It’s fun to be impressed now and then
The other night I was doing a fastpitch softball pitching lesson with a girl named Kristi Gandy, a longtime student of mine and one of the pitching studettes in the area. Kristi is a high school senior who will be pitching at Lake Forest College next year, and will likely be spending lots of extra time playing in post-season tournaments with them.
For most of her lessons this year Kristi’s brother Jim has been enlisted to catch. (They have a reciprocity agreement, as she catches for his baseball pitching lessons too). But the other night, she had a new catcher, a girl named Amanda whom I’d met once before when she came out to observe one of our team practices.
Now, I have to admit that given what I do in my off-hours I tend to be pretty hyper-intensive about technique. I like things to be done a certain way, and while I don’t spend a lot of time with the catchers who come in to work with my pitching students I do notice what they do.
So it was a real pleasure to watch Amanda catch. Her stances were excellent, as was her glove work, her blocking, and just about anything else you’d care to observe. I was pleasantly impressed with her.
Afterwards I decided to let her know. I complimented her and asked her who her instructor was. She said it was Laura Matthews, one of the coaches at Lake Forest College, which is how she was hooked up with Kristi. Her hitting coach is Joe Kinsella, the head coach there, and one of his assistants works with her on catching.
I see a lot of bad technique taught by people who you think ought to know what they’re doing, so it’s nice to see excellent technique being taught now and then. What was most impressive was learning afterwards that Amanda is in 8th grade. Here she is, not even in high school, and doing a great job catching for one of the top pitchers in the area, and a senior to boot.
Can’t wait to see where she is as a player in four years!
Fastpitch softball hitting game — High Fives
One of the challenges of teaching fastpitch hitting, either in lessons or in a team setting, is getting some game-like pressure into practice. After all, just about anyone can look good in the cage when they’re relaxed. But when there’s something on the line it can be a whole different ballgame (so to speak).
Tonight I had that situation with a couple of hitters. I wanted to give them a little bit of skin in the game to see how they handled the pressure, and have a little fun while we were at it. So I came up with High Fives.
The rules are pretty basic. You can use a pitching machine, front toss or some other method of delivering the ball. You make the pitch, and if the hitter hits a line drive or strong fly ball she gets a point. If she swings and misses, fouls it off or hits a pop-up or weak grounder she loses a point. A strong ground ball is neutral — it doesn’t gain or lose her a point.
Score is kept in the same manner you use for basic card counting in Blackjack. (Originally I was going to make the game 21, but realized it could take forever to finish.) So if she hits a line drive with the first pitch, it’s +1. A fly ball on the next pitch is +2. A pop-up on the next pitch takes it back to +1 and so forth. You can also go into negative numbers, i,e, -1, -2.
Five is the magic number, which gives the game its name. If the hitter gets to -5 the game is over and she owes you five pushups. On the other hand, if she gets to +5, the game is over and you owe her five pushups. The hitters usually get pretty excited when they win and you have to drop and give them five.
Now, you don’t have to use the same exact scoring system I use. You can adjust it to the types of hits you’re trying to achieve.
If you’re looking for a way to spice up hitting practice give this game a try. Just be sure you’re ready to pay up!
Are you training Seal Team Six?
Let me start by saying there are a lot of wonderful fastpitch softball coaches out there in the world. They really do put their players first, and while they may be demanding they aren’t over the top.
Then there are the coaches who act like they’re training Navy Seal Team Six. They favor long practices, brutal conditioning (think about the scene in Norway in Miracle) and yelling/screaming constantly at their players to perform. Woe unto the youngster who makes a mistake and dares not to be perfect.
Why? What possible good could that do? The fact is you’re not planning to storm any beaches or hunt down any fugitives in the remote mountains of Central Asia. You’re going to play softball.
It’s important to have standards and to want your players to become all they can be. But making them miserable shouldn’t be part of the deal.
Keep things in perspective. It’s a game and games are supposed to be fun. Work hard, but keep it in perspective. Your teams will perform better and everyone will be a whole lot happier.
Sometimes they just miss the point
I was at a lesson tonight (as usual) and got to talking to the parents of one of my students. They have been excited to see the progress their daughter has made, especially since we started back up in late September, and then they told me an amusing story.
There are four pitchers on their daughter’s 12U team (including her). My student actually could be playing 10U but moved up.
Anyway, at a recent practice the pitchers were all warming up, and one of the coaches pointed out that my student was the only one not doing wrist snap drills. Her mom and dad said, “Yes, that’s right” and smiled. (For me, wrist snaps as warm ups are a total waste of time, as I’ve written in previous blog posts.)
Her parents told me the other pitchers go through this elaborate warm-up sequence before pitching. Their daughter is often pitching for 25 minutes (or at least seems like it) before the others get started.
So then I asked the big question: how is she doing compared to the others? Because if she’s not doing what they’re doing, you’d hope she’s doing better.
She is. And that’s the funny thing to me. Despite being younger and smaller than the others, apparently she throws harder and more accurately. If that’s the case, and she’s doing something different from the others, maybe it’s time to question what the others are doing instead?
Just sayin’.
There’s more to rotation than merely turning
It seems to be pretty well-established in most fastpitch softball circles these days that rotation is a critical, must-have element of good hitting. Yet it’s important to keep in mind that the mere act of rotating itself doesn’t guarantee success. When you rotate, you actually have to do something, i.e. generate power with it.
As a hitting instructor I see it all the time. Players understand that they have to “turn on the ball.” Yet they do it in a way that looks good in slow motion video but doesn’t actually accomplish what it’s supposed to accomplish.
The idea of rotation in hitting is to recruit the big muscles — thighs, butt, core, back, chest, etc. — to help move the mass of the bat. Those muscles create power and batspeed. The smaller muscles in the arms can then be focused on getting the bat head on-plane with the ball and making fine adjustments. But when the big muscles aren’t used, hitters have to depend on the smaller muscles to get the bat moving, which means they’re less capable of making adjustments. They also don’t hit the ball as hard.
However you go about it, rotating the hips has to be an aggressive, ballistic movement, not an easy turn into position. I will tell hitters to “pop the hips” to get them more aggressive. It’s not just about speed — the body has to be used properly, driving the back side up and around the front side — but assuming the right things are happening “pop the hips” gets the idea of being more aggressive.
Another thing a quick, powerful rotation does is give the hitter more time to see the ball before committing the bat to the swing. If the hitter can cut the time of rotation in half, that extra time can be added to the time he/she has to see the path of the ball (and if he/she is really good its rotation), which helps the hitter make a better final decision on where to take the bat.
I tell hitters I always want to see them making their positive move (striding as I teach it, although a forward shift with no stride also counts) and at least starting hip rotation on every pitch. Sometimes they worry that they’re going to swing at a bad pitch, but when they do it they see committing to strong rotation on every pitch actually makes it easier to hold back on a bad pitch because they can start the bat at the ball later.
When they make the powerful hip turn they also see how the ball jumps off the bat at contact. It just gets easier to hit well. Maybe when you’re moving faster overall you have less time to take yourself out of a good hit — you’ve gathered the info you need and now you’re just executing, reducing the act to see ball/hit ball.
Something you want to watch out for is the “rotation” that is more about turning the back leg than driving the back hip forward. The old “squish the bug” cue is the worst example of it, but there are other ways that are less than optimal as well. If the thigh bone (femur for those who like medical terms) is primarily rotating in the hip socket you don’t have rotation.
Instead, you want the back hip to drive forward around the front hip and into the ball, which at the point of contact generally results in the back foot being up on the toe with the heel pointed at the sky rather than the catcher. (Mark, I’ll save you the trouble — see these videos for some good examples.) I say generally because you’ll always be able to find cases where it doesn’t happen, but those are more the exceptions where a hitter has to make an unexpected adjustment, such as an inside pitch that gets to them more quickly than they were ready for.
The point is just turning isn’t enough. To really be successful with it, the hitter has to practice and become confident in his/her ability to rotate quickly and powerfully in order to maximize the swing.
Now it’s your turn. What have you observed in hitters when it comes to rotation? How have you gotten them to commit to doing it more powerfully? And what kind of results did you see?
The real measure of an instructor
Had some time on a cold, snowy day to ponder an issue that perplexes many parents of fastpitch players — how to choose a private instructor.
One tried and true thing many people do is look at the top players in their area and assume that whoever coached those players up can do the same for their kid. Maybe that’s true. But it’s no guarantee.
In my mind, the real measure isn’t the coach’s top students — the kids just dripping with athleticism who blow everyone away. It’s the ones with average ability/athleticism who become successful that you ought to look at. Here’s why.
The outstanding athletes will probably be successful no matter who their instructor is. Sure, some instructors will take them farther than others, but the raw material has to be there first. As they say in the computer world, garbage in/garbage out.
The average ability players, though, test the instructor’s ability to take those student to the limit of what they can do. Which means there’s a far greater likelihood that that instructor will be able to do the same for your player, especially early in her career.
When you see a player who isn’t tremendously gifted standing out on the field, that’s a kid who has been coached up. That’s the instructor you’ll want to seek out. And if your player does have that little something extra, odds are the same magic will work for her too. Only a little better.
Keeping an open mind on fastpitch drills
In the world of fastpitch softball there are tons of drills. Some I like, others I don’t. Yet sometimes even a drill you don’t particularly like can be effective if you’re willing to keep an open mind.
One such drill for me is the pitching drill where you get down on the ground in a runner’s starting stance, like you’re in blocks. You then go into the regular pitch from that start.
When I’ve seen it done, it often feels like it works against using the legs effectively. The pitchers are down so far that they have to raise themselves up first, which means they don’t get a good launch. It’s not my favorite.
But last week I had a girl who was having trouble leaning into the pitch. At launch she would pull her head up early and if anything lean back, which was killing her speed. So I suggested she get down into the starter position and try pitching from there.
One good thing was she didn’t quite get all the way down, so she started from a little better position. But that did the trick. She got the feel of launching head-first and driving out with her legs, and was rewarded with noticeably more speed.
So I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks. Or at least get an old dog to try an old trick.
And once again it proves that the effectiveness of a drill is in the hands of the person running. That night we both learned something.
Definition of a good day
Today (or in actual fact tonight) was definitely a good day. Worked with four pitchers. One is almost ready to learn a new pitch. Two started on and pretty much got the hang of screwballs. Another had a curveball come together.
Gosh, I love this job!
Drill to help fastpitch hitters who drop their hands
A couple of weeks ago I was working with a 12U player named Carly who was having some issues with her hands dropping. The action of dropping her hands created somewhat of a looping swing.
The problem was she couldn’t feel it. So once again I brought out my trusty swim noodle. This time I placed it behind her, in an area I didn’t want the bat head to go. Her objective was to swing the bat without hitting the noodle.
At first, of course, she did hit the noodle. Here’s a slow motion video (taken later in the session) showing a “before” swing. (Notice the guilty grin after she hits the noodle.
After working on it for a bit we tried it again. Here’s the “after” swing, with Carly now taking the head of the bat on a more direct line to the ball instead of looping.
It’s a subtle difference but an important one. With this bat path she is now set up better to hit the ball more effectively.
By the way, back in the day I used to hold a bat behind the hitter, who would use an old bat in order not to damage her good one. But that became a bit intimidating. The noodle works much better, and allows the hitter to use her own bat.
As for Carly, we’re still early in her development as a hitter, but the noodle drill has been effective in helping her get rid of the looping swing. If you know a hitter who is having this dropping the hands issue, give it a try.
So what do you think? What drills or techniques do you use to address dropping the hands?
Keeping fastpitch pitchers on the power line
The other day I was working with a girl named Emily who has been a student of mine for several years. She’d always had a bit of a problem with striding off the power line, but after taking a year off from fastpitch softball it had become more of an issue.
Essentially, while she was striding off-line, she was working hard to keep her arm circle on the line. As a result she was off-balance, which affected both her control and speed. I tried a couple of things to try to get her on-track but they only had a temporary effect. Then a new cue hit me.
I told Emily to keep her bellybutton on the power line. That seemed to do the trick. Suddenly she was striding forward far more consistently, and staying in balance much better.
Once she was doing that, everything else fell into place. Her speed picked up and her accuracy improved.
If you have a pitcher who is struggling with these issues, give the bellybutton cue a try. It might just be what she needs to stay on line.
Life in the Fastpitch Lane 