Category Archives: Coaching
Seeing the lasting effect
Sometimes as coaches we wonder what the long-term affects of what we do are. Sure, we see when we win a game, or when a team has a good time during the season, or when a player we coached goes on to greater success elsewhere. But we don’t always know what sort of an effect we have on someone’s life generally until something nice happens.
One of those things has occurred. As many of you know I am part of the Mundelein Thunder travel softball organization. Each fall and winter we run player clinics that are open not only to our own players, but to any softball player who would like to work on her skills. About one-third to one-half of the participants any given year come from outside our program — mostly from our local rec league.
There is a young lady named Julia who participated in our clinics for several years. She was a rec league player. We talked to her and her dad about her playing travel ball, but her first love was dance and she couldn’t devote the time that travel softball required. Fair enough. After watching her move through some of the warm-up exercises we do you could see that dance was a big part of her life.
In any case, once players reach high school age, IHSA rules prevent them from participating in the type of clinics we offer. I found out last night, though, that she called the president of our organization, Bill T’Niemi, and asked if she could help out as one of our junior coaches, working with the younger kids to help them in the same way she’d been helped before.
Of course the answer was an emphastic yes. How cool is it that she wants to do this? After all, it’s not like our organization was the major part of her softball experience. But obviously she must’ve felt like she received some sort of value or she wouldn’t be asking.
Yes, she is getting service hours out of it. But there are lots of things she could’ve done to get those, and many would’ve required a lot less of her. But Julia has chosen to spend another set of Saturday mornings with us, this time passing on what she learned and helping younger kids have a great experience with the game of softball.
They don’t give trophies for that kind of thing. But it sure is nice to know we made an impression and fulfilled the mission every team is supposed to have, of helping players develop not only their softball skills but themselves as people.
Blindly following what the “best” players do
One of the most common pieces of advice regarding how to perform sports skills is to look at what the best players do. It stands to reason that the best players must by definition have the best technique or the best execution. How else could they be the best?
The truth of this philosophy may be somewhat different. The way athletes perform is at least partially a product of their training. In other words, some of what they do is what they have been trained to do, whether that’s right or wrong. Simply observing them doesn’t necessarily mean the techniques you’re picking up are optimum. They are what they are.
Here’s an extreme case from another sport. Up until around 1968 there was a particular technique used by the best high jumpers in the world. If you studied film of pretty much any high jumper, you would see him/her approach the bar, push up off the inside foot, drive the outside leg up, then when the body is at its peak kick the trailing leg up and over. This was the standard. By watching film you could find the little subtleties that made the best high jumpers capable of getting the highest.
Then came a guy named Dick Fosbury. He didn’t worry about what the best in the world were doing. Instead, he tried to figure out how best to use his body. What he came up with was a very different technique, one that had him turning his back to the bar, leaping up, and going over head-first. People thought he was crazy. Many thought the technique was dangerous, with a potential to break the neck of the high jumper. But he wound up winning a gold medal in the Olympics. Today the Fosbury Flop is the standard for high jumpers.
The point is that had Dick Fosbury focused all his efforts on what the best in the world did at the time he never would’ve been able to innovate a new and better technique.
Closer to home, many Major League Baseball hitters will put their back elbows up in their stances, despite the fact that it doesn’t do anything positive and can actually be detrimental. But somewhere along the way, some coach told them to do it, and it just became their habit. They learned to overcome it by getting into a better position at launch. But if you just watched them you’d assume it was an important part of what they do.
Observing top players is certainly valuable. But it isn’t gospel. It’s still important to think things through and make sure what you’re seeing is the best way to do things. Put your time into comparing what you’re seeing to the way the body works more effectively and you’ll get your best bang for the buck.
Is the elite athlete the proper standard to measure by?
Often times on various Web sites and forums you’ll see reference to the elite athlete. Generally the comments are in comparison to regular players. Experts and wannabe experts alike will talk about how elite athletes do this, or elite athletes do that. Or they’ll say every player should do X because that’s what elite athletes do. Most of all, they’ll imply that anyone who doesn’t approach the game like an elite athlete is doing things wrong.
The assumption is that everyone who plays the game wants to be an elite athlete. The truth is, they don’t. I’d guess the vast majority of players want to be good, and want to be successful within the area or level in which they play. But that’s not the same as being an elite athlete.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Being an elite athlete requires a few things, not the least of which is some outstanding DNA. It also requires an incredible level of dedication — the kind that has pitchers pitching every day not because they’re told to, but because they want to. The kind that has athletes following tough training regiments because it’s their means to the end they desire, not because their coach or parent tells them to.
Think of it this way: all soldiers in the military undergo a tremendous amount of training. Yet even within the military there are elite units, such as Army Rangers, Green Berets, Navy SEALs, etc. These soliders and sailors volunteer to undergo a higher level of training and sacrifice more because of a deep drive within them. That doesn’t mean the standard line soldier is less valuable or not worthwhile. Not at all. They just have different goals and drives.
Being an elite player isn’t for everyone. That’s ok. Each player needs to find his/her own level, and do what it takes to meet his/her own goals. It doesn’t mean it’s ok to slack off completely or let your team down. If that’s your attitude you shouldn’t be in a team sport. But it does mean that if your training regimine falls short of the elite athlete, it’s ok. Do what it takes to achieve your goals.
Turning the ball backwards
Sorry about the lack of recent posts. I’ve been traveling a lot for business the last few weeks, which sounds like fun but really isn’t. Fortunately, both time in the last two weeks that I was stuck on the tarmac for a couple of hours there was no one in the seat beside me so I could relax and invade that space without feeling bad about it.
Traveling has also cost me a fair amount of lesson time. I haven’t seen most of my Tuesday students since November, which I feel very bad about. But as long as my day job pays most of the bills there’s not a lot I can do about it. Sort of the real world version of a bad umpire.
Mixed into all of that was a couple of days at the National Sports Clinics watching presentations by several high-level coaches. One of them was Deb Hartwig, a former top catcher and D1 coach who now has her own instructional business. Nobody makes her take non-softball business trips, that’s for sure!
In any case, she brought up something very interesting about throwing. The conventional way of teaching throwing is to have the player bring the ball back behind the body, turn it to face backwards (ball to the wall), and then bring it forward. I know I’ve taught that for years. But she said if you watch video you’ll see nobody really throws that way. According to Coach Hartwig, what really happens is the ball faces down when the arm goes back, then comes up and forward as the throw occurs.
It certainly makes sense. If you think about making a quick throw, you’re going to want the wrist to stay loose. As the arm comes back a loose wrist will tend to make the ball face down. You’d have to use some tension to actually pull it up to face the “wall.” The ball facing down would actually seem more efficient.
Of course, I hate to take anything on face value, so I’m going to work on finding some video of baseball and softball players throwing, slow it down, and see what they actually do. Although I’ve taught “ball to the wall” for years, if there’s a better way I’m all for it! Especially if it helps create a few more outs.
Catchers calling their own games
That’s a topic I find very interesting. There seems to be a lot of resistance in a lot of circles to allowing catchers to call pitches. From my own personal experience I’ve seen a lot of coaches squatting on buckets at the front of the dugout, frantically signaling pitches. When I’ve watched on TV in the Women’s College World Series I’ve seen the same thing — coaches calling the pitches.
In the college game I suppose the rationale is that they have all the charts on the opposing hitters, that they know all the weaknesses and thus can make better decisions. I guess you can make an argument for that. Yet often it seems like the person in the dugout calling the pitches used to be a player. If her coaches never let her call pitches when she played, when exactly did she learn? How did she become such an expert between the time she played and now? Or was she maybe, just maybe, perfectly capable of doing it before, only she wasn’t allowed to?
In the youth game the thinking must be that the catchers don’t know enough to call pitches. How could a mere kid know more than the coach? Forget the fact that the coach is most likely not a professional coach with tons of experience in it. It’s just too important of a function to leave to a player.
Either way, that’s bunk. Calling pitches is not rocket science. It’s a skillset that can be learned like anything else. Coaches who don’t allow catchers to call the game are doing them a disservice. As long as the signals are coming in from the dugout the catcher is never going to learn the nuances of the game. She’s merely going to throw down the number of fingers she’s told to throw down, without learning why.
That doesn’t mean you have to stop cold turkey and throw your catchers to the wolves. If your catcher has never called a game before, start her with an inning. Go over what you want — how you want to mix fastballs and changes if that’s all your pitcher has. If the pitcher has more pitches, give her some ideas of what to throw when.
Why bother? Because the catcher can see things the coach can’t. She knows (or should know) what the umpire is calling. She knows whether the curve ball that got crushed was hit because the hitter hit well or the curve ball didn’t break. She can probably also tell where the pitcher’s head is because she’s looking right at her.
If that’s not enough, here’s a nother good reason: you want your players to think. Coaches who try to control every aspect of the game and their players wind up with a lot of brain dead players. Then they get mad when their players make mistakes. How are they going to learn to think for themselves if they never get the chance?
The answer is they won’t. Coaches, give your catchers the opportunity to start calling their own games. They just might surprise you.
How legends get formed
Rich found that amusing as did I, because the pitcher being referred to is one of my students, and I had just gunned her with my Jugs gun around 54-56 consistently. She hit 57 once if I recall correctly. I’ve done this long enough to know that pitchers don’t increase speed by seven mph in a week, no matter how pumped up they are.
I actually spoke to the girl and her dad about it and found out where the 63 mph figure came from. It was off a Glove Radar. I think those are great little devices — I used to own one before the part that holds the lacing in place broke — if used properly. They’re good for getting approximate readings, and for comparing against itself. But you can’t take it for gospel.
It’s very easy to get a false reading, especially if you move the glove toward the ball as it comes in. Like any Doppler radar, it depends on sending out a signal, having the signal bounce back, and comparing the times. If you move the glove toward the ball you close the distance the ball has to travel and change the timing.
The dad and the girl laughed when they heard the story. They hadn’t put much stock in the reading at the time, and still don’t. But obviously others do.
Rich theorizes that people like to have their kids associated with top-level players, so saying your daughter plays on a team with a pitcher throwing 63 mph certainly fits that bill. There’s nothing nasty about it. It’s more a case of being willing to believe in something you want to believe. But the more these things get repeated, the more they become legend.
Hopefully it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. She certainly has the ability and the desire to get there. But she’s not quite there yet. Still, it’s funny to see how legends get started.
Using your time efficiently
Often times we as coaches work on perfecting things that don’t require perfection. We want our players to be the best they possibly can be, so we relentlessly drill them, trying to push the envelope of what they can do. While there’s nothing wrong with trying to be the best, there is also a point of diminishing returns.
Here’s an example. On our team we set a standard of fielding ground balls in three seconds or less. The reason is that Division 1 colleges look for players who can run from home to first in three seconds. We figure if we complete the play from the time the bat hits the ball to the time the ball hits in the first baseman’s glove in three seconds or less we should be able to get most of the runners we face.
The revelation is that once we can execute to the standard there’s nothing to be gained by continuing to work to exceed that standard, i.e. to execute the same play in 2.5 seconds. There are plenty of other things to work on to prepare a softball team. Once you can meet the standard, it’s time to move on to the next thing.
The other thing is setting priorities. How much time have you spent working on the 6-4-3 (SS-2B-1
double play? The right answer should be not much. That’s a tough one to pull off with 60 foot bases. You need the right combination of things to go exactly right, e.g. a sharply hit ground ball to the SS and a pretty slow batter/runner. I’m not saying it’s impossible because I’ve seen it done. But the odds aren’t very good. So if you can pull that play off one time out of every 50 there’s a runner on first with fewer than two outs, it tells you that you shouldn’t spend more than 1/50th of your time working on it. If that. You’d be a lot better off working on plays you stand a much better chance of being able to complete with regularity.There are only so many hours available to you to practice. The more time you spend on trying to exceed standards or on situations that don’t come up very often, the less time you have to spend on bringing other aspects of your game up to standard. It’s better to do a lot of things well than a few things great.
Good things take time
Saw something in Bobby Simpson’s Thoughts for Tuesday e-mail yesterday that I just had to share. Bobby is the owner of Higher Ground, and has served as a baseball and softball coach, most recently with the National team in Great Britain. He is also a fellow columnist in Softball Magazine.
In any case, Bobby likes to send out short e-mails on a variety of topics. Some are technical, but most are more of the inspirational or “think about this” type. Fair warning: Bobby is a religious sort and that definitely comes through in many of his materials. But he’s not obnoxious about it, so even if that kind of thing bothers you it shouldn’t get in the way of taking advantage of his knowledge.
This week he told the following story. I think it’s a tremendous perspective on what it takes to be successful, brilliant in its simplicity. Here it is:
“Our interim pastor told a terrific story a week ago and I want to share it with you because it applies to softball, baseball, other sports, business, math classes, and life in general. He said that a little boy in the western part of Africa gave a very beautiful shell to a missionary as an offering. Knowing that the shell came from a beach quite far from the village, the missionary said, ‘You had to walk 15-20 miles roundtrip to the beach to get this shell. That’s a very long walk.’ The little boy replied, ‘Long walk part of gift.’
“Too often, we want to get something valuable and not pay the price. We want ‘something for nothing.’ We want the free lunch, the magic pill, the drive-through, microwave, zappable success. We must realize that success normally comes from a sacrificial, long-walk journey and not from some instantized magic. Part of the talent or so-called gift that we see in skilled performance is the long walk to get there.”
That is unquestionably true. Every softball team goes into every season, every tournament, with the wish or “goal” of winning it all. But how many are willing to put in the long hours of boring, repetitious work to get there? How many coaches want their teams to win, but aren’t willing to invest the time to keep up with new developments in the sport, so they’re sure that what they’re teaching is what will take the team where it says it wants to go?
On some levels fastpitch softball is a complex, difficult to learn sport. But at its core it’s not that tough. If you can field a ground ball with 99.999% certainty of doing it cleanly and successfully you will be successful. If everyone on the team can do their jobs equally well, the team will be successful. What you have to know is that 99.999% certainty can only be achieved one way — through a focused effort to get there. It’s never a short jaunt. It’s a 15-20 mile walk. But in the end, you give yourself and your team a beautiful gift that will last a lifetime.
If you’d like to subscribe to Bobby Simpson’s newsletter, go to http://highergroundsoftball.com/newslet.php. I highly recommend it.
Expert, textpert, keep it simple
It is amazing to me how complicated some people make hitting, pitching, and other athletic movements. They get all caught up in the most minute details, pointing out every little movement they see (or think they see) made by top-level players. For the sake of this post we’ll refer to hitting since that’s what Ken and I discussed, but it applies elsewhere as well.
What you see a lot of is scientific or pseudo-scientific jargon that I suppose is meant to make the person saying or typing it sound smarter than everyone else. I suppose if you’re doing a scientific treatment breaking down all the elements of hitting it makes sense. But if your purpose is to learn how to teach someone how to hit, it’s very possible that all that extraneous information will just get in the way.
One of my favorites is the focus on “scapula loading.” It is often touted as an essential element of having a high-level swing. I find that amusing. I’ve taught a lot of hitters to be successful (within their willingness to work hard) and have never once used the term or concerned myself with scapula loading. To be honest, every time I try to think it through I have to look up where the scapula even is.
Hitters, especially youth players, have enough trouble just grasping the basic concepts of what you want them to do. The more complex you make it, the more difficult you make it to achieve the results you want. Ken and I agree that there are certain basic things you teach, and there are a whole lot of other things that just happen as a result of doing those basic things correctly and enthusiastically.
I use a basic three-step instruction to teach hitting: step-turn-swing. Those are the most core elements to a good swing. Do them in the right order and you’ll be well on your way to success. Within each of those steps there are other instructions, of course. For example, just prior to taking the step it helps to make a negative movement backwards. Once a student has the core ideas down, we add the negative movement in there as an enhancement. If I understand correctly, that’s when scapula loading would occur. But if they make a good negative movement — one that is designed to help them move into rotation faster and more powerfully — they’re going to load the scapula as a result of trying to make a quicker, more powerful movement.
Coaches who really want to help their players improve should make an effort to separate the necessary from the superfluous. The further you get from the concept of swinging the bat in a manner that allows it to make hard contact with the ball — and in language that simple — the more difficult you make it for your players to execute the skill under pressure.
In his book The Science of Hitting, Ted Williams provided a very practical method of talking about hitting. He didn’t get caught up in a lot of biological jargon or equations. He simply said “make these movements.” And Ted knew as much about hitting, even back then, as anyone ever has. We would all be wise to learn from his example, and keep it simple.
The difference a caring coach can make.
Up until the time my son Adam hit high school (he’s 21 now) he was kind of a shy, quiet kid. He didn’t make friends easily, and he was definitely “his own person” meaning he didn’t try to conform to the norm. As such, when he would get onto sports teams where he didn’t know anyone he would tend to easy not to notice. He had some athletic ability — not a stud by any means but certainly not a complete incompetent either — but most times the coaches wouldn’t know, because they were focused on the kids who were more aggressive and seemed more interested.
This went on until the day he got on an AYSO soccer team coached by the father of his friend Kris. Kris’ dad Jim Bauernsmith had worked with the AYSO organization for a long time, and really believed in the principles they espoused. He also knew Adam from his hanging around the house, which helped.
From the first practice on, Jim brought Adam out of his shell, gave him confidence, and set expectations for him. Adam had more fun the three years he played for Jim than he had in a long time. And it spilled over into his other activities, including playing baseball.
Adam played a year of soccer in high school, but didn’t much care for it. He had no interest in playing baseball so we figured his sports career was over. His sophomore year, however, he discovered lacrosse and eventually went on to become a starter on his high school’s first-ever varsity lacrosse team. He played hard and played well, and was the kind of kid the coach wanted on the field all the time. That was a huge change for him.
I don’t think any of it would’ve happened without Jim, though. Jim’s taking a little extra time to work with a kid who just needed some encouragement had a huge impact on his life. Adam is now in ROTC at EIU and is in the Illinois National Guard. He is a self-assured, confident young man with both a good sense of humor and a sense of purpose.
How many times do coaches give up early on a kid because they think it will be too hard to make it work? There are all kinds of diamonds in the rough out there. But you have to be willing to look for them, and to bend down to pick them up, if you’re ever going to find them. Take a look at your own teams and see who needs that extra pat on the back or someone to believe in them. You never know how it will turn out for you.
Life in the Fastpitch Lane 