So you decided to start taking your daughter to private lessons, or to buy an online package, or do a bunch of research and teach her yourself. That’s terrific – way to step up and help your daughter get better at the sport she loves.

Now it’s time to set some realistic expectations. In my experience, when people think of improvement in sports through lessons, more practice time, etc. they tend to expect it will look like this:

When the reality is it’s far more likely to look like this:

So why can’t it be more linear in the classic “hockey stick” style, especially if you’re putting in the work? Why does it seem like it always has be be two steps forward and one step back?

A lot of it comes down to two things: human nature, and how the human body (and the brain that controls it) works.

Humans are amazingly adaptable to their environments. We can learn how to accomplish incredible things based on what our goals are.

Once we’ve learned how to do those things, however, we tend to internalize the movements that got us there. Which means we stick with them even if the goals have changed.

Let’s take a young pitcher, for example. All her coach really wants from his/her young pitchers is for them to get the ball over the plate, i.e., throw strikes.

“We can’t defend a walk,” the coach keeps calling out, so the pitcher starts using her body in a way that allows her to accomplish the #1 goal – throwing strikes. Doesn’t matter if the movement to do so is efficient, or yields a pitch velocity that makes everyone say “Wow!” or even results in many strikeouts or weak hits.

As long as there are no walks the coach is happy, and the pitcher is a star who gets the bulk of the innings.

Sooner rather than later, however, that strategy is no longer good enough. The pitcher is getting pounded by hitters who can blast a meatball coming over the heart of the plate, so she needs to learn to throw harder, hit spots, and eventually spin the ball too if she wants to continue getting innings.

Unfortunately, the movement patterns that made her so effective at age 9 or 10 are not very conducive to throwing hard or hitting spots or spinning the ball. So she now has to learn new movement patterns.

Only she’s kind of locked into the old ones, and since her body and brain remember that those patterns were great at accomplishing the goals associated with the pitching motion at that time they’re having a hard time giving them up. We are a product of our habits, after all.

As a result, the pitcher’s performance could drop down for a while as she attempts to replace old movement patterns with new ones. Sure, the new patterns will yield more success in the long term by making her movements more efficient and effective, which will make it easier to perform at a higher level.

But it could be discouraging as she sees that temporary performance dip while her body re-learns how to move to accomplish something that used to seem easy and familiar.

The same is true with every aspect of fastpitch softball – hitting, overhand throwing, fielding, even running and sliding. Because before you can achieve any type of improvement you first have to change what you’re already doing, no matter how successful it has been in the past, and change is hard.

At this point you may be wondering if there is a statute of limitations on the backward steps. After all, once you get to a certain level of competence, or even excellence, shouldn’t it be easier to just keep going up without hitting a plateau or (gasp!) seeing performance go down?

No, for the same reasons it’s a problem in the beginning stages. In order to drive improvement, even for those at the highest levels, you have to change something you’re doing, because as the adage says, if you do what you always did you get what you always got.

In fact, it may be tougher at the higher levels because there is more to lose. A player has to decide if the potential improvement to be gained is worth the risk of a temporary loss of performance – especially if that performance has been serving the player well.

Doing something different in a high-pressure situation is likely to result in at least a slight loss in confidence due to its unfamiliarity, which leads to not putting in the same level of effort as the player would with the more comfortable movements. She may also lose some energy temporarily because she now has to think about what she’s doing rather than simply executing the movements at 100% effort with no thought involved.

That’s why high-level players usually make these changes in the offseason.

A high-level player won’t take on that risk, though, without a clear view of the rewards on the other side. She will also have been through the process before too, so should understand the ups and downs of continuous performance improvement.

Sure, it would be great if making changes automatically resulted in an immediate improvement in performance. While that can happen sometimes, more often than not it takes some time (and some missteps) before the benefits of all that work show up on the radar or in the box score.

But just like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, if you put in the work on the right things, and remain patient, the reward will be there on the other side.

My good friend Jay Bolden and I have started a new podcast called “From the Coach’s Mouth” where we interview coaches from all areas and levels of fastpitch softball as well as others who may not be fastpitch people but have lots of interesting ideas to contribute.

You can find it here on Spotify, as well as on Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Stitcher, iHeart Radio, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re searching, be sure to put the name in quotes, i.e., “From the Coach’s Mouth” so it goes directly to it.

Give it a listen and let us know what you think. And be sure to hit the Like button and subscribe to Life in the Fastpitch Lane for more content like this.

Butterfly Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com