days before it was time to leave I asked if she’d like to go with us. She jumped at the chance. She rearranged her work schedule, her parents got vacation time, and she joined us for the tournament.

That would be pretty cool by itself. What I just found out, though, is that not only did she do all of that, she played with a finger that was either badly bruised or broken. I never knew it, she never complained or said “I can’t do that.” She was just happy to have the chance to be there, and willing to do whatever it took.

That kind of thing doesn’t show up in a stat sheet. You can’t measure it with a stopwatch or a tape measure. But any coach should be thrilled to have someone with that kind of heart and dedication. In this self-centered day and age those qualities seem to be few and far between.