Category Archives: Coaching
Fastpitch coaches behaving badly
Last week I had the opportunity to witness a type of fastpitch softball coach I thought was extinct. It was sort of like going to Jurassic Park and seeing a T Rex rushing at your Jeep.
The genus was Coachus Jerkus. In layman’s terms it was one of those old-style “command and control” coaches who seems to believe the more you yell at, embarass and humiliate your players in front of their teammates, parents, opponents and passers-by, the better of a coach you are.
It started with a pitcher (who was 15 or 16 years old) not hitting the spot the coach had called, with the result that the hitter hit a home run on a 1-2 count. (Understand that hitting a home run in this indoor venue basically meant popping a “Texas Leaguer” over a curtain about 120 feet away).
When the ball sailed over the curtain the coach screamed (and I am not exaggerating, it was like the aforesaid T Rex spotting prey) something unkind at the pitcher. I don’t recall the specifics of what was said, but it was along the lines of “What the hell are you doing?”
The intimidated pitcher’s first pitch to the next hitter went high and wide. To which the coach screamed “That’s where the LAST pitch should’ve been.” And on it went. If a player bobbled a ball, or didn’t make a throw quick enough, or didn’t get the bunt down she’d hear about it. As would all the rest of us. It went on from the beginning of the game all the way through the end.
To tell you the truth, I felt bad for the girls on the other team, although I understand this guy has been coaching for a while so they (or their parents) all probably knew what they were getting into. When the game was over that was unhappy-looking group of girls.
What’s really puts the capper on this behavior is that there was nothing at stake in these games. In fact, they were barely softball games. They were indoors on a short field with a 1-hour drop dead time limit. The purpose is to let the girls get out of the practice gym and try out their skills. Pitchers get to pitch to hitters, hitters get to hit off pitchers, teams get to work on plays, everybody has fun. Well, almost everybody I guess.
To go so over-the-top on any softball game when there are so many real problems in the world is wrong in my opinion. In this particular situation it’s particularly uncalled-for. The softball world could really use a governing board to report this kind of behavior so coaches who verbally abuse their players in this fashion can be disciplined.
The real shame, though, is that all that yelling and screaming really doesn’t help. Study after study shows that this old school style of coaching is actually counter-productive. Especially with females, where the old Mike Candrea admonition “Boys have to play good to feel good, but girls have to feel good to play good” comes into play.
Let’s hope this particular guy leaves the ’70s behind someday and learns that it’s ok to treat your players with caring and respect. In fact, it’s the way you get the most out of them.
Another way to explain finishing the change
At our last practice I set up a station to work with pitchers. We only had 15 minutes per pitcher, so I had each pitcher select one pitch to work on in that time.
The first pitcher was Emily, and she chose the changeup. It’s been troubling her for at least a year – to the point where she really doesn’t like to throw it. Yet it’s critical to her success, so that’s what we went after.
After some warm-ups Emily threw a few. And that’s when I spotted something in her finish. I always tell pitchers to drag the ball through the release zone, and she did to an extent. But it was happening too late. So I told her to drag it starting from behind her and then all the way through.
It was a night and day difference. All of a sudden it was coming in low and slow, floating the way we like it. And, she was able to mix it in with other pitches on command.
For me, it’s one of the things that keeps teaching most interesting — finding new ways to explain the same core concepts. I’ve never thought of telling a pitcher to drag the ball that way. But that day it seemed like the right thing to do.
For you coaches out there, never stop learning or finding new ways to teach. If what you’ve always said isn’t working, find a new way to say it. The more options you have, the better you’ll be able to help your players.
Three Star Master Coach
Ok, this is a little self-serving, but I am now a Three Star Master Coach with the NFCA’s Coaches College, or NFCC. Not only is it an achievement on its own, but it also takes me 3/4 of the way toward full Four Star status.
If you’re not familiar with it, the NFCC is a college Masters degree-level program that delves in-depth into various aspects of coaching fastpitch softball. You receive one star for every two courses successfully completed, so obviously I have taken six of the eight courses.
Courses cover everything from the mechanics of pitching, hitting, throwing, etc. to offensive and defensive strategies (two separate courses, by the way), defensive techniques, strategies for game day coaching and more. The latest course for me was #406, Coaching Dynamic Team Practices.
For this course I flew down to Orlando, where I spent two days with about 60 other coaches, from D1 college down to 10U travel. The instructors were Carol Hutchins, Cindy Bristow (both NFCA Hall of Famers) and Carol Bruggeman (no doubt a future inductee). We did several hours of classroom work, and each day we were also outside for two hours watching the instructors run a couple of teams through a sample practice.
While what they did was interesting, it was really watching how they did it that was the most fascinating for me. You got a pretty good opportunity to see why they are where they are. The first day they worked with the Seminole State Junior College team, and the second day with D1 Central Florida University.
If you’re committed to being the best coach you can be, the NFCC is an awesome program to improve your knowledge and help you grow. It’s not cheap — I probably spent more than $1,000 when it was all said and done — but a very worthwhile investment for serious coaches.
Of course, earning Three Star status doesn’t give my team any extra runs to start the game. But it sure helps me feel like we’re preparing the best we can for competition. And it’s fun to be among so many other committed coaches.
Training v practice
Saw this post the other day on The Talent Code blog and thought it was something fastpitch softball players (and their parents) would find worthwhile. It’s on the negative connotation of the word “practice.”
According to the post when players hear the word “practice” they think of boring repetition – something to be avoided if at all possible. Yet we all know those boring repetitions are necessary to learning our sport.
What author Dan Coyle suggested is replacing the term “practice” with “training.” Here’s the thinking.
Practice sounds like something you do for its own sake. You practice to learn, but you don’t necessarily have a specific goal.
But training is something you do in preparation for a something. Prize fighters train. Olympians train. Everything they do is aimed at a specific endpoint.
I happen to like the term “training” (this is a new concept for me), but what do you think? Is there a real difference? Does training sound better than practicing? Or does it not matter what you call it as long as it gets done?
All Access videos provide great insight, ideas
This is not an official Life in the Fastpitch Lane product review, but rather just something I wanted to share. I’ve been getting catalogs from Championship Productions filled with all sorts of fastpitch softball DVDs for a few years now.
I love looking through them, but usually don’t buy because I’ve already spent a small fortune on those sorts of materials. But one group I’ve had my eye on for a few years has been their All Access series, where you get to go behind the scenes of the practices for various college teams and see what they do.
They run around $100 each so not a decision one would make lightly. But I finally broke down and purchased two of them — the UCLA outdoor practice with Kelly Inouye-Perez, which I believe is the first one they did, and the University of St. Thomas indoor session with John Tschida.
I’ve watched them both now, and I can say they were well worth the money spent. Not to mention the time invested. The UCLA video runs across two DVDs and about four hours, whereas the UST set is on three videos and probably ran closer to six. I didn’t watch either in one sitting.
It’s fun to see how they structure their practices, what they spend time on, how they interact with their players and even how they use the facilities. I was personally gratified by the fact that many of the things they did are things I’m already doing, both with my team and with my students.
Still, I sat there with my smartphone writing down ideas for different activities or different approaches to the same skills. As with most training DVDs, at times a particular activity went on too long. In my mind once you’ve made the point move on rather than showing endless repetitions. Still, if you double-time it you can get through the dull spots and move on to the next thing.
Whether you’re a beginning coach or a grizzled veteran like me I think you’ll find these DVDs worthwhile. With the holidays coming up I’m hoping to pick up a couple more. Hint hint.
Practice time v game time
In the past few years, fastpitch softball teams seem to have become more and more obsessed with seeing how many games they can possibly jam into a season. The belief is that the more games you play, the better you get.
Yet if you actually look at what the professionals say, more games doesn’t necessarily equal better performance. In fact, it’s the opposite, at least as far as developing skills goes.
The current thinking across different sports is that you should have anywhere from three to five hours of practice for every hour of game time. Yes, you read that right.
In this article on the USA Hockey website, they recommend a 3 to 1 practice to game ratio. They’ve done a lot of studies about the amount of stick time players get in games, and it’s not nearly enough to develop skills. You get far more in practice.
World class soccer programs go even more. They follow a 5:1 ratio, i.e. five hours of practice to one hour of games. Dan Coyle in his Little Book of Talent and The Talent Code recommends the same ratio based on his study of talent hotbeds around the world.
Finally, closer to home there’s this document from Softball Canada. While they don’t give a specific recommendation on what the ratio should be, they do recommend against a 1:1 or even a 2:1 ratio. They essentially advocate many more hours of practice time than game time.
Check out pages 10 and 11 for more specifics.
So there you have it. If you want your player to develop her skills, look for a team that emphasizes quality practice time and instruction over an endless series of games. It may not be as much fun to watch, but it’ll pay off better in the end.
So what do you think? Is practice time more valuable than game time? Or do you believe the only way to learn the game is playing the game?
Failure another step toward fastpitch softball success
Normally when I tell stories about my fastpitch softball students I like to share success stories. It’s always inspiring to hear how a player overcame adversity and experienced success. And it’s not too bad for self-promotion either.
But today I want to share the stories of a couple of fails from over the weekend. Unusual, I know, but bear with me. The reason I’m somewhat happy about these failures is what they will ultimately do for the two girls involved.
Both of the girls in this story are 14U pitchers, and both have experienced a lot of success in the past year. Maybe a little too much. This past weekend, though, both got rocked. Admittedly it was pretty cold, so I’m betting that had something to do with it.
Regardless, for each girl a team served as a reminder that we still have a lot of work ahead of us. I think that’s a good thing, especially right before going into the long, boring off-season, because those experiences will provide some inspiration to work hard and get prepared for next season.
For these two girls, the bar was set a little higher. Both are great kids and hard workers so I doubt it would’ve been much of an issue anyway. But now they can put a name and a face on the opponent they’re preparing to battle, which always gives it a little extra juice. They’ll work hard to disguise the changeups better, to add speed, to add movement to breaking pitches and so on. Because they know if they don’t, someone out there will be making them feel bad next summer.
So many coaches and parents are afraid of failure. They don’t like to see their kids go through any adversity. Yet it’s human nature to need a little adversity to drive us to get better. It’s like the old saying that you can’t forge steel without a lot of heat.
Another thing I like about the struggles these girls went through is it showed them it isn’t fatal. Sure, it feels bad at the time. But they both got through it fine, and they now know a little more about themselves.
The final thing is that we can be sure they faced a quality opponent in those losses. When you’re winning all the time, and dominating in the circle, you have to wonder if you’re really that good or if your opponents are a little weak. Facing quality opponents gives you a level-set, and shows where you need to be versus where your are.
So yes, it’s not much fun to lose, and to fail. But those failures are critical to achieving ultimate success. As long as you don’t make a habit of them!
Crazy stuff people teach about hitting
So tonight I was doing my last lesson of the evening. It was scheduled as a pitching lesson, but the dad asked if I would take a few minutes at the end to look at his 13U daughter Hannah’s hitting. When we got to that part I asked what exactly he wanted me to look at and he said the whole thing. It seems Hannah wasn’t hitting the ball very hard.
I figured the best place to start would be to ask her what she thought she should be doing — what has she been taught in the past. She told me that she had been to a few hitting clinics at a local D1 college, one I think most people would consider a top 25 program. I couldn’t believe what she then told me.
Apparently, all of the instruction had focused on the following: to start the swing raise your front elbow, and bring your back elbow down into the slot (my term, not hers). Next pull the front elbow, and then push the hands through at the ball.
That was it. No mention of the lower body, or the hips, or how to use the shoulders. Nothing. Nada. It wasn’t that she didn’t remember. It’s that’s all there was.
I then had her demonstrate what she’d been taught. After a couple of swings, where she perfectly executed exactly what she’d been told, I stopped her and said no wonder she is having trouble. We then started working off a tee.
We only had a few minutes so I couldn’t get into a full bore hitting lesson. But I figured I could at least help her use her arms correctly. I put her into the “turned” position, where the hips have mostly come through while the shoulders were still in their starting position. (Some call this the “stretch” position, I believe.) I had her keep her bat angled, then hit the ball off the tee.
In just a couple of swings she was hitting the ball harder than she had with a full swing. We finished by having her take a few full swings, focusing on maintaining what we’d worked on for the end of the chain.
I don’t know if it’s going to help her much this weekend. I mean, I’m good but that’s spelled with two “o’s.” If she works the drill I gave her during the week it may. But at least it’s a start toward becoming a better hitter.
The reason I share this story, though, is as a cautionary tale that can’t be told too often. Remember, just ’cause someone coaches at or plays at a D1 college or has some other impressive-sounding credential doesn’t mean they know the first thing about hitting. Or pitching, or fielding, or any other aspect of the game.
When you’re told something, don’t take it as gospel. Look at what great players do and compare that to what you’re being told. If the instruction doesn’t match what you see, find a better instructor. (If it’s a team coach, find a diplomatic way to ignore it and seek out better advice.) There’s a lot of bad information and theories floating around there, and listening to it will actually make you worse than if you just tried to stumble your way through it yourself.
Fortunately, there’s a lot of good advice out there as well — advice that will match what you see being done by top players. Some of the “experts” may disagree with one another on certain points, because it’s not quite an exact science. There is still room for interpretation. But what you’ll see is a lot more similarities than differences among good instructors, especially in the bigger picture. Certain aspects, such as the sequence of events in hitting (hips, then shoulders, then bat) are universal.
In tonight’s case, I’d bet good money that not a single even decent hitter on this college team does anything close to what was being preached in the clinics during their games. They may think they do, but they don’t.
If you want to be successful, don’t take anyone’s word for it. Even mine. Verify what you’re being told by comparing it to what great players actually do. If it’s wrong you’ll save yourself a lot of wasted time, and you’ll experience success a whole lot sooner. And if you find it’s right, you’ll be able to pursue it a whole lot harder. As it should be.
Fighting ignorance
I saw a “fact check” website yesterday that had a great motto. The first part was “Fighting ignorance one day at a time” or something to that effect. Then in parentheses under that it said “It’s taking a lot longer than we thought.”
I know the feeling. I’ve spent a lot of time and effort studying, evaluating and re-evaluating the optimum techniques for executing fastpitch softball skills, I’ve also had a number of years’ experience teaching those skills to players of varying levels of athletic ability. So I have a pretty good idea of what works and the way things ought to be done.
I won’t say I know everything — there’s always more to be learned and new information comes out all the time — but I do my best to remain current, and confirm my thinking with what other top coaches are doing. That’s what I share here on Life in the Fastpitch Lane and other places as well.
Yet sometimes it can get awfully frustrating when I hear that there are still people teaching drills and techniques come from the era when mullets were in style, i.e. the ’80s. Especially when they try to foist that junk on one of my students.
I’ve seen it happen with hitting, where some team coach will start telling girls who can really rip the ball to squish the bug, take the knob of the bat to the ball, swing down on the pitch and other stuff that will actually prevent them from continuing to hit well.
Recently it happened with one of my pitchers. She was at a practice with her new team, which is connected to one of the local high schools, when the team’s “pitching coach” came over and started talking to her about snapping her wrist and pointing her elbow at the catcher (aka using “hello elbow”). I put “pitching coach” in quotes because the guy’s only qualification is that his daughter pitches at that school and he’s worked with her some.
Luckily the girl’s dad texted me right away, and he’s going to talk to the head coach, who said he knows some players have private coaches and let him know if there are conflicts. Still, until it’s resolved you have yet another person who doesn’t have a clue about how top pitchers actually pitch offering advice that was either told to his daughter at some point or that he got off some VHS tape.
People, listen up! Focusing on forcing a hard wrist snap is a gigantic waste of time! I can’t emphasize that enough. There are no muscles in the wrist. The muscles run from the elbow through the forearm to the hand. The wrist’s primary contribution is flexibility and quickness, not power.
What’s viewed as the wrist snap occurs as the result of a pronation (turning in) of the lower arm as it passes the elbow during release. It’s nothing you have to or even want to try to do, especially if you are also achieving brush contact. Trying to force a hard wrist snap actually gets in the way of the wrist making its contribution because it slows it down. It’s not where power comes from. The best the wrist can do is add a little bit. But if you make it the focus – for example doing endless wrist flips — you’ll actually defeat the whipping motion and slow the pitch down.
If you don’t believe me, how about seeing what NFCA Hall of Famer Cindy Bristow, one of the fastpitch world’s most accomplished coaches and instructors has to say about it? Or what about Bill Hillhouse, a former men’s National Team fastpitch pitcher and another highly sought-after pitching coach thinks about the wrist snap? If those two authorities tell you don’t waste your time on it, why would you continue to do it? Or listen to anyone who says you should?
The same goes for the hello elbow. It’s completely unnecessary as well as unnatural. Follow-throughs should be long and loose. You don’t need to touch your throwing-side shoulder after you pitch. You don’t need to point your elbow at the catcher. Again, that kind of stuff will get in the way of maximizing the pitcher’s potential.
For my part, I guess all I can do is keep trying to bring good information to people as best I can, and teach my students to remain strong and steadfast in their commitment to learning why we do the things we do. We’ll continue to fight ignorance one day at a time – even if it takes a lot longer than we thought.
When You’re A Coach, Timing Is Everything
This past summer, since I didn’t have a fastpitch softball team of my own to coach, I got to spend more time going out to various tournaments and watching my students play. I find it’s very valuable to see them perform under game pressure — especially to see if they’re maintaining the mechanics we’ve worked so hard to achieve. 
Of course, when you do that you’re always taking a chance. When things go right it’s great. When they don’t it can be, well, a bit uncomfortable.
Fortunately, the day I went out to see a 10U pitching and hitting student named Sydney play was a good one. It was about 100 degrees, but you’d never guess by the big smile on her face. The game I watched she was voted the MVP by the opposing team. No surprise there since (as I recall) she struck out five or six hitters in three innings of work, She also had a couple of solid hits and a walk.
Mostly, though, I am sharing this story because I just love this picture!
Life in the Fastpitch Lane 