A few months ago I put up a post that showed a way to help fastpitch softball pitchers who were struggling with hitting their inside and outside spots by exaggerating the locations. The idea is that by making the adjustments larger you can help them get a feel for what it takes to move the ball from side-to-side.

Here’s another way to do it, using kind of the polar opposite approach. This is more for fine-tuning, when the pitcher is already pretty good at going inside/outside but you want to make it more precise and reliable.

All it takes is some scrap wood and a couple of pool noodles. What you want to do is create two narrow barriers, then have the pitcher attempt to throw the ball between them. Here’s how it looks from the back side:

What you’re trying to do is create a visual that helps the pitcher home in on exactly where the ball needs to go. Sometimes, when they’re looking at a catcher against a background, it’s hard to focus on that small spot. This setup helps narrow the field so to speak.

Pretty fancy, huh?

The holders for the pool noodles were a couple of scraps of 1×6 pine board with a hole drilled partially through them. The holes should be just slightly larger than the diameter of the dowel rod.

Once you cut the dowel rod to size, glue it in place and then drive a screw in from the underside. That should hold it securely.

This side looks even better.

As you can see in the photo and the video, I didn’t use a very long dowel rod, which means the pool noodles aren’t very straight. I could have gone longer, but if the pitcher hits the noodle (as she is likely to do) and it is rigid the deflection could hurt whoever is catching if they’re not wearing equipment.

Besides, when they’re hanging over like this you can create some interesting holes to throw through, such as having the tops touch to work on keeping the ball low as well as on the corner.

You can do it from a 45 degree angle, like Juliana is doing here (due to a sore knee) or from a full pitch position. You may want to start with the former just to get the feel down before moving on to the latter, which will be more challenging.

Once the pitcher is becoming more consistent you can even make a game out of it, challenging her to make 7 out of 10 to win a prize or suffer a consequence – whichever fits your coaching style. That will add a little more game pressure too.

Or, if you have two or more pitchers there have them compete for who can do the most.

The overall idea is to aim small and miss small. So if you have a pitcher who needs to gain more precision in hitting her spots, give this drill a try.