One of the age-old questions when developing fastpitch pitchers is whether coaches should prioritize speed or accuracy.

Of course the real answer is they should focus on mechanics and everything else comes from that. In other words, focus on the process and the outcomes will take care of themselves.

Still, you do need some way of measuring whether the mechanics you’re working on are helping your pitcher get better or not. The two most common are speed and accuracy.

So we again come to that question: which of those should be the priority? In my opinion, the priority for young pitchers should be speed. Here’s why.

Let’s say you choose to prioritize accuracy. Understandable, especially if you are a team coach.

You want pitchers who can get the ball over the plate and get hitters swinging. After all, you can’t defend a walk and all that, and no one likes a walkfest.

The problem is, if you sacrifice speed for accuracy your pitcher will develop a way of pitching that is totally focused on that outcome. That will get her by up until about the age of 12, especially if you’re not playing high-level ball.

But at some point she will need to gain some speed or she won’t be pitching anymore. While it may have been good enough to “just get the ball over the plate” when she was younger and the opponents didn’t hit very well, those hitters have been developing too.

And they can now crush those slow meatballs all the way toward South America.

So she’s going to have to gain some speed. The problem is, that’s going to throw off her whole way of pitching because she’s going to need to use her body differently than she’s been doing it, which means her accuracy will go down anyway. And now she’s neither fast nor accurate.

Let’s look at it from the other side. If you focus on speed first, your pitcher may have some trouble throwing strikes at first.

Young people don’t always have total command of their bodies, and some have less than others. Which means you could have arms and legs (as well as pitches) going everywhere when they try to use their full energy But…

The more they work at it at full or near-full energy level, the better they’ll be able to feel their body moving in space. Pitches that were way wide, or going to the top of the backstop, or rolling in the dirt, start getting closer to being strikes.

The zone keeps narrowing until finally the pitcher can throw reliably. Only instead of throwing meatballs she’s bringing heat.

And as she gets older, the mechanics she developed to build that speed continue to be refined, giving her better and better control without having to go back to the drawing board and re-learn how to pitch.

In the end, it comes down to what your goals for that pitcher are. If all the team coach cares about is not giving up walks to ensure a better shot at wins in the short term, it might make sense to go for accuracy.

Your pitcher will definitely get more opportunity to pitch right now.

If, however, you’re looking to develop your pitcher in a way that delivers long-term success, put the priority on speed and let accuracy come later. Because by the time a pitcher is 13, she needs a minimum level of speed to even be considered for most teams, much less given the ball when it counts.

You show up to a tryout with speed and no one cares how many batters you walked or hit when you were younger. They may even be willing to take a chance on you if you look a little wild.

But show up throwing in the mid-40s or less and you’re probably not going to be pitching much no matter how accurate you are. Because by that time accuracy will be considered table stakes, not a point of differentiation.