Category Archives: Mental game
Every pitch is a new day
One of the challenges with fastpitch softball is how difficult the game can be from a mental standpoint. A little failure here, a little failure there and things can start to get overwhelming.
Last night something occurred to me to help change that thinking. I held a ball up high and asked the students to imagine it without any seams. I then asked them what else is yellow and sits in the sky? A few seemed to think it was a trick question, but they eventually got that I meant the sun.
I then started moving the ball at arm’s length from hip high to overhead, and asked “What does the sun do each morning?” They replied various versions of “rise.” Then I kept moving the ball down and asked, “what does it do each evening?” Most said “fall” instead of set, but they got the idea.
Then came the point. I asked if they’d ever had a tough day, where they couldn’t wait to go to bed. They’re teenage girls, so of course they have. I asked, “But then after a good night’s sleep you felt better the next day, right? The world looked a little brighter.” They agreed.
I told them each pitch is like a brand new day, full of possibilities. Whatever happened the day/pitch before doesn’t limit the possibilities of today. They understood.
Tonight I told a girl named Hannah that story. Later we played the “High Fives” hitting game, and she got in the hole with -4. One more bad hit and she’d owe me five pushups. But she kept battling back, and eventually got back to -1 when we had to stop.
I complimented her on her mental toughness, because I really was trying to sink her. She told me she remembered what I said about the sun, and didn’t focus on what would happen if she missed. Instead, she focused on that pitch and that pitch alone, independent of everything else, and said it it worked for her.
If you’re looking for a way to explain playing one pitch at a time, give this one a try. And if you have your own way of explaining it, please share!
Fastpitch competitors know how to deal with adversity
Tonight I had the opportunity to watch one of my fastpitch pitching students, Tayler Janda, and her Grayslake Central High School team demonstrate what it means to be a competitor.
It’s rained a lot in the past 24 hours, so I texted Tayler’s mom to make sure the game I’d planned on going to was still happening. It was, she said, and then a few minutes later she texted that it started out ugly.
From all reports (not just Tayler’s mom Jennie) the umpire had a strike zone the size of a loaf of bread. Tayler isn’t a big girl, so she relies a lot on movement and finesse to get hitters out. But the umpire was having none of that, forcing her to leave the ball on the plate when the hitters didn’t swing. By the time I got there, she had given up five runs in the first and three in the second, and her team was down 8-1.
But in the top of the third, she didn’t give up any runs, and from then on started to cruise. She only gave up one more run for the rest of the five innings (which meant the game I saw was pretty awesome). Instead she was inducing easy outs from the hitters, along with a few strikeouts.
What I liked about what I saw was watching a competitor in action. Rather than complaining about the umpire or continuing to throw the same pitches that weren’t working for her, Tayler adjusted. She figured out how to adapt her pitches to get the results she wanted. Yes, she had to leave the ball on the plate more than usual, but she did it in a way that didn’t allow for the big hits the opponents had gotten earlier.
Now, she may have been stoked by the comeback efforts of her team at the plate. They chipped away at the lead, and went on to win it in the bottom of the seventh on a short sacrifice fly to right and some heads-up baserunning. But I think a lot of it was her own inner fire.
When I work with pitchers we talk about the mental game, and what you can control versus what you can’t control. Tayler was the epitome of that tonight.
She couldn’t control the umpire’s miniscule strike zone, so instead she controlled her own frustration and instead decided to work with it. That’s what a competitor does. And knowing how these things go, I’ll bet she inspired her team to go out and snatch a victory from the jaws of defeat.
I know Tayler doesn’t plan to play softball in college. But a competitive spirit like that is sure to serve her well no matter what she does in life. Kudos to her, her teammates and her coaches. It was a fun game to watch!
Coaching, playing and the success delusion
Funny how sometimes fastpitch softball and my day job in PR coincide. I was just reading an article in the journal of one of our clients — HRPS (HR People & Strategy) talking about neuroscience research into the brain and how it affects leadership when I came across a description I thought is worth sharing with the softball community. It’s about a phenomenon many of us fall victim to at one time or another — the success delusion.
According to the article, the success delusion follows this line of thinking: I am successful. I behave this way. Therefore, I must be successful because I behave this way.
We see this all the time, especially on discussion boards. Someone will post the results of research that has been completed recently that says the optimum way to perform a particular skill is to do X. Then someone else will get on and comment “I’ve been doing it the old way for 20 years. I’ve had many students/players get colleges scholarships and be the best player on their team. Therefore, I’m not going to change no matter what the science says.”
That’s the success delusion. You ignore the facts because you believe what you’ve been doing has been the key to your success, without a thought that perhaps your players/students would’ve been even more successful had you taught them differently.
Players fall victim to it too. I’ve certainly seen this as an instructor. A parent will bring his/her daughter in for a lesson and I will recommend some changes that will help her reach her potential. But she’s already the best player in her rec league, or on her travel or HS team, so she doesn’t want to make any changes. She has confused success with excellence and therefore has shut the door on making any changes. That’s fine — it’s her option — but she shouldn’t be surprised when one day in the not too distant future some of the kids she used to be above are suddenly passing her. Or that despite her awesome record, college coaches aren’t interested in looking at her.
Success is a good thing. We all like to get that rush from winning; it’s what keeps us going. But it’s also easy to assume a particular behavior is the reason for that success when it could actually be a barrier to greater success.
Never be so caught up in what you’ve done that it prevents you from doing what you can do. Keep learning, keep striving and be open to change. You’ll be amazed how much farther it will take you.
Hitting and confidence
This may be one of those chicken/egg things, but there’s no doubt in my mind that hitting and confidence go hand in hand. Tough to say whether confidence drives good hits or good hits drive confidence, but it does seem to work both ways. Often it the two come from making adjustments that may seem small but deliver a quick payout.
Here’s a case in point. One of the girls on the team I coach has struggled with her hitting for a couple of years. She’s a big, strong kid (also one of the hardest workers and most enthusiastic players you could ever hope to coach) so she ought to hit the ball hard. This is my first year coaching her, but I’ve worked with her in the past.
Thing is, she wasn’t. Her dad would tell me every now and then she’d get one, but mostly she was hitting weak grounders and pop-ups. Mechanically she actually had a good swing, although it had a couple of issues. But she couldn’t quite seem to get the timing down. When we played indoors in January, she went 0-4 with four strikeouts, all swinging, and barely touched the ball. She was frustrated, and reportedly ready to quit the game she’d loved for so long.
So, it was time to really to get to work on her and figure out how we could turn it around. She’d gotten all sorts of advice over the past couple of years (including from me), so I was aware that there may be some resistance coming out of frustration and confusion.
I had videoed her in the batting cage (along with the rest of the team), so it was time to do some deep analysis. One thing I noticed was a sort of “reaching” with her front foot. There was a little weight shift from the lower body, but the upper body stayed in place. Not good. Generally you see hitters moving to toe touch with the front shoulder over the front hip, more or less. Also, her early timing moves were quick and staccato instead of fluid, the way you’ll see good hitters doing it. (I will accept blame for that since I tended to teach a quicker load and positive move a couple of years ago than I do now.) It was no wonder she was struggling!
I pointed it out to her on video, and showed videos of a couple of top-level hitters (softball and ML
, and it seemed to make sense to her. I sent her off to the tee and she worked on taking her whole body forward.
The following week, my friend and former coaching partner Coach Rich started Jonesing to teach hitting so he came out to practice and worked with her on it too. Rich and I have a sort of ESP when it comes to hitting, so the girls were all amused when either he would tell them something I just said or vice versa. As she continued to work on it, it just seemed to click. But the real test would be her next game action.
That was last weekend. She didn’t strike out once, and the only weak contact she had was when she tried to pull an outside pitch instead of letting it get deep. Given her previous results, that was a trifle! She had a couple of solid hits, plus a couple of solid outs across three one-hour games. The best ball she hit all night was her last one — a hard liner to center that unfortunately went straight to the CF. Probably 10 feet either way, or 10 feet deeper, and it’s a double.
The kicker came this past Monday. She was taking batting practice at her high school’s open gym, and the varsity coach called everyone at all levels over to watch her hit, saying “This is how you should do it.” She is a freshman, by the way, so that’s pretty high praise.
Needless to say, there’s no talk of quitting anymore. In fact, her confidence at this point is sky high, and she’s now looking forward to stepping into the batter’s box.
So was it the first good hit that drove her confidence? Or was it the change in mechanics (which no doubt felt better and more powerful) that drove her confidence? Probably some combination — the change made it easier to hit, which enabled the confidence building. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter. What matters is a good kid is in a happy place. Can’t wait to see what she does this spring and summer.
How to know you’re getting through
In my last article for Softball Magazine, I used one of my favorite little teaching devices to talk about the importance of commitment to what you’re doing. The article focused on what is the difference between bacon and eggs. The answer, of course, is that the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. I finished, as I do in lessons or team practices, by telling readers they should be the pig. 
I do know that message got through to at least one of my students. I usually get a box of extra Softball Magazines when they come out, so I will distribute them to my students. This one was no exception. Each of my students received a copy of the magazine, including a girl named Erin who is new with me this year.
Well, lo and behold, right before Christmas she comes to her lesson toting a good-sized red shopping bag, and inside the bag is the piggy bank shown in the picture. She had customized it with the saying “Be A Pig.”
Obviously the article made an impression on her and her family. Hopefully she’s living it too! But this was so cute I just had to share. I love it when a plan comes together!
That whole breathing thing really works
I have been an advocate of taking a slow, deep breath (also known as a cleansing breath in Lamaze circles) ever since reading the book Heads Up Baseball by Tom Hanson and Ken Ravizza, which in my opinion is the Bible of the mental game. The basics are to stare at an object that won’t move during the game, such as a sign permanently attached to the backstop, then breathe in slowly — in through your nose and out through your mouth. It’s designed to calm a player down as she starts to panic and help her get back into her happy zone.
Last week, though, I got a chance to prove scientifically that it works. I was in a clinic for a little outpatient procedure which I will spare you the details on — nothing serious, just a routine if disgusting test. As part of it, the nurse clipped a device onto my finger to track my heart rate.
After it was on, I turned to look at the monitor and saw it was reading 81 beats per minute. What a great opportunity, I thought, to see what effect the breathing exercise would have. So I took a deep breath — in through my nose, slowly out through my mouth. And lo and behold, down came my heart rate. At first I dropped it to about 74 beats per minute, so I did it again and got it down to 72. So, since it was going to be another 20 minutes before the procedure started I decided to play with the machine and see how low I could go. As I recall, I got down to about 70, but couldn’t get any lower than that.
Still, that’s pretty cool. I was already calm when I started, but doing the breathing brought me down even more. It’s the same for athletes.
When I explain this to players they often look at me like I’m nuts — especially the younger ones. I make them try it and they give me a token effort. Then they’re the first ones to panic and lose control in a game.
It may seem silly, but it really does work. I’ve had plenty of anecdotal evidence over the years, but now it’s confirmed scientifically. Every player should learn to breathe. You never know when it can make the difference between cascading errors/failure and success.
Creating remarkable performances
Saw an excellent article the other day in Jeff Janssen’s Championship Coach’s Network newsletter and thought I’d pass it along. You can read it here.
The article is actually a book review written by Greg A. Shelley and Colleen Sager about the book The Encore Effect by Mark Sanborn. The book covers how to create remarkable performances. 
In the review, they highlight three areas Sanborn says are essential to becoming the type of performer who really stands out. Those elements are Commitment, Professionalism and Skills. Commitment and skills are pretty much self-explanatory. But professionalism takes a little explanation.
According to Sanborn, it’s being “other-minded,” i.e. putting the team and your teammates ahead of yourself. This is an area many young athletes struggle with. They are far more focused on their own personal performance than the performance of the team. Yet that mentality often holds them back from being, as the Army says, all they can be. Until they can move beyond themselves they may perform well. But they won’t be considered extraordinary, or a premier player.
This is a topic I’ve written about before as well. No matter how well you play, you’re not really an elite player until you can raise the level of play around you.
The end of the article includes an awesome quote from the late John Wooden, the former head basketball coach at UCLA. The quote is this: “Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.”
I love that concept. So many players are content to be good, or even very good, that they never make the effort to become great – or remarkable. That’s a shame, because it means they’ve wasted their potential. It’s like another favorite quote says — “Good is the enemy of great.”
I haven’t read the book yet, but it is going on my future reading list. If you want to find out what it takes to be remarkable, I suggest you pick it up too.
Theory on why it’s so hard to move from the cage to the field
Every fastpitch player and coach knows this experience. You’ve been working hard in the batting cage all season. You’ve hit thousands of balls off the tee, and thousands more off a machine, front toss or even full-out pitching. You’ve been ripping the ball every time. Then you get into a game and it’s nothing but pop-ups, weak dribblers to the pitcher, and whiffs.
Yes, it’s certainly frustrating, especially because you were expecting to do so well. But somehow the swing you had in the cage didn’t quite translate to the field.
There can be a lot of contributing factors, many of which have been discussed before. Certainly there’s an element of nervousness in a game situation that you don’t have in practice. You have lots of chances to hit in practice situations, and if you mess one up you just take another. But in a game if you mess up, that’s it. Your time at bat is over.
There’s also worrying about consequences instead of focusing on the process. There’s the pressure of parents, friends, coaches, teammates. In fact, there are all kinds of things that might be the cause.
Yet it even happens to otherwise mentally tough players for reasons no one has ever been able to explain. But I have a theory.
Think about the environment in a batting cage. It’s very closed and very tight. You can see the top/ceiling, sides, and usually even a back wall. If the cage is 70 feet long and eight feet wide, it’s still a pretty narrow space, as shown in the first photo.
Now think about what you see when you stand at home plate. The world is a lot bigger on the field. Instead of a 12 foot ceiling you have infinite space above — the sky. Instead of a back wall you have 180 feet or more to the end — way too far to be of concern. There is a ton of space, plus a ton of distractions. The second photo shows an empty field, but in a real game you’ll have eight players from the other team in front of you, plus a couple of coaches. And baserunners if you’re lucky. You have an opponent and an umpire behind you. And the always “helpful” fans in the stands.
With all that going on, the ball looks pretty small — certainly a lot smaller than it does in a closed cage. It’s the same phenomenon that makes the moon look bigger when it’s low in the sky. When you see the moon near trees or buildings your mind gets the idea of proportion. When it’s overhead, there is no reference point to measure it against so it gets lost against the background of the night sky. In the case of a softball, your reference points to the ball in a cage are a lot closer so it seems bigger, or more important in the space. On the field, the ball takes up a very tiny portion of your field of vision and thus is much tougher to pick out.
Think about how you hit in a cage too. Because it’s a long tunnel, hitters tend to try to hit the ball up the middle. After all, if you hit a screaming line drive down the first or third base line in a cage, it goes about 10 feet, hits a side net and dies. That isn’t much fun. But if you drive it to center, the ball goes the length of the cage. That feels good, so you focus on driving it down the center. On a field, though, there’s a lot of space ot hit the ball, so it tends to go all over.
Anyway, that’s my theory about the problem. So what’s the cure? You have to visualize the cage on the field, as shown in the third photo. Essentially you have to create a small space in your mind where the ball is bigger relative to the backg
round so you can see it better, and you can stay focused on driving it into a gap.
If you can “see” the cage in your mind, it should help you look where you ought to be looking, and see better than if you’re taking in the entire field plus sidelines.
Give it a try, and give me your feedback on how it worked. If you’re a coach, feel free to copy the photos and show them to your team. I’ll be interested in hearing if this theory proves itself to be true.
Don’t let the pursuit of perfection stand in the way of execution
There is a tendency among coaches (me included) to place a lot of emphasis on having rock-solid mechanics. We know what we want to see, we know what the best players in the world look like, and we try to get our players to match that image we have in our minds. Our most dedicated players often know what they’re trying to achieve and work toward meeting that ideal, whether it’s hitting, pitching, fielding, throwing or any other aspect of the game.
Overall, that’s good. But sometimes this relentless pursuit of perfection can get in the way of player growth. How can that be? Simple. All those skills we’re working on with such passion require dynamic and often ballistic movements. Yet it can be difficult to be dynamic or ballistic if your focus is on being extremely precise with what you’re doing. A hitter trying to get an exact bat path, or a pitcher trying to throw a pitch “just so,” may wind themselves up too tight to get the kind of impact they need. So while they would look great in slow motion video — everything is exactly where it should be when it should be there — the result is less than explosive.
I don’t think this is something coaches build into what they’re teaching. In fact, I think it’s often something that’s more hard-wired into certain players. They have such desire for perfection and achievement that they let it get in the way of just going for it. Put another way, they are so focused on their mechanics they become, well, mechanical.
Pursuing perfection is a worthy goal, but it has to be tempered with a ballplayer’s attitude. We’ve all seen kids with terrible swings or terrible throwing form that still hit or throw the heck out of the ball because they approach it with such intent to hit or throw hard. That is something we all need to be sure we’re instilling in our players.
I would rather see more intent and less perfection in a player or student, particularly at this time of the year (fall). Yes, I want them to improve their mechanics and approach that ideal, but not at the cost of putting every ounce of themselves they have into it. It’s important to remind them every now and then that the intent to perform an action is every bit as critical as the mechanics themselves. After all, you can fix mechanics and make them better. It’s a lot tougher to fix intent if it isn’t there.
Great article on mental toughness
Read an interesting article today in Baseball the Magazine, the sister (brother?) publication to Softball Magazine. It was on the secret to mental toughness and was written by Jack Perconte, a former MLB player (LA Dodgers, Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox) who is now coaching youth athletes.
In the article he goes through all the usual suspects — confidence, love of the game, aggressiveness, etc. But what he ultimately comes back to is strong fundamentals.
In the article, Perconte says that mental toughness isn’t in the head — at least not entirely. It’s really driven by knowing exactly what to do and how to do it. If you can execute the correct skills without thinking or hesitating you’ll be known as being mentally tough. One example he gives is the hitter who stands in the box and fouls off pitch after pitch. That hitter most likely has very strong fundamentals, which is what is enabling her to continue fouling off pitches until she gets one she really likes and can hit well. She’s not worried about whether she’ll hit the ball or not. She’s just relying on her strong fundamental to carry her through.
Coaches are often in a hurry to get past the fundamentals in order to get to the “good stuff.” Yes, there is a lot to learn in the game of softball and sometimes it feels like there simply isn’t enough time no matter how hard you work. But if a player can’t throw the ball 60 feet and hit her target it doesn’t matter whether she knows which base to throw the ball to. It just means she’ll be making an error at the right base. If she doesn’t know how to hit, having great baserunning skills won’t matter a whole lot.
It’s a great article. Baseball the Magazine is available on newsstands everywhere. I recommend you pick it up, give it a read, and pass it out to your team. It may help them understand why you’re spending so much time on fundamentals skills.
Life in the Fastpitch Lane 