Girls Fastpitch Softball

Get Dirty, Revisited

2010-02-03T05:28:00.001-08:00

I feel foolish today. I never really would have given my topic of the day a second thought if I had not finally understood something I should have noted quite a while ago. Several months ago, I wrote something for all the girls heading to tryouts and those playing in front of college coaches. That piece talked about getting dirty, you know, diving to the ground while going after balls. The advice is sound. You should get dirty on the softball field if you want folks to take notice. But, as in most things of importance, merely suggesting to players that they get dirty is not nearly enough. I'm not sure why I hadn't realized this before. Today it is patently obvious.

Decades ago, I was a pee wee football player finding my way through calisthenics and drills meant to toughen us up and make us ready for game contact. We would run in place for 15 minutes and every few seconds the coach would blow his whistle. When we heard the whistle, we were required to hit the deck, get up as fast as we could, and then start running again. Honestly, this was not one of the harder parts of practice. I considered it a joke, a break. I could have done this all day. I was used to hitting the deck. I liked it. It was easy. I think the coaches thought they were torturing us. They weren't, at least as far as I was concerned. It seemed stupid.

As an adult softball player, one of my less intelligent moments came on a line drive. I was milling about near third base when this guy hit a shot. I had no time to think. I just dove and caught it. As I got up, everyone was laughing at me. I was kind of embarrassed. We were playing on blacktop so I got pretty badly cut up. I ran to the dugout and used my drinking water to clean out the cuts before running back out to my station. This was blacktop in Manhattan. It was filthy and I wanted to make sure I didn't get any infected cuts. All sorts of folks frequented this field and who knew how many times some homeless guy, like the ones who lined the field to watch, might have spit or worse right where I had ripped open skin.

As I said, my cohorts made fun of me for diving for a ball at a meaningless softball gathering. Many of the women (it was coed and half of these had been college players), felt I should not play due to the obvious injuries. They felt I should go get first aid and call it a day. I didn't because I wanted to play and because I was used to ripping myself up like that. So, after this batting practice was over and the coach asked if I could play, of course, I said yes.

I have never given much thought to diving or not. You really can't. If you have time enough to contemplate a dive, then you should probably move into a better position to make a catch and the dive becomes a moot point. Diving is reaction. It is not a decision. It is a conditioned response. My childhood in sports had conditioned me to dive if a dive can make the difference between something getting past me or making the catch. Yes, that's true even during batting practice. Actually to be quite honest, I would dive and ask questions later if I was playing whiffle ball with a kindergarten class, on broken glass. I just can't help it. But apparently, not everyone reacts that way and I suppose that is the subject of the day.

If you grew up watching baseball the way I did, one of the more memorable commonplace plays, involved Brooks Robinson, perhaps the greatest third baseman ever to play the game, diving on balls hit to his right. I used to have a poster in my room of Brooks completely air-born on a ball obviously bounced foul. I was no Baltimore Orioles fan but Brooks' dive was something everyone who appreciates the game can agree was truly remarkable.

Brooks was undoubtedly by far the best third baseman I ever saw. There certainly are many other very good ones. I can name probably a dozen but I want to note one who was also not on a team I cheered for at the time. Craig Nettles almost rivaled Brooks Robinson's movement to his right via his own technique to his left. He would almost always go air-born on balls hit that way which were otherwise out of his reach, even when he had almost no chance of making the play.

Many moons ago, I was coaching a 12U travel team. I had a very young girl on the team who loved to "get dirty." I practiced these girls pretty hard but as I began to wrap up practices, there was always this one kid standing last in line. I would hit her the last groundball of the day while looking to wrap up and put away the equipment. But each time, right after the last grounder, this girl would say, "Coach Dave, can you hit me some balls I can dive for?" Practice after practice, I would accommodate this kid by hitting 10 or more she could dive for. I never gave it very much thought. My biggest fears were 1) she would get hurt or 2) she would dive for some ball she should have played "normally."

Some time after this encounter, I observed one of the best shortstops I have ever seen on a softball diamond. She was just about 13 and playing for one of the top few teams in the country. Normally at games like this, I would spend a lot of time watching pitchers and hitters but this kid caught my attention while she was in the field. I watched her as the pitcher went into her windmill. She got into a great ready position and crept forward as the ball was released. When a batter hit a hard grounder up the middle, past the pitcher, this kid would go to ground to stop the ball, get up quickly and gracefully, and then make a good quick release throw to her first baseman, easily nailing the runner. Nothing got past her.

When I saw this kid in action, I thought what she had was mostly mental. She was a hustler. She dove for everything. That's attitude. You can't teach that!

This past year, while in California, I was watching a fairly closely contested showcase game. The defensive team was up by a couple when this girl hit a long fly to center. The CF ran hard back to the fence and without hesitating dove to try to catch it. The fence did not give very much as she went over it, got the ball into her glove, and struck the ground very hard. The ball was jarred loose and the batter began her HR trot as coaches ran out to check on the girl. She was injured pretty badly. She had a separated shoulder and perhaps some other less serious injuries. An ambulance was called. I understand they gave her morphine for some very severe pain which caused her to go into shock. You can't teach that sort of desire and I suppose perhaps you shouldn't.

I say you can't really teach desire but you can teach players how to go to ground. I guess it never occurred to me that "getting dirty" is as much a fundamental skill as anything else. It can and should be taught.

The other night we had an indoor practice. I always look for something we haven't done or that needs tuning because our girls just don't do it right. I decided that in order to spice up our backhand drilling (see last week's piece), I would get some mats out and have the girls go to ground while performing the backhand play. As I waited for my charges to come over to me, I envisioned throwing balls slightly out of reach, each of them merely diving onto the semi-soft mat to make the play, and then each getting up to make a throw. It would be a simple drill but one which they needed to do.

My one lament with this team has been that nobody is sufficiently constituted to dive after balls. These are not some rec or JV players. Most of these girls are real athletes, playing multiple sports on the varsity level or just shy of it. These girls are almost all fast, pretty good on fundamentals, have played several years of travel softball, and are generally hard as nails. For instance, we had one girl run into another on a foul pop last year and both went down hard. Neither kid would come out of the game. And, as it turned out, one had played with a concussion from the collision. When these girls get together, they do not play dolls. They generally have mock fist fights or otherwise roughhouse like a gaggle of boys. They are girls to be sure but they are not meek nor mild. But none dives, at least not often, after balls!

So there I was with my silly little drill and each kid took their turn trying to dive after the throw I made. I was actually shocked by their dismal performance. None of them knows how to dive. I needed to teach them how to dive!!!!

So the question becomes, what is a normal skill progression to teach girls how to dive after balls. The answer is ... Let's start at the start.

I would say that before one learns to walk, the usual advice is to learn to crawl. That's probably bad advice since crawling has nothing to do with walking. And crawling ruins those cute little expensive outfits we wasted our money on for our infants. Falling forward, however, has much to do with diving. So if I were trying to teach girls to dive after balls, I would start with a simple exercise of falling forwards.

Place a mat in front of a kid. Have her get into ready position, without a glove on, and then allow herself to fall forwards to ground. The object here is not to fall to one's knees which is exactly what they'll do the first time. You want them to fall into a push-up position with hands spread slightly wider than when they would do a push-up and legs straightened. It is sort of a belly-flop. You are going to need to have them perform several reps of this seemingly wasteful exercise until they can do it properly, without landing on their knees first.

Once you have done that a sufficient number of times, place the player on one side of the mat and have them dive sideways into the same position while facing you. If you are going to dive on your backhand side, you need to have your head turned towards your glove hand side. Do this enough until they can accomplish it correctly and then once more to reinforce. Now do it the other way, to the forehand side while, again, facing the theoretical direction from which the ball is coming.

Once these three types of falls have been practiced, have them put on their gloves and do them again. Players need to learn to go to ground with one hand inside a glove. Each will probably struggle with this a bit. You have to land on the pinky side of your glove when doing the forehand side dive and the thumb side of your glove when doing the backhand. Girls need practice at this. If they don't practice it, injuries will occur.

Once your group has accomplished the task well enough that you are confident they will be able to advance, it is time to work an actual ball into the drill. Again while facing you, each girl will, in turn, assume a good ready position and then dive for the ball as you throw it. The easiest way to start this out is with a ball bounced or rolled. Later, you can work in throws or line-drives.

Keep in mind that you must watch the way they dive very closely and correct errors. You want to teach them how to dive properly and then condition in the response with frequent drilling. That means this is not some drill you do once and then never engage in again. It is indoor season and, provided you have a reasonably soft mat, you can do this at every practice or every other one for 5-10 minutes, once you have taught the skill. After initial work, you won't have to have them dive without their gloves or the ball. That stuff was to get them used to the notion of diving and to keep them off their knees. So this can become a routine and quick part of every defensive practice sequence.

The mere diving and stopping or catching a ball is just the first part of the skill. After the ball is in the glove, a player has to get up and make a throw. It really makes no difference how good of a play you make if you get nobody out. And this takes practice. At first, some girls will get to their knees to make a somewhat weak throw. Others will gather themselves slowly, get up and throw as if they have all the time in the world. The difficult things to teach them are to dive, get the ball, get up quickly and then make a quick release throw to target.

We have done the dive and get the ball parts. Now let's finish the play. Some coaches well tell you to keep the ball in your glove and to get used to doing a push-up while holding the ball tightly inside the glove. Some coaches will tell you to take the ball out of the glove while down and push off the ground using your empty mitt and while pushing the ball into the ground with your throwing hand. I don't really have an opinion. I know how I do it but there's no point in explaining that. I suggest that you just merely have them get up and see what works for them to get up quickly and make a throw. And at some point, I suggest putting a stop watch to the drill. This may encourage them to find the fastest way possible.

When you get up off the ground, I believe it is best to have your hands close together and get up while twisting into the proper throwing direction. I don;t seem to be able to put this into words so experiment. The general idea is that a player is going to dive to either her forehand or backhand side and then have to make a play to one of the bases. So, retrieving a ball and then getting up to make a throw can involve several possibilities and all should be practiced, depending on a kid's likely positions. each kind of play and throw to each of the various bases requires some thought. Your SS needs to work throws not only to first and second but also to third - that's not a bad place to remain on the knees - and, of course, to home. You can figure out the rest.

Once you get back outdoors, you should not assume that you have covered this ground sufficiently. In case you didn't notice, the fields you play on have no mats to soften the blow for a diving player. They need to get acclimated to the sometimes harder ground. You should have drills requiring your infielders to dive some on the dirt and for your outfielders to hit the somewhat softer grass. These drills should become as easy and boring as my football drills were. Gradually, over time, your team will become hardened and begin to routinely dive for balls they might otherwise not make a play on.

The funny thing is the girls will probably begin to enjoy these drills. When I ran diving drills the other day, we came to the end of practice and everyone huddled around my station. More than one asked, "coach, can I jump in here and go again?" Just as was the case with my diving youngster a few years back, I ended up being the last coach to wrap up because everyone liked the drill and wanted to go again. Y They actually like diving. It's cool! And they can see themselves making these kinds of plays because, well, they always had the desire. I didn't have to teach them that. They just never really gave it much thought but they did not know how to dive. I felt foolish when I realized that.

One For The Bucket Brigade!

2010-01-29T07:49:00.000-08:00

Tom writes in to ask, "How about doing one for the bucket dads? Everyone talks about the kids!"

You know, Tom, I would do something for the bucket dads and moms but I don't want to wallow in self-pity. So I am going to try to stick to anecdotes you and others have sent me, as well as some interesting stories I have heard or seen. I will, of course, talk about some of my personal experiences because those are the ones I know best.

Tom complains of pain he got while returning the ball to his two daughters when they practice pitched to him. As he notes, "there are no points for throwing it back on the fly." I'll add that there are no points for looking like a pro when you throw the ball back either!

I have not only caught a lot of pitching sessions, I have watched others do almost as many. One of the more comical things I have noted is the father or mother who squats like a real catcher and then tries to whip the ball back to the pitcher, again, like a real catcher. I know the mentality. I did this a few times and gave it up for personal safety reasons and to avoid pain.

Even funnier than the would be major league catcher is a fellow I know who wanted to work his daughter's ability to protect herself from line drives by whipping the ball back at her as hard as he possibly could each and every time. His throws probably maxed out at 50-60 mph. Nobody hits a ball back to the pitcher that softly beyond 10U. It doesn't do any good to whip the ball back at her if that's the best you can do. It just gets your blood up and makes her dislike you. It also will eventually burn out your arm.

Let me provide some advice to all parent catchers and this same advice was mentioned to me by Tom. Flipping the ball back on one hop is not a shameful act. It will save your arm. If your daughter is really, really going to grow up to be a pitcher, you are probably going to have to catch 2 - 4 times per week for 100 pitches and returns at the very least. A good average might be 3 times per week for 150 pitches and even that is a bit understated. That is 450 return throws per week, 44 weeks per year, over the span of perhaps an 8 year career, yields 158,400 throw backs. If you, like Tom and I, have 2 daughters, figure it out. You are going to hurt your arm!

I have a pretty bad right, throwing arm. I broke my elbow playing football when I was 15 and still have shards of bone on the inside of the elbow. I know the shards are there because my doctor warned about this at the time of the injury and, quite a while ago, I hurt it and it locked into place. When I had X-rays done, the doctor noted that he could see the shards and it was the swelling around them that had caused the lock-up. Years later, when my kids first got involved in softball, I threw a little too hard with another father before practice one day. My arm was sore for weeks after that.

Once you get the knack of throwing it back on one hop, it may actually save you time because you won't suffer all those bad throws as you try to emulate Pudge-Rod. Tom suggests that bouncing the ball back will make them better fielders. I'm not sure if it is true or not. But it certainly does not hurt their fielding ... or your arm.

The knees are probably your most abused joints. If you ski, snow or water board, that's more so. If you value your ability to walk around, up the stairs, into an elevator, I suggest trying something besides the standard catcher crouch. I am fully aware that there is a little known Medicare benefit for which you might qualify. I am slightly jealous of all those people on the TV who got their Power Chair and didn't have to pay a penny out of pocket for it. But if you are in your 40s, you will look silly making your way to the restaurant/bar/supermarket in an electrical chair. The alternative is a knee replacement but those replacements need to be replaced after a decade or so. You can count on having to replace your bad knee(s) as many as 5 more times during your life if you need your first one at 40 or so. Save your knees, get something to sit on during pitching practice!

Tom suggests a high bucket. He recommends this because 1) he has sufficient room to toss the ball back underhand and 2) he is able to get out of the way of a wayward pitch very quickly without stressing his knees too much. I prefer a lower bucket. I use one of the shortest buckets around, one I used on my boat before I got rid of the boat in favor of softball lessons. I like the shorter bucket because I can set a lower target and I want my kids to throw a lot of low pitches in order to induce grounders. But I may rethink my approach very soon as I am missing out on the benefits Tom noted.

I do not suggest spending money to get the item I have seen in stores and online. That is a stool which stands on one leg and is sold specifically for bucket dads and moms. I got one for Father's Day. It is not very convenient and I have fallen off it several times. The thing about a bucket is you can use it as a bucket in which to carry gloves and balls. It is sturdy. One cheap little plastic bucket will probably survive your kids' pitching careers and you will be able to will it to them when they become parents.

At this point I have to tell you a story or two story about buckets. I learned about them my first year of travel. The warehouse superstore was selling seeds in a bucket for a very cheap price and we decided to buy one for the team. I had hoped to recoup the bucket after the seeds were gone because it looked like it might make a good seat. But when the seeds were depleted, the team's manager, a father of a pitcher, grabbed the bucket and made it his own faster than I could possibly have grabbed it back. A month or two went by and someone took the top of that bucket and attached a proper seat cushion to it for the coach. He still has my bucket today! I think he is rather proud of it.

Another bucket brigade dad I know often catches his daughter when she pitches. He does so in pitching lessons and practice sessions, at team practices and before games. I noticed that he sits sideways on the bucket in order to protect his potential to produce children in the future. After years of watching this, I commented to my wife about it and was surprised by her reaction. She told me that when she first saw him sit sideways like that, she lost all respect for the man! She said he should sit like a real man!! So if you are at all concerned about the way people perceive you as you sit on your bucket, sit straight and protect yourself through other means.

Yet another bucket dad I know has a daughter who is a good pitcher but not always that successful when pitching against the best kids. We were conducting a tryout for catchers one day and she was pitching to them. I asked her if she had a dropball because I wanted to see the catchers block. She said she did and proceeded to throw several very good ones. I was genuinely impressed, not with the catchers but with this girl's dropball. So I asked the father about why he never had her throw the drop in games. He looked at me with a puzzled expression and said,

"Well, she really doesn't have a drop. I mean we don't work on it at all. I can't stand catching the thing. So she never works on it. I didn't think it was very good because I haven't seen her throw one in many months."

I informed him that she does indeed have a good drop. I also told him that she practices it when she throws with her younger sister, a catcher. I strongly suggested that he begin calling the pitch as one of her main ones in games. Do you know, that pitch has become her mainstay and she is a much more effective pitcher now than she was before she started throwing the drop a lot.

Yet, I understand why a father would not want his daughter to spend a lot of practice time working on the drop, at least not while he was catching it. The drop is the bane of many bucket dads' existence. I remember talking to one father who had a daughter with a good drop. He was catching her in the yard one summer evening when one pitch pointed out a tree root he had not completely removed from their throwing area. He was struck in the knee by a drop that bounded off the tree root. For months afterwards, he walked around with a softball sized bump on one leg. This guy used to wear shorts in weather above 25 degrees. But during July and August of that summer, he wore long pants due to his embarrassment.

Speaking of embarrassment, another father of a talented drop ball pitcher I know took one off his shins. He had to go in for X-rays after a few weeks of hobbling. The pain was excruciating. But this guy had some trouble with the doctor because he refused to tell the man flat out that the injury was caused by catching his daughter's pitching! The doctor wanted to know how it happened. He said "never mind." The doctor persisted relentlessly. I think the doctor finally accepted some explanation about a foul ball at a high school baseball game.

The moral of that story is shin guards are advisable. I actually don't wear them because I can't stand them. I caught until I was 18 but I never really loved wearing guards. And as an adult, I really can't handle the feeling, especially when I wear shorts. That's not a very good excuse and I have chipped bones on my shins too, though nothing that hindered my ability to walk. I guess I am pig headed and one day my daughter's dropball will convince me to wear the shin guards I have.

Tom has some advice if you also refuse to wear baseball/softball shin guards. He uses soccer style leg guards. I may have to look into this because it makes a lot of sense. But I may have trouble finding anything that fits properly. If you don't have football shaped calves, you might want to look into soccer shin guards to protect you while catching.

I have one final dropball story for you. I was at the field one day and noticed a bunch of guys from our organization standing around a pick-up truck chatting. As I walked towards them, they were laughing and making all kinds of odd faces. As I got close, one yelled out to me, "hey Dave, have you ever taken one in the ... you know?" I replied, "yes, many times, it ain't pretty, it's always the darn dropball." As I uttered the beginning of the word "dro" they all broke out into hysterical laughter. They were all pitchers' dads. They knew exactly what I meant. They all had the same experience.

I understand what Tom is saying about the higher bucket. If you are catching a dropballer, it is best to get the heck out of the way once that ball hits the ground. It has a lot of spin on it. You really do not know where it is going to go. The faster you can get out of the way, the better.

Still, I cling to my low bucket. And one of my kids is a dropballer. I have worked a way to protect myself and that is: I stay closer to the plate and when the ball hits the ground, usually it is right around the plate. I go forward rather than trying to block it like a catcher. I attempt to short hop it right near where it hits the ground so it doesn't have the opportunity to jump. It doesn't matter to me if I catch it or merely knock it away. Just so long as it doesn't jump me. So far, that technique has worked.

The worst I have ever been struck is actually on a change-up. My kid's change is pretty good. It moves and dives. When it hits the ground, it is difficult to know which direction it will bounce in. She once threw one that hit the plate, bounced up, and caught me in the chin. I saw stars. I got a nice little knot on my face that stayed there for several months. I think perhaps the bone was chipped but I never sought medical treatment because I was a little too embarrassed. I didn't need to hear another human being suggest I wear a mask. So I won't go into proseltyzing you about wearing a mask. I'll just say that there is a good reason to put one on, and leave it at that.

So to recap, a bucket is better than squatting. I prefer a low one but Tom likes a high one and he can offer some sound logic for choosing that size. Protective equipment is probably a good idea though I admit to wearing none. You must be hyper vigilant to protect yourself. And those of us too proud to admit it hurts when we get hit should probably rethink our manhood.

Speaking of manhood, I don't want to shortchange the many women who catch their daughters' sessions. I know several who, for one reason or another, do the job. They may be better athletes than their husbands are. They may just be the only one available when their daughters take their lessons. I think I know of more fathers than mothers but there are penty of each and all have their own war stories.

As a matter of fact, I know that one of the guys who laughed at my comment above no longer catches his daughter's lessons. Instead, he has his wife do that. The reason is he has become very good friends with the pitching coach. When the coach sees him, he likes to talk endlessly. The guy not only feels as if his daughter is shortchanged due to the coach's excessive conversation, but also he is concerned because he too often gets distracted from the job at hand. His daughter has hit 60 on the gun. But she is a little wild, especially when throwing movement pitches. l; He often finds himself nearly getting hit because he is too engaged in conversation. So now his wife catches the daughter at lessons. And she's the one sporting the injuries most of the time.

I really urge you in the strongest terms possible to not allow yourself to be distracted when catching. Even a 50 mph pitch can do some damage when it hits you in the head. Talking with others is possibly the most insidious form of being distracted. I just heard on the radio that the result of laws prohibiting cell phone usage behind the wheel actually have accomplished one of their objectives - to lower the rate of usage while driving. Unfortunately, the laws did not accomplish the main objective. Accident rates did not go down. While hands-free devices are used to a much higher degree than before, it turns out that they do not prevent accidents. It is the talking that yields the distraction, not the use of hands. If you try to hold a deep conversation while catching your daughter, you're gonna pay a price.

I have on many occasions found that I am not quite as wide awake as I should be when catching. Sometimes my concentration drifts. Sometimes my relatively weak eyesight takes me out of focus. That is not good.

I strongly suggest that before you get behind the plate, you make certain you are wide awake. I now very often drink a full cup of coffee before catching. I sometimes take a shower beforehand. I will try almost anything to ensure that I am as awake as possible. It is no fun to recognize that you almost got hit by that pitch.

Speaking of those times when you feel like you almost just got hit, it is difficult for those whose daughters don't yet throw hard or those who have never been part of the bucket brigade to understand our plight. The best way I can describe this is via analogy.

Do you know that feeling which immediately follows a near miss auto accident? Your adrenaline pumps at full throttle. You feel sweat start to well up in all the usual places despite having been relatively cold before the incident. Your heart pounds. You feel throbbing at your temples. That's an almost car accident. Almost being hit by a pitch is not as bad. I would say that on every pitch my daughter throws, I feel about 5 percent of the car feeling. And when I almost get hit, I suspect I reach to about 10 or 15 percent of that extreme. During the winter, we catch down in my basement which is very large. The basement is also rather cool, perhaps 45 - 50 degrees. But after we are done, I am always sweating. And when I almost get hit, I sweat profusely.

Women have more sense than men. They are more willing to don the full gear. Men are often either too lazy or too stupid unless or until their daughters become demonic hard throwers. I know of a Division one pitcher whose father always puts on the equipment. He does this because his daughter has been clocked around 67 and for one other reason. When the kid throws to him, which she still does on occasion, he abuses her psychologically. When he does this, she usually throws harder. And she, I believe, aims to hurt him. He throws the ball back at her hard a lot - he doesn't follow my one bounce advice and when he does throw it hard at her, I believe he aims to hurt her. Their sessions are rather violent. He dons the gear as a matter of survival. She should consider pitching with catcher's gear on too. Then again, she throws harder than he does.

One other item about gear, as a person who has suffered several concussions, not as a result of catching, I urge you to use the old style of catchers mask which is generally more protective of your brains. I know the newer, hockey style masks are more in vogue and look better. But the helmet part is intended to deal with foul balls. I personally do not think you need to use a helmet. And the hockey style mask provides less cushion when the mask is struck. That is my opinion formed after doing some research. You can do your own thinking and research.

The plight of the bucket dad or mom is not a well respected one. Those of you who regularly catch your daughters know of what I speak. We in the bucket brigade suffer all manner of injuries and humiliation. A little common sense can go a long way towards reducing the number of our injuries. And learning from others is at the heart of the human condition. So take Tom's advice and mine. Don't let your pride get in the way of protecting yourself. Also, when your daughter can throw a projectile hard enough to kill you, it is best not to anger her too much.

Individual Motivation

2010-01-28T06:24:00.000-08:00

I want to venture into a very difficult labyrinth today. I should probably just step back and not get into this but something is pulling me and I don't feel like fighting it. The issue has to do with how athletes become motivated individuals and how parents and others interact with them in order to enhance this "coming of age," if you will allow me to call it that. This is not a particularly straightforward issue to discuss. But I feel the need to try.

Some time ago, I told you that I once was told by someone far more experienced than I that a father must find the right time to step back from his softball playing daughter in order to allow her to mature in the game. She needs to be coached by someone not related to her. She needs to find her way in the real world where not everyone thinks she's wonderful, where some folks might be less tolerant of some of her bad habits. She needs to prove herself anew to someone else in the sport who has interacted with many other girls prior to meeting her. You (I) need to stand back and become a mere fan again.

Since I heard those words, I have discussed the issue and related ones many times with friends, others in softball, and even a few visitors to this site who wrote me e-mails on the topic. I agree wholeheartedly that a parent of a softball player needs to give her the room to stretch her wings, as it were, or she may never learn to fly.

I say she "may never learn to fly" because many girls have indeed gone very far within this sport while being coached by fathers or mothers. Tincher was taught to pitch by her father. Other name players had heavy parent involvement before they became name players.

Most kids need their parents to step away in order to take the steps of personal development on their own but it is not necessarily a panacea for raising a softball player. Both ways work, depending on the individuals involved. Still I agree in principle with those who argue for giving my kids space because I am not trying to raise softball players. I am trying to raise people, two individual people. I believe I need to step away from them in order for them to grow up. It's just not that easy to do!

Within the issue of stepping away from a softball playing daughter is the related one of her self-motivation. Youth is wasted on the young. If I had my life to live over again ... I would know how much effort would be involved in developing any skill to a desired degree. And, of course, I would put in the effort needed for the things I wish I were doing today!

When I was very young, I decided I wanted to be a baseball player. I was too young to have my dreams dashed so, when I told my parents, they waited several years before explaining to me why this was a bad idea. When I told my father that I wanted to play football in the NFL, he quickly pointed out that I would need to be at least 6-3 and that was unlikely. He also pointed out the short duration of a lineman's career and other problems with my idea. When I told my parents I wanted to be a mathematician, they pointed out that the only career for that kind of direction was teaching and since teaching didn't pay, I might find another career choice. They were wrong on that and other scores but I am not going to try to beat my parents into the ground today. What I want to point out is it is not a great idea merely to explain logically to a person why they can't or shouldn't do something. Instead, it is probably a better idea to inform them slowly about what is needed to become this or that and then let them find their own way.

With respect to school, my parents always wanted me to get good grades. Perhaps they wanted me to get great grades but they accepted my somewhat above average ones without giving me too much trouble. My siblings struggled in school to some degree so when I had better grades than they did, I was able to get away with less than I was capable of. But my motivation was external, not internal. I got the grades I got in order to appease them, not because I enjoyed learning or wanted to achieve at some level in order to accomplish things or make my life better. It was not until I returned to college as a 23 year old that I found self-motivation and at that point, I became an "A" student, near the top of the class, who wanted to achieve the highest grades possible regardless of the level of effort required.

Self-motivation is tricky because each of us are individuals who have our own hopes and dreams, who mature at different ages, and who have our own unique capacities and abilities. One kid is apparently fully mature, within the context we are examining, at the age of 7 or 8. Another is incapable of self-motivation until perhaps 16 or in my case, in terms of academic motivation, as old as 23. It is next to impossible to know for sure when a kid is capable of self-motivation in any pursuit.

When we start out the softball careers of our very young daughters, they really do not know what it takes to improve their skill levels and play to their potential. I recall one of my daughters, 8 at the time, telling me that she would like to throw better. We went out into the yard and threw the ball for 15 minutes before she informed me that she was tired or saw some neighbor kids playing and ran off for that action. A day or so later, I reminded her of her desire to throw better and suggested another session of catch. She told me she had something else to do and, after all, "we did play catch for a very long time yesterday." She was sure she had done enough to improve to the level she desired!

Later, when pitching lessons arose, my wife and I decided to tell the girls that they could continue pitching lessons and we would pay for them provided that they practiced an acceptable amount. We decided that 2 times per week in addition to the one lesson would be the minimum and 4 the maximum. They could continue with their lessons if they practiced twice a week but it would be better if they did more. And, if they did more, we would never consider dropping lessons. If they stuck with just 2, we might one day put an end to lessons.

So my daughters continued to pitch several times a week in order to preserve their lessons. When they wanted to play travel ball, we put certain other restrictions on them. They were required to get their homework done in a timely fashion so as to avoid conflicts with practice. They were also required to step up their pitching to a minimum of 3 times weekly in addition to lessons. If they pitched for one half hour at practice, that would count. We didn't want to burn them out. We just wanted a commitment level in order to justify our spending this much time and money to keep them in travel ball and pitching lessons.

As time wore on, my kids did what they needed to do to maintain things as they were. But sometimes that edge you need to compete was missing. I won't quantify it in this article but there is a level or degree of pitching effort one must do in practice in order to maintain proficiency levels and advance them enough to make all this worth it. Sometimes, with one kid or the other, that level was missing.

Sometimes, one or both of my daughters would complain about me making them pitch. It might not be right at the start or at the mere mentioning of "we'll be pitching at 7 o'clock tonight." It wasn't always a direct complaint. Sometimes we had just finished the warm-up and my kid would say "I'm really tired today" or "I'm still sore from all that pitching we did yesterday." Sometimes it was even more insidious like, "how many pitches are we going to do today?" And still other times, it was a matter of one kid, or both of them, putting out the bare minimum of effort in making each pitch.

Initially, I told them that I never want to be asked how many pitches we are doing. At different points I told them that I am not going to waste my time by catching them while they put forth less than 50% effort. I have actually picked up and walked out on a few occasions because I felt their effort was completely insufficient. I refuse to waste my time if they don't have their body and mind into it.

Soreness is a tougher issue because I don't want them to alter their motions because a bicep or forearm is sore. When they complain about sore muscles, I try to diagnose the problem, come up with a solution or dump practice for that day. I used to think they were using soreness to get out of practice but I have learned that my kids don't do that. When they complain about soreness, I believe them and we can usually do some skills that will not beat them up further.

As time has worn on, I have become weary from listening to my kids try to make practice shorter or get out of them entirely. It doesn't happen very often but when it does, it gets under my skin. That has been made more irritating by my often very sore shoulder, elbow, wrist or hand. A couple years ago, I developed bad tendinitis in my catching wrist which required me to soak my hand in ice water several times each day. It eventually went away but pain in my catching shoulder is a constant companion. Sometimes my elbow hurts and sometimes my hand does. I try not to complain to them about it - I don;t want to teach them how to get out of things - but when they are trying to wiggle out of practice and I'm hurting, I have less patience with the head games.

That was a while ago because gradually they have become self-motivated and that's why I am telling you this. My older daughter became self-motivated quite a bit sooner than the younger one. She loves just about everything that has anything to do with softball. Softball dwells within her very being, perhaps her soul. If she were confined to a wheelchair today, I believe she would either find a softball league for wheelchair bound persons or start one on her own. .

I know I am prone to digressions but I want to explain the wheelchair comment lest I receive some angry e-mails. When I was in my late teens, I worked as a lifeguard at a pool. One day, one of my fellow lifeguards dove into the pool and fractured his neck. He was paralyzed from pretty much the neck down though he could use his arms fairly well. The name of this fellow is Doug Heir.

Doug was an athlete before his accident. After the accident he wanted to end his life. That's pretty normal for a person in that predicament. If you love sport and one day are told that you'll never do any of the things you love, well, that's about as tough as it gets. Gradually, through the efforts of his brother and friends, Doug found the motivation to move forward with his life. Move forward, he did!

Doug became the President Of The National Spinal Cord Injury Association. He also finished law school and has been a practicing attorney. He has run for public office. He is a motivational speaker. He also has been called the most accomplished athlete on Earth because he has won more gold medals than any other human being.

Doug found his self-motivation, with help from his brother, in sport. He competed in field events at Paralympic and other world championships. He has one too many events to name and, in the process, set several world records. His image has appeared on the Wheaties box and many sports media outlets have proclaimed him the world's greatest athlete, among other noteworthy achievements.

So, you see, I do not use the wheelchair example lightly. And when I speak of self-motivation, I have seen it at its all-time low.

So my older daughter is now just about fully self-motivated. This was accomplished primarily by gradually allowing her to control the direction of her practice sessions. At every turn, I have reminded her that the game belongs to her, not us. Our purpose is to facilitate her accomplishment of what she tells us her goals are. She is never practicing or pitching for us. We enjoy watching her pitch but if she were never again to pitch, that would not change anything about the way we love her or treat her. The decision to pitch or not is hers and hers alone. The decision to play softball is hers alone.

As I say, she is just about fully self-motivated. It is a long process which requires work for the full duration. One does not one day turn from being externally motivated to being completely self-sufficient. It is a process not a watershed moment. We must still remain vigilant and work towards instilling the internal motivation.

As I say, this was a gradual growth which took place probably over a 2 year period. It probably, I don't remember, started as a result of a planned practice session at which she was not motivated. She may have complained. She may have inquired about how many pitches we were going to do. She may have thrown at less than her best. I just don't remember. But at that point, I believe I ended the session early. I was tired of the continual lack of effort - in a relative sense. I told her that she could tell me when she wanted to practice again. And I waited for her to do that.

After a few days, she missed working on her pitches and came back to me. In the next session, I let her control almost everything. There is a pattern to her warm-ups which I like to be adhered to to avoid injury. After that, it was "so, what do you want to do next." I really enjoyed asking her "how many pitches are you going to do today?" I think she understood the irony. But she chose her direction and I have to say that it was fine.

Now, what I do in order to sway her in the direction I think she should go is make suggestions. If I think her screw, drop, or drop curve is not quite as sharp as it should be, I ask, "do you want to work on X pitch today?" or "you know, you have thrown better drops, maybe we could work on that pitch more during one of our sessions this week?" or "is there any pitch that you would like to work on?" I try to sway her but I don't want to take over and I don't want her to get mentally lazy and allow me to take over. It's her game. These are her pitching sessions. If she's going to put into them, she must decide what it is she is going to do.

At various times, I think she informed me of when we were going to pitch and then, when the time came, she complained or was less than thrilled when I reminded her. Now when that happens, I react by telling her that I would love to have the hour to myself and it doesn't matter to me if she doesn't practice. She does not do that often anymore. She is responsible for her success or failure. If she wants to skip, it is entirely her decision. And she has to live with the results.

When she does complain, I generally believe she needs the time off. She has become self-motivated enough and we have informed her enough that she now knows that there is a minimal level of effort required to maintain and only through exceeding that will she get better. She wants to get better. She works pretty darn hard at it. Her practice sessions are much better. She seldom, if ever, takes a pitch off during practices.

To tell you the truth, I'm the one lacking motivation these days. She wants to pitch more often and her sessions are longer. I intervene more because I think she is overdoing it than I ever did because I thought she was doing too little.

My younger daughter is more difficult, as a general matter. She has had way too much success at almost everything from too young an age. She is very successful in school without ever having to put out much effort. Her report card is almost always better than her sister's, even when her sister gets almost all A's. When the kids take those state proficiency examinations, if her older sister scores advanced proficient on the math part, as she has many times, the younger one will score higher. She once scored a perfect score on that test. That's the way it is for her.

She was also a successful pitcher with far less practice work than her sister. The only times she would really work were after losses, expecially those in which she got hit fairly hard. It has been very difficult to get her to work at anything, especially pitching, unless she experiences some degree of failure.

She was always the biggest complainer with respect to practice. Even when she did not complain, she was far more prone to those lackluster sessions in which the effort needed to improve was missing. It probably took 3 years to find her self-motivation and I'm not quite sure I know what brought it on. Something, somehow, somewhere must have happened which caused her to recognize that she needed to work in order to succeed. And very recently, she has begun to use this self-motivation in many different ways.

I should tell you that I understand parents who tell me about their daughters, "if I didn't push her, she would do nothing. If I don't make her pitch, she won't and her ability will drop off." I am not telling you to drop everything and do all that it takes to get your daughters self-motivated. What I am telling you is that you should have this as a goal, a long-term goal.

Every kid, every person, is different. Some require more push than others just to achieve up to their 50% level. There is no particular age, no particular experience level, at which a given kid must become self-motivated. But as much as I have encouraged you to do certain things in order to have your kid become a good pitcher, catcher or whatever, I am encouraging you to find those things that will point her in the direction of becoming self-motivated. And everything you do with respect to this must leave the door open for her to become self-motivated when she is ready to do so.

This process, like the game of softball itself, is often rather difficult. Worse, while I can tell you how to fix some hitch in the swing, some shortcoming on the drop ball, or some particular fielding or throwing problem, I cannot tell you how to instill self-motivation in your child. It is a hands-on chore. Problems must be diagnosed in person. Treatment varies with the individual. Prognoses will vary. The time during which you may be able to accomplish the task is going to be different for any two kids.

I had a friend from childhood who became an Olympic medalist (a couple gold and, I think, one or two silver). He was a champion from a young age. His motivation was entirely external. He became a champion to appease his father. He was a world class athlete before he found self-motivation. But he also developed substance abuse problems. It was only after he solved his substance problems and found self-motivation that he became an Olympic champion.

I have often observed parents encouraging their kids to play hard, hustle, get a hit, etc. in softball tournaments. I have sometimes been an overbearing father with respect to my kids' softball play. I understand when parents need to be involved with their kids' softball. I also understand sideline nerves. But there is one thing we must remember and a few corollaries which spin off this single principle. It is their game - we had our opportunity already.

It is their game and we cannot necessarily relate to what it is like to stand 4o or less feet away from some hitter to guard against the bunt. We don't know what it is like to stand in against some 60 mph rise ball throwing freak of nature. We do not know what it is to live amongst their peers while suffering a tough game when everyone else is hitting the ball hard. Sure we had similar experiences but we do not know what they are going through. We have to guess.

When we were their ages, we didn't necessarily trust when our parents, teachers and coaches told us how to live. We learned most of what we know today thanks to mistakes and a few very smart mentors who taught us how to be self-sufficient. We got bored at practices. We turned our heads away on hard grounders. We complained about the duration of practices, etc. We dogged it. Why on Earth would we expect them to be any different.

When a young kid starts hitting, catching or pitching lessons, their coaches tell them what they need to do in order to prepare for the next session. "Don't forget to take 50 swings in the yard, do your blocking homework, pitch 4 times between sessions, etc." We can and should encourage our kids to hear those messages over and over again. We can tell them that if they would like to continue doing these lessons, they must practice on their own. We can make them practice but they will learn how to do it with the least possible amount of intensity to appease us. We can be perfectionists who mentally beat on our kids to make them all that we think they should be. But what is gained and what is lost when we do this?

If you think you may have the next Jennie Finch, there is probably nothing to be learned from me. If, on the other hand, you are simply using softball as an enjoyable way to teach your kid certain things, if you just want her to enjoy athletics, if you are not trying to take her up to the very top levels of the sport, then one of your goals should be to teach her self-motivation which she can use in other aspects of her life. It isn't an easy thing to instill. You will have to find your own way. But, in the long run, it is a highly advantageous thing to have taught your child. It is well worth the significant effort.

Diamond Nation Tournaments Announced

2010-01-28T05:16:00.001-08:00

There is an article on SpySoftball which consists of just a commercial announcement as follows:

"Rising Stars and Triple Crown Sports have announced two new tournaments - a summer event June 23-25, and, a fall event October 8-10, both at a new 10-field complex called Diamond Nation in Flemington, NJ.

The tournaments will be limited to 40 teams, and the sponsors hope to attract the top 16U and 18U teams from across the nation. (Flemington is 44 miles from Newark Airport.)"

That's a fairly simple message but several items should be included in order to convert this announcement into a complete statement of fact. First of all, the complex is definitely beautiful although it could have been laid out differently to make it easier to move from field to field. Personally, I favor quads to make the movement from field to field easier while also providing fans and college coaches the opportunity to see multiple games with just a few steps. Quads have issues such as when balls are fouled from one field onto another but I would take them over the arrangement at DN.

Secondly, Flemington is fairly close to Newark Liberty International Airport as the crow flies but it will most likely take you an hour or more to drive from one to the other in the best of traffic conditions. If you come in or leave at rush hour, you should budget two hours. , so You will be sitting out a lot of traffic lights along the most convenient routes. At times, you may get the opportunity to watch a single traffic light turn from red to green to red to green to red again! It is not the most convenient place to get to in New Jersey. Flemington is kind of out in a part of the state which nobody ever experiences on TV or in the movies. It is a less densely populated part of the state.

Third, the place is not a purely softball complex. It is really set up for baseball and the fields are converted to softball via the placement of fences and playing at one corner of the otherwise baseball setups where 60 foot bases paths are located. But the facts that these fields are used primarily for baseball and are somewhat inconvenient for softball is not necessarily fatal to the utility of the complex.

What may be fatal to the complex are a couple of practices by the owners of the facility, as well as the fact that the fields are 100% turf. Generally, at this complex, anyone aside from the players and coaches must pay an entrance fee. I have been to tournaments and showcases at which such a fee has been charged but usually the fee is either nominal or only applied to very large events such as a national championship tournament. The nominal fees were typically not charged by the organization hosting the tournament but rather the park itself which had significant facilities to maintain with taxpayer dollars. It is not fair to ask local taxpayers to foot the bill for maintaining fields during an event which largely draws people from far away. But DN is different because this is a commercial venture. They invested huge amounts to build this complex and are seeking a return on that investment. The charge for fans (parents) is rather hefty and the system under which, for example, a visitor can leave the complex and then return is not exactly state of the art, or, for that matter, well thought out.

Next, as part of the profi- making angle, teams are allowed to bring in just one cooler and no food. They aim to make all attendees purchase some drink and all food from the snack bars. The food at the snack bars is not necessarily good or what one would choose to eat when playing a multi-game day. But you are forced to either sneak in food - not easy - or buy whatever they have to offer at the snack bars.

Still the things I have listed are not fatal to many who wish only to play the best possible competition no matter what it costs and no matter how inconvenient the location. And while the tournaments do hope to draw a very high level of competition, the fact that the fields are turf ought to give teams cause for hesitation. Turf is great when natural fields are too wet to play. But at any other time, I would prefer to keep my players off it.

The problems that are encountered on turf are many. The most obvious issues involve ground balls. Most balls are hit with considerable spin in fastpitch softball. Turf does not act like dirt when a spinning ball hits it. Grounders are a little too true. If you put a team on turf for a year and then had them play on dirt, say at ASA, NSA, etc. nationals, you are looking for trouble. Your infielders will not be able to adjust back to the unpredictability and much different play of real dirt on a skin field. It isn't quite as bad as always playing on grass infields but it is rather different than playing on a conventional softball field.

Next, outfield play is different on turf vs. natural surface. We've played all sorts of grass including some amazingly well groomed fields in the Carolinas and Florida, some very nice but quite different type surfaces in Caifornia, some dreadfully hard ones in Ohio, some not very well groomed natural grass surfaces in several other places, etc. I have seen some artificial surfaces for softball fields that were very nice on which the outfield hops were quite similar to those on natural surface but such is not the case at DN. Ordinary hump back line drives and pops that fall to ground bounce inordinately high leading to misplays as well as extra base hits for balls that would easily be played back in for singles on other surfaces. Outfielders must play fairly deep because any ball that strikes the surface will run rather fast. Any single hit beyond a certain point is going to make it to the fence. Playing outfield at DN isn't at all like playing on natural surface or very good turf.

Finally, the pitching surfaces are not great. The turf itself is rather slick. Girls sliding into bases do not get any kind of rug burn because of the slickness. Instead, they find that they need to grab hold of the bases in order to avoid over-sliding the bags. This does not help pitchers find that point of resistance with their landing legs which they need to pitch well. Further, the pitching circle areas are a carpet overlay on the normal surface of the field. There is too much give in them. There is a sort of trampoline effect. Every pitcher I have talked to had something bad to say about the pitching area at DN.

I have nothing against Diamond Nation. I don't particularly care about the site's distance from Newark Airport nor that you have to buy food there. I can go a day without eating though I would rather be able to bring in my own water and Gatorade. It can be a little too expensive ov er a 3 or 4 day tournament to pay snack bar prices in order to avoid dehydration or heat exhaustion.

I understand the need to charge a fee to attendees at commercially maintained fields. I am OK with that as a general matter. If there is a nice place to sit to watch games, it's fine with me that I have to pay provided the fee is not exorbitant. The fees are too high at DN. There is not a convenient place to sit and watch. I would like to be able to come and go in accordance with my team's schedule. It is not very convenient to come and go at DN. Actually, it is kind of a hassle though hopefully they will get better at handling this.

I am happy for whatever softball facilities are built which enhance girls' abilities to play even when a summer is very rainy. Most of us east of the Mississippi suffered through last year playing much less frequently than we would have liked. Turf is great when you have nothing else playable. But given the choice between turf and a dry natural surface, I would rather have my girls on the natural one. You really do not get to see kids' and teams' abilities when you play this kind of artificial surface. This is more true at the highest levels. At least that's one man's opinion.

Additional Comment:

My wife just read this post and reminded me that parking was absolutely horrendous at this facility. I suppose I had forgotten that fact but now that I think of it, it was really bad. There was not a huge amount of teams there when we played but we struggled to find a parking spot. I can only imagine that with a large number of teams present the parking would be absolutely impossible. Hopefully they will rectify the parking situation before these tournaments are held since they cannot support the number of cars one would expect.

Easy But Neglected Skill

2010-01-27T12:07:00.000-08:00

Among the several skills coaches often neglect is the ordinary backhand play. Often folks act as if it is a difficult skill requiring more athletic ability than other plays but that's just not the case. Backhanding is as easy as any other skill but the fundamentals must be taught, reinforced through proper simple, repetitive drilling followed by sufficient iterations of live hit balls.

All too often when coaches hit grounders to players, they either hit them directly at them or hit too many to their glove hand side. If a coach has been properly emphasizing to their players to get in front of the ball and make plays between their legs, it is natural for girls to do this in a ground ball line, thereby getting no practice on backhands. I very seldom see coaches hitting backhand plays over and over again whether in practice or as a warm-up before games. l; the one exception is the short hop drill in which coaches hit balls sharply to girls stationed close in. That's a good drill but it only involves a limited piece of potential backhand plays. And usually no instruction on fundamentals has preceded it.

Generally, players learn backhanding of balls at their waists and above via normal everyday games of catch. Watch a bunch of players throwing a ball around for any length of time and sooner or later someone will make a bad throw requiring a backhand catch. After a couple years of warm-up tossing, most girls can handle any throw that requires a backhand catch. Often players learn to catch very well using backhand because it places a player in better position to make ensuing throws. If you want to be in position to make a quick throw, you move your body so as to catch the ball using a backhand because it is easier, most of the time - excluding outfield to infield cutoff throws. So backhand becomes the preferred way to receive a throw most of the time. Yet, on grounders, receiving the ball either to the glove hand side, beyond the leg while on the move or fielding it between the legs are the most reinforced skills. We do not automatically teach the backhand. We do not make sure our infielders and outfielders get enough drilling and practice at this very important skill.

If you can honestly say that your players do get adequate instruction and practice reps with backhand, OK. Today's column is not for you. If you're not sure or know that you have not addressed it, read on.

The first item to address is the teaching of the fundamental skill. Every infielder in a good ready position should be low. When they field balls, they should remain low. That is as true for other skills as it is for backhand. But for whatever reason, one of the most common mistakes in the backhand is a tendency to stand up or slightly erect when making a play on the ball. Ideally, the backhanding player should be very low. Ideally, her eyes should be just slightly above the level she gets the ball at. If a player's head is several feet above the track of the ball, she will probably misjudge it and end up with the ball bouncing off her glove or going under it.

Secondly, in every other instance of fielding a ball, the glove is held in front of the body. If a player places her glove at the same depth as her body relative to the ball, we correct her by saying, "get those out in front of you." It is always better to get a ball closer towards the direction it is coming from whether fielding a grounder, a fly, or thrown ball. The same is true for backhand. The glove must be placed towards the direction of the ball. You should not be attempting to make a backhand play parallel to the depth of your foot or head. I suppose it is often difficult for coaches to see how deep tor shallow the glove is relative to the player but this needs to be corrected just like it is on ordinary grounders hit directly at players.

The next most common error in backhanding occurs at the point at which the ball has struck the glove. Just as with other plays, the glove hand should squeeze the ball. Most often girls try to cradle the ball by cocking their wrists and pulling the hand in out towards the outside of the elbow. This is not only a poor way of catching the ball, it tends to put the player off balance and the glove in a bad position from which to remove the ball. Many beginning players working on backhands will do this to make sure they get the ball. Even experienced girls who have poor backhand skills will do this for the same reason. But when you catch a thrown ball above your waist in a backhand position, you don't do this. Instead, you squeeze the ball in your catching hand while holding your wrist loose and allowing the force of the ball to carry your hand backwards. This is what we call having soft hands.

The reason catching with soft hands is better is because when you cock your wrist towards the outside of your elbow, you are in a position which takes away from your hand strength. The connective tissue in the hands is stretched to a weaker position from which to grip anything and you tend to use weaker muscles in your forearm in a position from which their strength is diminished. Your grip is stronger when your hand is slightly cocked towards the inside of your elbow which is what occurs when you use soft hands. You are also in a better position to deal with the impact of the ball when your wrist is slightly loose and you catch the ball in front of you. Your body acts as a shock absorber.

The last fu tndamental mistake we want to deal with today occurs after the ball has been successfully caught and a throw needs to be made. The girls I have coached tend to stand upright at this point. They want to gather themselves and then make a strong throw. But usually you can make a stronger, quicker throw if you stay low, plant the correct foot while turning your body and removing the ball from the glove simultaneously. If you are a righty, that means you stride with your left leg, get the ball, and as your glove comes back towards your body, you step with the right leg, plant the right foot while turning your body so that your left shoulder faces the target and then make the throw. Staying low and planting your throwing hand foot beyond your glove hand foot is the key to making a strong, quick throw.

I would begin my backhand practice but talking about the points I have just gone over. Then I would demonstrate the correct way to make a backhand play. After that, I would use a few very simple drills in a progression which gradually goes over the skill.

The first item should be merely retrieving the ball using a backhand. All that is needed is for each girl to get in a good ready position and a coach to bounce balls at them. The player and coach can be just ten feet apart with the coach to the glove side of the player. Have her take a single step with the glove side foot, across her body while staying low and fielding the bounced or rolled ball. The coach can roll several reps and then bounce several more or mix it up anyway he or she wants.

After this drills, you want to increase the difficulty slightly. From the same basic position but two additional strides away from the player, the coach again rolls or bounces balls but this time the player must take three strides to retrieve the ball. The player strides with her glove side leg once, then again with the throwing side leg, then finally with her glove hand leg. Stay low! Then she fields the bounced or rolled ball.

If players do not take the right steps, I suggest having them walk through it once or twice, as needed. if she still struggles, stand in front of her with your back facing her. Then each of you do it as she watches you and makes sure she is doing the same thing as you. In the case of a three step drill, which is usually where the footwork first gets mixed up, I would make the demonstration while calling out 1, 2, 3. The turn around and watch her walk through it while you call 1, 2, 3.

You want to get as many reps as timne permits doing these drills. Once you have a reasonable number in, you can add to either or both drills by making players get into throwing position after fielding the balls. Again, a slow numbered walk through should teach the steps if anyone struggles.

If you only have time to do the first two drills, with no throw maneuver, because your time runs out, that's OK. Thge next time you get together, run through the basic drills quickly and go into the throwing maneuver next. Each time you work on backhands, begin with the basic drills for a couple warm-up iterations. Then go into the throwing maneuver. Next run these two drills with more than a mere throwing maneuver by having the girls make an actual throw to a point on a diagnonal from where they field the ball.

After this, assuming you have sufficient space, I would perform the same two basic drills but have girls make throws to each of the various bases from all the potential points on the field from which they would have to make such a play. After these drills have been run and only after they have been run, you can start to hit live balls for the purpose of reinforcing the fundamental skills in more realistic circumstances. At each of your practices in which you do the old normal ground ball drills, you should make a couple minutes freed to do some bakhand practice both from close points requiring a single step and from further out requiring more of a run. Obviously, with respect to your outfielders, the run should be much further. But your middle infielders need to learn to take several strides and then make a backhand play.

After you have done these things, you can get into more complex drills using backhands like diving for balls, getting up and making the throw. But for now, these very fundamental skills which are almost always neglected, should vastly improve your infielders' and outfielders' play.

Outfielder Drills

2010-01-22T06:29:00.000-08:00

If you came here to grab some outfielder drills, you may have come to the wrong place. What I mean is, I don't like to just list out and describe a bunch of drills so that you can quickly grab them for your practices. Rather, it is always my goal to make you think about things and understand an approach rather than merely provide a handy cheat sheet. It is more important and useful to understand the approach than it is to have a pocket full of drills for a particular part of the game.

I often get questions e-mailed to me like "can you give me some drills for (outfield, infield, catcher, pitcher)?" Sure, I can give you those drills but I don't need to - you don't need me to. That's because, if I give you some drills without explaining their objectives, you are not going to use them properly. If instead, I spur your mind to consider the goals of drills, you can adapt practices to cover goals instead of merely having a series of drills with nobody thinking about the goals.

For example, if we consider what we might do for a pitcher in terms of defense, I could say have her throw pitches and then hit balls at her. That's simple enough. But what we want to consider is the sort of defensive plays a pitcher might make, the skills needed to successfully complete such plays, and what we can do to instill the skills while correcting errors. If we do that, we first develop a list of situations, then we think about how we would like to see the desired outcome accomplished, then we develop the skill set required, and the drills just come to us. We might decide that balls would be bounced back to the circle with: 1) nobody on, 2) a force play at second or third, 3) no force play on but a runner on second or third, etc. We might then decide that the pitcher needs to be able to move left and right, make good throws to each of the bases, etc. We then can see that she must do these things after making a pitch. The drills we would use become obvious at this point. The same is true for other defensive plays made by the pitcher as well as every other position on the field. The drills we can use become obvious once we consider the various plays and skills needed to accomplish each.

Many times when a coach has a mere list of drills, he or she runs them as he or she believes they should be run but with several mistakes. Further, the drills are run without explaining the objective(s), without describing the manner in which the play should be made, and without adequate correction when fundamental mistakes take place. This is not just a less efficient way to run drills but also a great way to reinforce bad habits and to make sure the player(s) in the drills will never develop the desired skills.

What's worse is when a coach has a particular drill, doesn't understand the goals of it, and then tries to modify it to make it their own. Many times I have observed coaches take a very good drill, teach it badly, and then later try to adapt it to make it more meaningful or harder without ever considering what the goal of the original drill was in the first place. I'm not going to give you specific examples because it angers me when I contemplate this. Let's just say that I have coached many times when someone has either taken a drill from someone else and then run it almost completely wrong, or has taken the drill and tried to change it in order to accomplish some totally different skill unrelated to the objectives of the original drill. The result is a pile of mud and practice sessions which merely fill time and accomplish less than optimal skill development.

A common mistake is to combine several drills into one and thereby proceed with the mistaken assumption that you are covering all skills needed in the shortest possible amount of time. It is often OK to combine drills in certain situations but when you try to accomplish 4 goals in one drill that should be four, you often don't get the desired result. For example, let's say that you have a drill which teaches infielders to deal with short hops the way a corner infielder often must. You also have an ordinary ground ball drill. You have a quick release throwing drill and yet another drill for dealing with slow rolling balls on the ground. You could run four discreet drills, each taking 5 plus minutes, or you might combine all of them into a single one and do it for ten minutes. You saved 10 minutes by combining them and that means you get to do an additional ten minutes of batting practice later. But in the course of combining the drills, chances are pretty good that you will miss one of the goals of one of these drills, fail to teach one or more of the skills properly, and give your players too few iterations of the drill to instill the skills.

Many, many times, I have coached with someone who really liked my drills one year and the next decided that, in order to save time, they would rather combine things. The result is a single drill covering four or more skills which the other coach does not really understand or teach to the kids. The kids practice but they do not develop the skills. Everybody is happy until game time when those players can't make a good play on a ball stopped on the ground. The coach says, "but we practice that all the time." But the kid has not been taught the skill and has not had enough practice iterations working it to have made it part of her game.

Further, the logical extrapolation of combining various skills and drills into a single element of practice is to simply line up the kids in the field and then hit balls at them while expecting them to make the plays. That saves time, doesn't it? You hit the ball to a player while telling them to make the play to X base. They throw it in and then you hit another. Each kid gets five balls hit to them and every practice involves a different set of five such plays. That's just great! This approach is to be avoided. That's why we conduct drills in the first place. If you want to merely line the kids up in the field and hit balls to them for a half an hour or so, go ahead. See what the results are.

When you line kids up in the field and hit ball after ball, invariably something gets missed and you bore the kids to tears. I once talked with a girl whose team practiced this way. She told me that she would often get so bored after 15 minutes of just standing there that when her turn came, she wasn't paying attention or had gotten so cold that she couldn't make the plays the way she was supposed to. She noted that during many practices, the coach would forget about her and get so distracted that he actually forgot to hit her any balls at all! She suggested that this happened during more than half the practices. She came to think of practice as a time during which she had to stand in the outfield for half an hour before being sent to the batting cage to take some swings. That's an absolutely dreadful way to run a practice. By contrast, this girl who was then on our travel team would get completely exhausted at our practices while having to do 25 of this, 25 of that, 25 of some other skill, etc., etc. The two practices were so completely different that she could not contemplate the two as both being practices. One was practice, the other was a joke. And I hate to tell you what she thought of her coach as a result of the poor manner in which he conducted practice.

Today, we want to consider drills for the oufielder. So first let's consider the various plays she might make. Obviously, grounders, line drives, and fly balls might be hit directly at her, to her left, to her right, and over her head (at her, to the left, to the right). If the outfielder is RF, we must consider balls hit to the line that are fading - spinning away from her towards the line. If she is LF, we have the same issue but in the other direction.

RFs have to consider hard hit line drives which strike the ground in front of them on which they can make a play at first. LFs should consider the same play when runners are on first and second when there may be a play at third. They should also consider making a play with a runner on third when the ball is hit hard enough that the runner freezes and then heads for home right as the ball hits the ground.

In the case of both corner outfielders, we have the issue of flies into foul territory with runners on base tagging up. Tag ups are important to consider whether the ball is hit fair or foul but we want to make sure the OF considers and makes her throws on fly balls hit into foul ground. It is a fairly common mistake for OFs to forget about tag ups on foul balls. Obviously, we have to consider tag ups in general as well as those where the ball is hit into foul ground.

CFs have slightly different plays to make though many of them are very similar. Let's not forget that all OFs need to be able to vector a ball off the bat - from home plate - and that they must track balls while running over grass covered ground. Sometimes they must take their eyes off balls, run to a spot and then pick the ball up again.

With all the possible balls on which a play is made, we have to consider the various throws to bases. Each one requires different footwork. Each, arguably involves a different sort of throw. Each kind of play involves slightly different skills that need to be worked on. So the next element of coming up with some drills involves creating lists of the various plays and the skills we need to develop. Then we ought to be able to design drills for our practices and even come up with new ones on the fly in order to make practice more interesting and, therefore, meaningful.

I want to emphasize this point. When a practice involves everyone moving and being kept interested at almost all times, it is more fun, interesting for the players, and accomplishes more. If you have 12 girls standing in various places in the field waiting for their turn while each play involves just two of them, you have at least 10 bored girls at any given moment. If, instead, you provide just enough time for each kid to get her wind back before having to do something, you are running a better practice.

Many times, the OFs get the least amount of real consideration when their skills are contemplated. Some coach takes them all out to the outfield and hits fly ball after fly ball from one of the sidelines while the infielders work many and various complicated plays over and over again. There is a value to hitting fly balls to the outfield but they need more than that. A worse kind of "drill" occurs when all 8 or 9 defensive players are put into the field and each one gets a few balls hit at them. This is an OK pre-game warm-up but each and every practice cannot be conducted this way.

It would be better to design drills and keep all OFs moving for most of your practice time and then hit some flies towards thje end of a workout. For example, you might form a line in left and throw balls to the fence which after trying to catch them, they must retrieve quickly from the fence and then throw to a cutoff standing near the infield. In another drill, you might want the OFs to run with their backs to you and then pick up a ball hit or thrown high into the air. You may want to work hard hit balls hit right at them which will strike the ground before they get there and on which you want them to make a quick release throw to a base.

One of my pet peeves is when OFs are lined up in one place and a series of balls is hit to each in turn and the only emphasis is on the OF performing the loopy crow hop before throwing the ball back. Yes OFs need to learn the crow hop in relevant situations but that is not the only relevant footwork. How many times have you seen a RF make a play when she could get the runner at first but she does that OF crowhop and gets the ball there too slowly. Contrast that with those times when an infielder plays right and the same situation occurs. More often than not, the IF will get the out which the crow-hopping-trained OF cannot. In other words, your OFs need to do some short quick throws in their drills. In other words, you need to have a drill which teaches, emphasizes and reinforces making those short throws.

So I strongly suggest that rather than reading this and copying a set of drills to use in your practice, you step away from the computer with a couple sheets of paper and a pencil. Then jot down a list of plays you can come up with on your own. Now spend more time thinking about the skills need for each one. &nb sp; Then jot some short notes for some drills you would like to do. Now I'll do the same thing and here is a specimen workout for the OFs that I come up with:

1) Take all your OFs aaway from the IFs. Have them warm-up throwing balls back and forth from 40 feet, move back to 60 after 5 minutes, and then move back to 80 after another five minutes. Once they are reasonably warmed up at 40 feet, work in the footwork needed to make quick release throws. Correct players not doing it right.

I forgot to mention that you want to make sure you have ample room in which to work. The outfield while infielders are doing their own drills is probably insufficient. If you have two adjacent fields, take the OFs over to the vacant field. If your field does not have fences and instead has a large open grassy area, use that by moving far away from the IFs. If you are stuck in the OF of the only field your whole team has to practice on, there's nothing you can do so adapt accordingly.

When the girls are moved back to 60 feet while throwing, have players on one side throw line drives at their feet and have the other side field them like sharply hit balls on which they need to make a quick throw to the infield. Have them charge, scoop and quickly get into throwing position to throw the ball back to their partner. Then, obviously switch sides.

When the girls are 80 feet apart, have one side not throw the ball to the other player and instead have her bounce it to her partner. The retrieving side should make a play on the ball, crow hop, and throw strongly to the other side. Then switch sides. You now have fin ished 15 to 20 minutes of your OF workout.

After this throwing, you want to make the examples more extreme. You want girls to really run before retrieving balls and making throws. Line up girls at one spot and then move to a place 80 to 100 feet away from them. Cones would be useful to establish the line and a target point to which to run. each girl in succession runs at the target point and then when they get to a certain point, throw a ball into the air which requires the fielder to run hard in order to make the catch. Do this in each direction causing the fielder to make plays requiring a forward and backhand catch. This can be accomplished by you moving to another point after each girl has a turn in one direction. Emphasize hard running, not mere jogs. Make the plays somewhat difficult to make.

After this is done, you have another 10 minutes more of practice completed, bringing you to about the half hour mark. The next drill might be to keep the girls right where they are and move to a point from which you can throw pop flies in front of them which require a long run to catch. In each drill, you want to make sure that things move along quickly. You, the coach, should break a sweat. If you aren't sweating, you probably are not moving fast enough. RTe minutes more has passed and we are 40 minutes into the overall practice.

The next drill will involve less distance. Give each player a ball and have them each in turn throw it to you and then start running. You will throw it after about one or two seconds and then have them run the flies down. Do a turn throwing the balls to their right, another to their left, another directly over head, and several more varying where you throw the ball. This is another 10 minute workout and you should probably give them a couple minute break for water.

Once they are back, work some outfield fence plays. if you have a fence, try tossing the balls back to it and having the OFs make plays while finding the fence and catching the flies. Then work an outfield retrieval drill where they can't possibly make the catch and instead must race to the fence and then make a throw to another player. You are probably about an hour into practice and now you can liune the girls up to hit a series of fly balls.

If you are on a free field with nothing else going on, hit balls from home. Keep those girls who are likely to play corners in the corners and those likely to play center in center. Alternatively, you can have each rotate to the various fields after say 5 balls. Also, have some of your Ofs take turns covering bases and have your OFs make attempts at throwing to each. Do this sequentially so that each OF gets the opportunity to throw to each base except you don't really need to have CF and LF throw to first and your RF really should work on making a cutoffable throw when her turn to go to third comes. Hit the balls hard and then hit some soft ones. Hit balls directly at them and, if you are able into the gaps. Make sure that on every ball a girl is yelling for it. It is most common in this softball world for college and high school coaches to want their players to yell "ball, ball, ball" when calling for it. I suggest you use that. I don't really care for that - I'd prefer I got it. But when we coach,m we prep for the next level so use ball, ball, ball and don't try to fight city hall.

I suppose I forgot to work a drill into the early sequence which does nothing more than have OFs in two locations judge whether they should make a play or allow the other OF to make it. We do want to have such a drill and make sure that one girl is going for it and calling it while the other is backing up properly. If you forgot too, work it into your next practice. Don't just assume you will cover it when you hit to the whole field.

I suppose that when I go back and read this, I will realize that I forgot several drills. I don;t have time to list out every possible play, skill, and a drill for each. That is yet another reason I want you to use your own brains to develop drills. I doubt I have offered up anything here that you couldn't have come up with on your own no matter what your experience level is. So your takeaway from this piece is, sit down and make your own list of drills. If you have taken sufficient time and put in the effort, you will cover all the skills your OFs need. And if at some game or other situation, you realize that you have forgotten something, just add to your list and make sure you cover it in the next several practices.

As a final note, if you live in a cold region and are now working indoors, you should still take this approach. Works out the skills and design your own drills. You will do much better this way than you would by copying someone else's drills without understanding the objectives of each.

Have a good practice!

Set Sights, Do The Work

2010-01-20T06:37:00.000-08:00

Today I want to switch gears a little and talk about college softball recruiting a bit rather than discussing mechanical and practice issues, or getting into some arcane rule interpretation. In order to do that, I need to dispel some myths, correct what I see as mistaken impressions of a few friends, and throw some stuff at you second hand that I picked up as a result of discussions I had with people I believe to be in the know. My hopes are not that I will offer a thorough education of the process in its entirety. Rather, I hope to shoot enough buckshot at the wall to give you something you don't know, to correct a mistaken view or dispel a myth propagated by those who pretend to be in the know. I'm gonna stick to what I believe is the beaten path. I may repeat items I have written about in the past. OK, enough of that. Here goes.

Note that I refer to college recruiting not college scholarships. That is because college softball recruiting is about more than just scholarships. College recruiting is about playing college ball whether there is athletic money involved or not. Scholarships alone is a too limited view and I'll explain why in a moment. I will also state some obvious things about playing in college in order to explain why I am discuss recruiting generally and not merely focused on scholarships.

There are a finite number of college scholarships out there for softball players. D1 schools have up to 12 of these to offer. D2s have less but a fair number. D3s do not offer athletic scholarships. There are other scholarships available from junior colleges and schools not in the NCAA. But the total number is fixed and it is not a huge one when compared to the number of kids playing ball at fairly high levels and who aspire to play in college. Also note that if a school has 12 scholarships to give, it gives those to all four classes. So in any given year, a school with 12 has an average of 3 available, excluding obviously the renewal of existing ones.

Also, college athletic scholarships are often split into equivalency pieces. For example, one "scholarship" might actually be split into two or more partials, one kid getting 50%, another receiving 30% and still another getting 20%. Top, top players may get full rides but most others get partials of some percentage. I know of a baseball player who received something like 60% and then was able to cover another 10% with academic money. His family must pay 30% of the cost of attending that university. That's a far cry from 100% but each family knows what it can and cannot spend on education.

A very good softball player I know of received an offer of 50%. Often folks talk, and I know I have mentioned this before, about colleges spending their money first up the middle - pitcher, catcher, SS, CF. But that does not mean these four positions should expect full rides while the others should expect partials. That may, on the hole, represent the average but I know of players up the middle who got partials, sometimes small partials, and others not up the middle who received full or large percentage scholarships.

If you are not playing softball for one of the top 20 or so teams in the country, chances are very good that you will not obtain a full ride to play ball at Arizona, UCLA, Florida or one of the other perennial members of the top 25 D1 club. When I say top 20 teams, I mean Gold level national powerhouses. If you are playing for one of the teams in the next tier and are an impact player, you have a shot. but if your level has nothing to do with Gold, high level showcase ball, or some other recruiting animal that has a track record of placing their kids at the top schools on full ride, you have to either get yourself up into this upper echelon or set your sights on something else. If you are the number two shortstop on an ASA B team, in all likelihood, AZ is not going to be picking you up on their radar.

Secondly, if you are not really looking to get a full ride or any athletic scholarship money at all at a top 25 NCAA D1 school, if you are not even looking at D1 or D2, the field is fairly wide open but you need to set your sights and do quite a bit of work. If your goal is merely to play somewhere, you still need to look into this recruiting thing. I would not advise you to ignore the college recruiting world, choose your school, get accepted and then plan to walk on and make the team once you arrive. That is much harder than it would otherwise seem. And if, by chance, you do make the team, chances are not that great you'll ever get onto the field or up to the plate during actual games.

To prove the point about merely walking on vs. being recruited though offered no scholarship money, consider that someone who is asked to come to a party stands in at least a little better shoes than someone who invites themselves. If say a college coach with no money to offer but at a small school that has an impeccable academic record wants to field a reasonably competitive team, which most do. She has to find herself players at each of the nine positions who can actually play the game pretty well. She will attend the showcases and other recruiting events in order to find said players. She knows that her two best pitchers, catchers, or outfielders are graduating in 2010. She will attempt to entice the players she needs to fill those roles. If you happen to walk on at such a school and, for example, you are a catcher the year the school has two incoming freshman for that position, lets just say that the only icing of your catching hand you can plan on, if you are very lucky, is out in the bullpen or after practices. Besides, if a coach were to recruit kids while offering no scholarship money and then play some walk-on of approximately equal talent in front of a recruited kid, her other recruiting efforts would likely begin to shoot blanks as word of this began to spread.

I'm not saying that a college coach has a moral or other obligation to keep or play a recruited kid. I'm simply stating the obvious which is that people act in their own best interests and that includes a college coach with no money to offer who recruits kids to play on her softball team. I once had to listen to the complaints of a parent whose son tried to walk onto the baseball team at a D3 school. He was a good player. He had a good tryout. He estimated that he was better than all the other walk-ons (non-scholarship players). He didn't even get looked at. His father angrily told me that the results of the tryout had been pre-ordained. The coach knew who he was going to take before tryouts began. These were all freshman. How did the coach know about them before the tryout?!

So, recruiting is about playing, not merely about scholarships, not merely about D1 and 2, and not merely about going to those big name schools everybody with a TV set knows about. Recruiting is about playing just about any level of college ball. Recruiting is about a bigger world.

Next, college coaches do not cold call at high school games. I know I have told you this before but I find I need to mention it again because I heard someone recently claim I was wrong about this. I couldn't disabuse him of the notion so I need to vent again. Let's agree that from time to time, though rarely, a college coach will actually go watch a high school game. Chances are that such a coach will not be coming to watch your .500 team play a non-conference game against another .500 team on a cold, rainy day in May. They may go to watch a team play when a kid they are already recruiting is pitching, catching or playing SS in the state playoffs against some undefeated team who has an ace pitcher that is going to a rival school next year. In such instances, it is also likely that the college coach is visiting a sick Aunt who lives in the vicinity of your school field because she happens to be in town for a game at a nearby college tomorrow and she happens to have nothing else to do. It is conceivable that she will be impressed by a freshman catcher who throws everybody out and hits three homeruns during that game. She may make some inquiries. But she is not there to look at all the players and see if she can find a few recruits who just don't happen to play travel ball.

It is also extremely unlikely that any college coach is going to come prospect at your 16U PONY tournament in June after her team has put down their uniforms for the year. She will not be at the ASA B tournament that draws in the best town teams from at least 15 miles away. She probably won't be at the "showcase" event featuring teams from two states which occurs the same weekend something really big occurs someplace else.

As a side note, there is a fairly common misconception that kids who fly to the west coast, Florida, Colorado, etc. to play showcases are looking for full rides to PAC10, SEC, ACC, Big 10 or Big 12 schools. The assumption being that the local coaches within driving distance of my area wouldn't go out there to recruit kids. Aside from the fact that some small school located far from these showcases has an impact player from California, Florida, Texas or some other softball haven, coaches from all over the country populate these events. I know many kids who went or are going to various schools within 4 hours drive from their homes and would not have ever met them nor been recruited if they didn't make 4hour flights to be seen by the local college coach.

I have been to a few recruiting events here and there. I have seen smallish northeast schools in California and Florida, junior colleges from the deep south in New Jersey, etc., etc. I know from reviewing tournaments and showcases that there are small colleges from upstate NY who have been to big events more than a thousand miles from their schools. There are D3s from all over the country at Florida's Rising Stars showcases. There are noon-NCAA schools from the Midwest at California showcases. The point is, if you are seeking to be recruited by a small local school that does not give athletic scholarships, you may still have to travel far from home in order to get their attention. They do not restrict their recruiting efforts to an area within 4 hours drive of their schools.

To drive home the point, let's say that the best pitchers come from California or Florida. Now, assume that at a large showcase featuring 100 or more of the best teams in the country, there are 300 or more pitchers. All the D1 and 2 schools in the country cannot hope to absorb all these pitchers. But somebody will likely have some of these girls on their team. If a school of solid (decent to great) academic reputation but no athletic scholarship money can draw in one of these kids who happens to be better than anyone else pitching in their conference, do you think they might pick up such a scrap? Is that made more evident if you consider the kid needs no financial assistance and is looking to major in a subject for which the school is one of the best? What if, such a kid finds the school through her own efforts, writes to the coach requesting that she come watch her play while also telling the coach how much she wants to go to her school and why? Coaches at many and varied schools attend the big showcases. It is not merely the top 25 D1 schools who are out shopping in California, Florida, Texas, etc.

Well, that discussion involves a lot about some showcases and I don't want to go deeply into the general subject of showcase ball. I do want to firmly state that college coaches are not out watching high school games on cold calling visits looking to find prospects. They are also not just staying close to home. If you limit yourself to local high school ball or travel ball on the middle range, they are not going to find you no matter how good of a game, month, or season you have.

I think the contrary mythology has developed because, when you visit a college's web site and view news or profiles of incoming freshman and existing players, the girls' high school accomplishments are often listed while not much from travel ball is. Also, here and there folks will claim to have seen a college coach at their high school or B travel game. Many times the supposed college coach is some guy who nobody knows that came to watch his relative or friend's kid play while wearing clothing from his alma mater or a college team he follows.

I know a fellow who likes to go to local college games in various sports. When he goes, he gets "geared up" with sweatpants, sweat or t-shirt and cap sporting the school's logo. Sometimes he leaves the college event to go watch his daughter's high school sporting event. He does not change his clothes between events! He and I often have a good chuckle about how people give him the eye and watch everything he does in such instances. I sometimes find myself in these situations too! This fellow and I have joked many times about how one day we are going to put a stopwatch and clipboard, maybe radar gun, into our cars so that when this happens, we can really look like college coaches!!

I once noted some guy I was sure was from Providence (RI school) at a high school game. I knew a girl on one team playing had already verballed to that school and assumed this was the coach coming to see her play. Then later I saw him again so I asked the girl's father. He laughed and told me the man was some other kid's father and "he just loves Providence, especially their men's basketball team." On yet another occasion, I was watching some 18U travel games and saw somebody wearing college garb. I asked a parent who he was and they told me he was the uncle of one of the girls who had signed with that school. . He was so proud she had obtained a scholarship that he purchased all their clothing and wore it everywhere!

Enough about that. Now let's talk some more specific stuff for girls who are not top players for top teams playing a grueling showcase schedule against other top teams in front of huge throngs of college coaches. When you go to see showcases, clinics, etc., one thing should strike you. Some of these girls are absolutely unbelievable athletes. The remainder are pretty good but nothing all that spectacular. There are the best and then there are all the rest.

The best and all the rest principle is true at every level of play. It is true at top showcases, lower level ones, and clinics put on by colleges or others. It is pretty much true no matter where you go in the softball world. I really don't know how it is possible to distinguish between many of these kids in terms of playing abilities once you get past the obviously great players. Yet, some of the rest will get full rides to some schools. Others will get partials. Still others will be recruited and get campus jobs more easily than the rest of the kids or perhaps find certain arcane kinds of financial aid is available to them but not everyone at the school. Some will get into institutions they might not otherwise be able to achieve. Some will go to schools of their choice that provide no assistance whatsoever and become the third pitcher or back-up CF ahead of other kids of equal ability who tried to walk on without having been recruited.

So how did these kids get recruited when they do not stand out from the "all the rest" crowd? That's pretty easy, at least in concept. They figured out where they wanted to go, learned what they needed to do to gain favor, and then did the work necessary to go there while being recruited.

The first part of the equation involves choosing schools to target. When I was in high school, I had no idea where I wanted to college or what I wanted to do once I got there. That was truie right until the day I graduated and walked away from childhood. Kids need help narrowing the very large list of possible colleges because not only must they accomplish the task, it is better if they do it in say the freshman or sophomore years so they have more time to target the softball coaches.

What I would do to begin the narrowing process is to list a kid's academic strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, and potential areas for several possible careers utilizing her strengths. If you are strong in history and English comp, you should probably not target schools known mostly for their engineering programs. If a kid is very strong in math but says she wants to teach high school or something along those lines, you don't want to target Ivies or other schools that have no programs in her areas of interest.

Try to be as honest with yourselves as possible and narrow the list of schools down to the ones which might be the best fit academically, socially and otherwise. Some kids need to be at a relatively smaller school because that's her personality. When I jumped to college from high school, my HS graduating class was just over 400. The college I chose had class size of about 2,000. That was a good fit for me. My brother graduated from the same high school but he was unintimidated by large throngs. He went to a much larger school that had, I think, 10,000 or more per class. I have heard stories and seen personal instances of kids who do much better in very small setting but who went off to large state institutions and then had to leave because they just could not take it. It takes more than brains top make it at Princeton. You kinda, sorta have to fit in to the kind of people who typically go there. Very large institutions where they get 100,000 at home football games are not necessarily well suited to kids from high schools having class sizes of 100 or less. An extremely bright, borderline genius kid may not like a teaching college despite the significant athloetic money thrown at her.

There are more types of colleges than there are flavors of ice cream or ways to cook shrimp (ha, yet another Gump reference!). There are many schools out there that are possible success stories for your kid but you must pare it down to a reasonable figure focusing on schools that seem like a good fit. Once you do that, you can look to see if they have softball teams. Create a list of your schools and the reasons why they seem like a good fit.

As an aside, I would try to list out schools which are in reasonable proximity of you. You know whether you and your child enjoy 8 hour rides or not. You know if you should cross off this school or that because she does not want to commute under any circumstances and it would be silly to enroll at a school around the corner from you if she is adamant about staying on campus. By contrast, a school as close as 30 miles can still be OK for staying on campus if they provide housing for kids that close.

Choose schools that will accommodate a kid who wants to change her major from English to Biology if your kid is strong in all subjects and is perplexed about whether she wants to write the great American novel or cure cancer. If your child is strong in science but may want to be a science teacher, make sure the colleges you choose have that available.

Also, be aware of the approximate cost and available, non-athletic aid at each school on your pared down list. Add a field for these figures noting the date on which you made the note because these kinds of things can change. Some schools' costs increase more rapidly than others. Some may lose or have lost a good portion of their endowments due to bad financial times. They very possibly may cut aid in the future. You'll want to re-verify your figures as time moves forward. Generally having these figures to reference will be a good aid to your decision making process but you will need to update them next year.

Now that you have your list of schools, the reason you (your child) would like to attend each one, whether they have softball or not, and the costs associated with each, start contacting the ones which do have softball. If you are a freshman trying to get recruited for softball, there isn't much reason to contact schools that don't have the sport, at least not until you are a junior. Don't drop them off your list but there's no reason for a freshman to contact a college so early except for the purposes we are discussing.

The best ways to contact college coaches at your schools of choice are via e-mails but before you start doing this, do the following:

1) Get registered with the NCAA Clearing House at NCAA.org
2) Look for, complete and file any prospective athlete questionnaire the ionsitution has online. If you don't find such a document after much effort, go ahead and contact the coach bec ause they will probably send you one.
3) Create some sort of record-keeping method via spreadsheet or written page on which to note dates and responses of your college contacts and keep it updated as the process moves forwards.

You most likely can find an e-mail address for most of the coaches you need to contact on the University's web site. Some few have forms to use in order to e-mail coaches. &n bsp; You can write your message offline and then use the form once you are ready.

Before you send an e-mail, it would be a good idea to not see this like texting or your other e-mail correspondence. Write out what you want to say as if you are writing an essay for school. The student-athlete should write the message but parents must review the writing before it goes out. Parents who write such e-mails should go over them with their daughters and allow her to change word choice to something she is more comfortable with. The coach knows he or she is dealing with a 14 or 15 year old kid. They do not expect advanced legalize from high school kids. And they are looking to connect with the kid, not the parent. They are also seeking kids who are mature enough to handle tasks like this.

Your first e-mail communication should tell the coach some things about yourself like why you want to attend their school. You are selling (I guess almost recruiting) them. Don't simply tell them that they have a wonderful softball program or you like their logo or mascot name. Tell them you want to go there because of their academic record and the fact that they are strong in the majors you are considering. Tell them that you expect to be able to have your application for admission accepted when it comes time for that because you fit their student profile. If you have a 100 average in honors mathematics or took the PSAT early and scored very high, you can tell them that, if you think it is important to establish your bona fides academically because this school has such high standards. As I understand things, Ivy League schools will not consider girls who have not yet taken the SATs. But many softball programs obviously will actively recruit kids who seem to have their academic houses in order long before they sit for entrance exams.

If you are going to play some showcases and suspect that the college coaches you are writing to may be in attendance, I strongly suggest that either in this first e-mail or in another sent shortly thereafter, you draw attention to the coach that you will be playing. Provide them with more than your name, the team name, and your uniform number. If you have a copy of your schedule, send them that, including times, places, and opponents. Let them know if your coach is amenable to putting girls into the lineup to allow college coaches the opportunity to see them. Some coaches are not and I suggest you get away from them since showcase ball is about, um, showcasing, not winning. If your coach finds it perfectly acceptable to be asked to put a player in just for the coaches, invite the coach to inquire if he or she does not see you on the field.

As an aside, I am rather serious about getting away from showcase coaches who won't put you in, maybe even get offended, when college coaches ask to see you. This is no way to coach a showcase team. Folks who cannot accommodate such requests should find another hobby. I recognize that there are many coaches out there who are like this. I just don't understand it. There are times when a team must show that it can play competitively to remain in a showcase in following years or to hold onto good field placement. But coaches on teams charging perhaps thousands of dollars, which deprive you of the opportunity of being seen when college coaches ask, should be avoided. Better yet, make sure everyone in your area knows that the ultra-expensive team repeatedly turned down college requests. They soon won't have a team to play and that should open the field up for another, more well run one.

At this particular juncture, I would like to raise a subject which relates to the topic and which I found rather interesting. I recently attended a brief recruiting seminar conducted by an organization promoting a new tool for aspiring college softball recruits. When I first heard about the tool, I must admit that I was not optimistic. I felt it was just a web site for putting video tapes and opther information online at a cost, a cost I was not willing to pay. I believed it was put together by some local coaches in order to make money from college softball recruiting. My understanding, if you can call it that, was corrected at the seminar.

The web site is Fastpitch Online Showcase (http://fastpitchonlineshowcase.com). The organization which runs the site held a "college showcase" event which was run like many of the camps and combines. Players performed certain drills, pitchers pitched under the radar gun, catchers popped under the stopwatch, hitters hit, all while being videotaped. The tape of the "showcase" in its entirety is being placed online for college coaches to view for the next month. Folks involved in the showcase suggested, though never stated, that a bunch of college coaches would be in attendance. I signed my daughter up purely to get the experience of participating in a combine setting, not to get in front of college coaches. Some folks made public inquiries as to whether there would be coaches actually in attendance or not. They rightly suspected that there would be few. I believe there were 4 or 5 actually on site.

But this thing was not some local get-rich-quick or fundraising scheme. And it was not intended to draw in tons of coaches. It was really intended as a sort of introduction to this new service. And, at least on the surface, these service, the web site, and the costs associated with it, would appear to be very reasonable. The idea in everything we have said up to this point is, most of the girls aspiring to be recruited for softball need to make connection with coaches and get the coaches out to see them play. This service is designed for that purpose. They have a database of schools and the e-mail contact info for those schools' coaches. The site itself offers up space to hold and present a fixed number of videos to use in order to draw the coaches in. They provide guidance on how to go about making connections with the coaches. They also can videotape players to make recruiting tapes to place on the web site.

I'm going to leave it at that because i want you to do your own homework on http://fastpitchonlineshowcase.com. As of this writing, I am not subscribed to the service and I am not making any sort of income from mentioning it. I merely came upon it and want to bring it to your attention for further investigation. if you do subscribe and have positive or negative feedback, I invite you share it with me.

So the idea is to develop a list of schools and then contact the college coaches. make this a personal message. Don't write some canned message and then personalize it with a "Go Fightin' Randoms" phrase thrown in to convince the coach that you have school spirit. if they have a beautiful campus and everybody knows that, tell the coach that you know that. if their engineering program is world renowned let the coach know that is why you want to go there. A college professor once told me that everybody has some one thing good about themselves. At times, with certain people, I have come to doubt that. But when one is courting another, it is customary to offer a compliment or flattery of reasonable measure in order to win them over. On the other hand, canned "lines" usually end up getting you soaked by a thrown drink. Be smart. Otherwise, maybe college is not for you!

If you have a video, I suppose you could mail it to the coach. Video is a great way to show your skill level. But the guy or gal making the decisions usually does not view every softball tape that the school receives. If someone is viewing it, it is probably an assistant chosen to screen such things before the head coach wastes their time. Your tape may very well end up in a box on the floor. The actual physical videos can be rather expensive when you have to send out 20 or more of them. It may be unproductive and inefficient to send hard copies. Instead, many kids today put their vids on Youtube or other types of web sites. That can be much more efficient assuming you can get coaches to go and watch it. That is really what the previously mentioned web site is all about and I agree with their premises on this. They believe it would be far more productive to place your vid where other softballers have theirs. It is hard to refute that logic.

Either in your first e-mail correspondence with the coach or in subsequent ones, it would be good to send along a link to your videos. This way the coach can quickly determine if there is any chance that you are a prospect. They probably won't come right out and say anything since their communication to you is very limited. Don't take it one way or the other if you don't hear back from them regarding your video. Instead, keep reminding them of it and you by e-mailing them once every month or something like that. An remember that the objective is to get them out to see you in person. So, if you are going to attend a showcase, one of the NFCA recruitment camps, or some such, write them with your schedule, etc., invite them to come watch you, and remind them about your video. If they come out and see you, you have succeeded. If they don't, ask again next time. You aren't badgering them unless they have somehow communicated that you are wasting your time. E-mails are easy to delete. Addresses can be presorted into junk or other folders. It is not as if you are calling them each day as they walk into their office or get up to leave for lunch. It is just an e-mail. It can be removed with one click of the mouse. And, if you are e-mailing a link to your video, you are not junking up their small office or desk area with something which merely collects dust and must be cleaned after they get over their bout with the swine flu.

In summary, evaluate your station in life - your place on the rungs of the softball ladder. Select a list of schools that fit you on a number of levels. Contact the coaches and do so repeatedly, preferably by e-mail. Get them to come out and see you. Be on your best behavior and show them what sort of person, student, and teammate you are. And once you have done this successfully, be wide awake for any clues as to interest level they provide you.

If you have asked a coach to come and watch you, she does, and she invites you to a clinic, go to it. If you invite her and she comes and then you invite her again and she comes, there's a good chance she saw something in you - assuming there is not some other kid doing the same and she is really there to see them. If she invites you to a clinic, there are 80 other kids there all of whom play your position, two of these are called over to a station where the coach watches them closely while you are not, most likely she is not interested. That doesn't mean you should stop recruiting her. But it may be your clue that perhaps you should not get your hopes up and perhaps should look in other directions. In some cases, coaches at these clinics will tell a kid outright that she does not fit the profile they are looking for. In many cases in which kids are singled out for closer looks, coaches do not communicate their interest immediately or directly. You have to read between the lines some. The process can be disconcerting but that's the way the real world is. You can try directly communicating with the coach and asking outright whether she has any interest. But I'm not sure this is the right way to go about things.

The one thing perhaps you should avoid once you begin walking the path is any direct questions about athletic scholarships. You should already know whether the school gives any athletic money. You should also have gained an understanding of the sort of kids they recruit. If you are likely to merely be a pre-arranged "walk-on," you probably can gauge that for yourself. You can ask coaches about financial aid questions without bringing up athletic money. They may or may not respond with direct answers to your direct questions. Everybody is different. But as with courtship, the idea is to engender interest before we get down to prenups.

OK, so that's what I have to tell you today. I hope there is something in it which you have not considered before. When I take the time to go to a tournament or seminar, my hopes are that one thing stands out as a take-away. I threw a lot of stuff up in order to hopefully get you one thing you didn;t know or correct something you had wrong. I'm not an expert. I am merely a person like you who is interested in sharing what I learn. I hope you got something out of this. If you already heard everything I had to say, sorry to have wasted your time. If you have something to add, write me. Just please don;ty write me stories about how some kid got discovered and erose to be the ace pitcher for Arizona when the coach there read about her in the paper or saw her at a high school game. I don't want anecdotal exceptions. I want some principles others can follow.

Under / Over Opinions

2010-01-19T06:37:00.000-08:00

I begin today by recounting one of the most ridiculous comments I have ever heard. Some bright person suggested that pitchers could gain significantly by engaging in a sport which would result in a sort of "over training" that would improve their strength while enhancing their windmill motion. The sport of choice? Bowling! As I said, that is a ridiculous assertion. Another assertion of far less dubious distinction but wrong, nonetheless, is the suggestion that pitchers would benefit tremendously by training via long distance running. Finally, the over training practice commonly used which really gets me nervous involves using a 12 ounce ball to pitch under the assumption that throwing with a much heavier ball will vastly improve speed. Yes, over training does build strength and can improve stamina and speed. But this must be done sensibly and demonstrate a higher degree of common sense than that evident in some of the foregoing.

Let's quickly dispense with the idea that bowling is a reasonable training activity for windmill pitchers. To begin with, think hard about the movement of the bowler and how that differs from the movement of the windmill pitcher. The bowler rests the ball in her hand with the palm facing skywards and the fingers hooked into holes drilled into the rather heavy ball. She aligns her body so as to allow her arm to swing down and place the ball in the right visual tunnel - just about the same one every time. She walks rhythmically forward to gain some momentum, steps forward and places the ball down as she swings her arm forward in a measured manner, spinning the ball with her stiff wrist so as to hit the pocket in the right place and hopefully knock all the pins down. She gauges her speed so as to get the movement just right in an effort to hit the same place just about every time. She does not roll the ball as hard as she possibly can or even close to that. The spin she creates is the result of releasing the ball with her hand to the side of it and sweeping the hand upwards in a "shake hands" position as she follows through.

Now contemplate the windmill pitcher for a moment. She does not walk forward because that is not permitted. She must obtain momentum via weight shift and a minor sort of rocking (fallling?) forward into a single stride. She opens her shoulders and hips about 180 degrees. She raises her arm as quickly as possible over her head and then downwards through the release point - something no bowler would do absent some mood altering ingestion.

The ball wrests more in her fingers than in her palm the way a bowling ball is held. She alters her arm angle ever so slightly and uses her fingers and wrist to spin the ball. If she is throwing a plain fastball, she may cock her wrist backwards and then as she comes to the release point she snaps the wrist to get the greatest possible spin and speed on the ball. If she is throwing a movement pitch, she will alter her wrist cock accordingly but then, again snap the ball so as to get the greatest possible spin of the desired type. The fingers play a much greater role in spinning the ball. And the wrist is loose, not stiff, as it snaps.

If a bowler did an arm movement like a windmill pitching at any point, she would injure her arm and possibly other body parts. If the windmill pitcher threw like a bowler, she would be slow and get little advantageous movement on the ball.

Bowling and windmill pitching have very little in common. The largest similarity between the sports is they both use a ball. They both involve converting inertial force into a thrown object though, in the case of bowling, speed doesn;t fit anywhere into the equation. Maybe the only other similarity is they involve somewhat, though not totally, similar underhand movements. I can throw a bowling ball down the ally as hard as anyone I know. When I bowl, people often stop and watch. Then they giggle. And the scoresheet shows the futility of a fast-bowled ball.

The stiff wrist is critical to bowling. It would be a killer in fastpitch. Bowling with the fingers used similar to windmill would result in nothing less than a bloody bowling ball. I don't care to go on about the differences between the sports. As I said, it is an absurd comparison. But the thinking behind it really stems from the theory of over-training which tells us that doing something a little more than usual will build the strength necessary to get stronger at the desired activity. And that generally is a correct approach, depending on what it is you are trying to improve.

The second assertion of using long distance running to improve pitching, or any sort of play on the softball diamond for that matter, is one I criticize carefully. Running a mile or two, maybe more, regularly is a very important part of healthy living and should be encouraged for any athlete. Every person who steps onto any athletic field is made better by being in better shape. Running for conditioning purposes can help an athlete in so many ways that I cannot possibly hope to list them all. But from the perspective of merely improving the play of an otherwise in-shape softball player because it will somehow make them stronger or better at some skill, well, that is a wrong assertion.

Fastpitch softball is a sport which requires many very short explosive movements. The longest duration of any exercise might be when playing on a field with no outfield fence and a ball is hit well over the outfielder's head. Either the kid who runs out the homerun or the outfielder pursuing the ball gets a sustained exercise of perhaps 12-15 seconds. Of course, the outfielder will switch out of adrenaline mode if she finds herself sprinting to retrieve the ball for more than about 6 seconds, knowing, as she does, that they ain't gonna get nobody out on this play! The baserunner will not likely be able to leg out a homerun if it takes her more than say 14-15 seconds no matter how far she hits the ball. So the longest possible exertion is perhaps 15 seconds.

A maximum 15 second assertion which requires sometimes rapid recovery stands little to gain from greater cardio-vascular health. Track sprinters at say the 100 meter distance do not spend a lot of their effort to run distances of say five miles and thereby improve their cardio. Sure, they're in great shape and that is necessary. But when they are working towards better outcomes in competition, they focus on explosion and repeating short sprints rather than performing marathons. That's not really a question. An athlete doesn't even really use the same systems for generating energy for the muscles when she performs a 10 second sprint vs. when she runs for a several minutes.

When swimmers train for their particular distance, the sum total of their training may involve a pretty good number of yards or meters. But for someone who sprints in their races, that long total distance results from many shorter sprints. They do perform over-training but, for example, someone who races at say 100 or 200 meters, is likely to perform race-level training at perhaps 25% to 75% of the race distance repeatedly with short amounts of rest between each rep. When reps at say 500 meters are performed, the swim usually involves some sort of stroke mechanics concentration or shorter sprints during the rep and slow downs in between. So even when the athletic endeavor involves over-all longer periods of time, the training does not involve significantly greater than the race distance.

Power lifters, for example, who lift say 300-400 pounds in their particular exercise do not perform 30 rep sets at one tenth to one quarter the goal weight of competition lifting. They do perform rep lifting to improve strength, recovery and general conditioning. But using one quarter weight in order to extend the exercise to use body systems never used in competition is largely a waste of time. That's true in almost every sport one can imagine. Fastpitch should not be considered any different.

Many pitchers do in fact use their legs. Leg strength is important if the pitcher relies upon it to generate speed. But given the nature of the sport, the leg part of the exercise during game conditions involves quick, very short bursts repeated about 10-20 times with about 10-30 seconds of rest between reps, followed by about a 5-10 minute rest during which no exercise occurs - unless of course the pitcher hits the ball over the outfielder's head and needs to leg out an extra-base hit. Then, of course, the pitcher repeats this routine until she is driven out of the game or it ends. Without judging the practice, if a pitcher is one of THOSE aces, she perhaps has to repeat this routine for as many as 300 iterations of the pitch in a day. The typical pitcher probably has to perform the exercise 100 plus times a day, possibly two or more days in a row.

I am not sure I see how running 5 miles per day, 4 or more days per week really helps the pitcher in the performance of her duties. It cannot hurt to be in shape for many reasons. But one does not develop the capacity to maintain speed through the explosion-recovery-explosion routine, no matter how many times it gets repeated, by running long distance. You don't even use the same muscle fibers in the two activities. Notwithstanding Forrest Gump's fictional accomplishments on the football field as well as those on the open road, someone who explodes in motion needs those fast twitch muscles to be developed well in excess of the longer twitch ones.

My conclusion is running is generally good to get an athlete or anyone in shape, though we won't address the impact on the joints of running on macadam. Athletes in this sport never run more than 240 feet. Far more commonly, they run 60-120 feet, even when they play the outfield. Therefore, it is common to see softballers limit their running distance to repeated sprints of 60 feet or less. I have seen both pitchers and other players perform sprints as short as 10 feet in speed-agility training. Yes, many college and high school softball athletes have coaches who make them run distance to get in better overall shape. But this is mostly wasted effort, not to mention time, if the athlete is already in good shape and the desired outcome from the exercise is explosiveness - faster pitching, faster running, better outfield performance, etc.

Taking a step back and looking just at the outfielders who are perhaps the only athletes on the field whose actual game benefits at all from distance running, in my humble opinion, their running should be done on surfaces similar to the outfield itself, i.e. grass of somewhat uneven nature. The reason outfielders benefit from running is because they must learn to run while keeping their heads quiet in order to vector balls in flight. By contrast, no matter how good of a distance runner a player is, if she bobs her head or allows it to bounce when she runs, she will have trouble tracking balls in the outfield.

Rather than having outfielders run miles on blacktop, I would prefer to have them run sprints between foul lines in the mid outfield with somewhat minimal recovery periods. Those runs would be over training for the outfielders. They're probably too long. You would perhaps get better results by limiting them to runs from the foul line to dead center since they'll never have to run any further than that. More importantly, the runs involve a realistic surface. And if they have to track balls towards the middle and end of that sprint, that would be best.

Personally, I would rather just put outfielders in the field and hit or throw balls to them for long periods of time to combine explosion-recovery-explosion training with other skills like tracking and mechanical issues at the same time. What is more critical to me than any outfielder's need to be in good distance running shape is her ability to keep her head virtually motionless when chasing line drives and flies. Good distance runners often keep their head motionless to conserve energy. But simply having your outfielders run distances is not going to engender that particular behavior.

Finally, I have seen large numbers of girls warming up or training while using those overweighted balls. I have a set of balls which range in weight from 8 ounces up to 12. The regulation fastpitch softball is 6.8 ounces. These we9ighted balls can be purchased individually or in a set of progressively heavier balls. The cannonball weighted training softball is often seen at fields and practice tunnels. Those weigh about 16 or so ounces, more than double the weight of a softball.

I do not have a problem with pitchers or others using over-weighted balls to train for softball but the way they are used often makes me nervous. I haven't read the literature for the cannonball but I have for other brands of weighted balls. And this literature advises against performing full windmill (and other throwing) motions while using weighted balls. Rather, the manufacturers encourage users to do motion isolation drills - partial motions - with their products. They do this for a particular reason - lawsuits. They don't want the legal liability when someone gets injured or perhaps ends their career by blowing out a shoulder while performing full windmill pitches with their product. That should tell you something.

The manufacturers tend to suggest certain specific, very limited drills like wrist snaps. Others who advise about how to train pitchers and others warn in all CAPS or boldly against overuse, more than 15-20 throws per session. For this, I am going to be a little over cautious. I don't think anyone should do a full windmill with a 12 ounce or bigger ball. My reason for taking this approach is I want all pitchers to do what they can to avoid injuries because the quickest way to make your pitching speed drop off is to be forced to undergo surgery followed by a months long rehab.

I really do want pitchers to get faster. But as I look out onto the vast pitching world, I seldom, if ever, see a perfect or near perfect motion. Actually it is a rare occurrence when I observe pitching motions that I do not see something that can be corrected which would yield better speed. So my suggestion is, before you go try to find something that will yield you greater speed, take care of the little things. Work on your mechanics. Then, take a look at the pitching motion as a whole and figure out what it is about it that can yield you greater speed.

There are few people in this sport who would dispute that pitching speed comes largely from the first and last parts of the motion. Some would deny that the beginning, the legs, provide much speed. Some emphasize the legs more than the arms towards the end. But almost nobody suggests that it is the in-between that generates the greatest speed. Yet, when you use weighted balls for a full motion, you are working the middle part in a manner which may be dangerous to your body.

I suggest to you, and here I have to steal from one visitor with whom I have frequent exchanges, that the windmill motion is a bullwhip. It begins with the biggest, heavy part of the body exploding into motion. The inertial force of the body created via the legs at push off is roughly equivalent to the first motions of a bullwhip - when the user thrusts the handle forward before creating the whipping movement.

To be clear, the in-between stuff is largely a harnessing of this inertial force. It isn't unimportant but it is not some weight-lifting move. It is the mechanics of the body as the force is run from the handle down towards its end point that are more important than strength. A good circle is very important to speed. But you do not need super strong (over-trained) muscles to accomplish the task.

On the other side, as the arm comes towards release point, the inertia moves towards the tip of the whip. Here muscular explosiveness again comes into play as the bicep and other arm muscles are invoked to transfer the inertial force to the finger tips as the ball is released. Obviously, weighted balls do not help the leg explosion. The weight of an over-weighted ball, used in a full windmill, wears on the shoulders and other body parts as the mechanics convert the body's inertia towards its end point. And then, at the end of the motion as the arm comes forward and the forearm muscles are invoked, this is where we tend to see weakness in the human body and precisely here that we need to work muscles, as well as mechanics, to realize greater speed.

Many folks in both baseball and softball mistake the weighted ball for some kind of panacea to improve throwing speed and strength. If that were the valid, then baseball players would be able to throw tennis balls very far and softball players would be able to really make a mark throwing a baseball. It doesn't work that way. If you were limited to throwing softballs for a long period of time and then picked up a baseball, I suggest that you would be very uncomfortable throwing the smaller ball. Maybe I don't need to tell you this. Maybe you have already tried it. I have. I used to love throwing a baseball. But after years of throwing with my kids using the 11 inch and then 12 inch ball, I hate throwing that little baseball. It feels awkward in my hand but more to the point, its lighter weight sort of bugs me. I might be stronger than I was but my mechanics for throwing the baseball are so messed up that I completely spaz out. I think I can actually throw the softball almost as far as a baseball. That shouldn't be true using the over-training logic. But it is true.

I read a comment on some product-buying web site made by a person who had purchased over weighted balls for training. That comment said, "Good way to warm up quickly ... compare it to swinging a heavy bat before batting." Do you use a heavy bat before stepping up to the plate? How much heavier? Does it work for you? Really? What does it do?

Guys in the big leagues use heavy bats, sometimes a mere steel rod, before stepping up to the plate. I suppose that after all the effort and money that is put into the sport, this must work and be important. But what are they doing when they swing the steel rod? The only thing they are doing is loosening up their bodies to prepare to swing their real bats. Anyone who picks up a very heavy bat and tries to improve their timing by swinging in the on-deck circle using that heavy bat as the pitcher pitches is fooling themselves. The timing of a swing has more to do with decision making than it does with being able to swing something heavy. If anything, you might mess up your timing by swinging too heavy of a bat because you are conditioning yourself to make a decision far too early. This is why I have never purchased my kids a donut or one of those weighted sleeves to place on their bats. I can see using a weight to loosen up but once you are loose, take the darn thing off and take some swings using your real bat by itself.

A worse practice involves dry swinging a significantly heavier bat than the one you use in games during the off season to build strength. When you do this, you are altering your swing mechanics - the more important element of a powerful swing. You are transferring weight to parts of the body in greater proportion than they will be used when you actually step up to the plate. If you use to much weight to train with, your swing is going to be all out of sync when you use an unweighted bat in games and scrimmages.

I suggest that a one ounce difference will give you all that you need. That means using a 32 ounce not a 34 ounce practice bat if you use a 31 in games. That means not taking a bunch of dry swings using a weight during the off season. I have nothing against bat weights used to loosen up briefly but don't think that a singles hitter will become a homerun goddess by using 4 or more ounces on her bat during the off season. The effect of using a significantly over weighted bat beyond the mere loosening steps is mostly psychological.

Moving back to pitching, a very slightly heavier ball may offer some over-training benefits especially for pitchers who have very good mechanics - a rare occurrence. Rather than buying 12-, 16- or more ounce balls, you can really make your own device without much effort. If you take very small nails and pound them into regulation softballs, you can create your own weighted balls. (Do I need to mention that there are benefits of using a real ball? The weighted softballs I bought are somewhat difficult because the seams are not raised the way real balls are. When you use them too much, you can lose the feel of the real ball.) So if you take real balls and put very small weights inside them, you can get a little over-training without endangering your body, with very little cost, and without loosing the feel of the ball. Very small nails (I don't know what they are called) can be pounded into ordinary balls at the holes for the seams. You can take a 6.8 ounce ball and turn it into a 6.9 or 7 ouncer. That really should be sufficient.

It is worth noting that most of the pitchers I see trying to use heavy balls to increase speed tend to be relatively slower pitchers. That is, they do not throw 65. They want to head in that direction. So they try whatever they can find in an effort to improve their speed. I cannot remember the last time I saw a really fast pitcher working with a weighted ball other than in the early stages of a mere warm-up when they are just waking up their muscles.

Fast pitchers have things which make them throw fast. They may have bodies made for the purpose - for example those 6 foot tall girls with long arms and fingers (i.e. longer bullwhips). They may have superior mechanics - this is probably the most common cause of speed. They may have a relatively high percentage of fast twitch vs. slow pitch muscle fibers. They may have developed their fast twitch muscles rather than the slow twitch ones. They may have built up their muscles for fast pitching through many, frequent, effective practice sessions while using proper mechanics since they were pretty young. But most likely, they did not achieve speed through weight-lifting of any particular sort.

I entitled this piece "Over / Under" and you may have noticed that the primary focus is "over." I'm not all that sure what to say about "under training." I sduppose I addressed it inadvertently when I discussed working explosive movements like softball players doing 10-15 foot sprints. I think under training has a similar place in sport as over training. Generally, the effects are psychological. Sometimes there can be real physical advantages but they aren't quite as powerful as some seem to think.

If you are used to swinging a 32 ounce bat, you train adding several ounces to it for dry swings, your real bat probably feels like an under training. Your bat speed will be very fast relative to the heavier bat. Similarly if you never add a single weight to your bat but, instead, train by using a light bat, your swing will should be quicker. Some folks like to use this technique - not necesasarily for swinging - in order to generate explosive speed in various movements. For example, some pitching coaches and trainers try to improve arm speed by having pitchers work with lighter balls.

I don't really know if this approach works. I suppose it could but I think the difference is, again, psychological. In track, swimming, and certain other sports, the athletes taper down their practice loads as championship competition approaches. This has physical effects as well as psychological ones. I suppose the physical effects are more important but I never want to devalue psychological impacts. By the time one enters the competition, one is about crazed by the lack of work. I remember as a swimmer that I felt as if I was going to kill someone if I wasn't allowed into the pool to compete.

Another thing swimmers do aside from tapering down their workouts is to shave their bodies under the theory that it cuts resistance in the water. I don't know in quantitative term s how much this matters. But I can tell you that cutting your head hair down to the nubs or shaving your head and then removing all or most of your other body hair does make you feel different in the water. I remember in college swimming in the conference championship meet. I placed fourth or fifth in the preliminaries. Then, we we came onto the pool, the guy who had finished behind me in prelims had shaven his head before the finals and removed I suppose most of the rest of his body hair. I had spent my time more wisely, going out into the Bronx and finding some low-life bar and pool hall in which to spend my meal money. I beat baldy by quite a bit. His time was slower in the finals. Mine was faster.

So under training may have some beneficial results but I think much of this is tied to the psychological. The one exception to this, I believe, happens when one is working fundamentals like pitching or swing mechanics. I believe that an athlete can work on mechanics without the tools and thereby help to train the body to perform better. I have used this in swimming, baseball and football. For example, I believe I greatly improved my ready position at linebacker and my stance for both offensive and defensive line by practicing it and moving from it without any equipment on, while working in front of a large mirror.

I was once putting too much weight on my fingers in down football stances. Coaches corrected me but the final result, which they highly approved of, involved putting too little weight on the hands. They wanted my head way up but once I started working this on my own, I quickly saw that I was not in a good explosive position. Working off the field, out of gear, gave me the best tool to fix my stance. I did the same thing for swimming my main stroke, butterfly, an d vastly improved it. Also, working in front of a mirror without gear or a ball in my hand was a far better way to improve my catching mechanics. I imagine the same is true for windmill pitchers - although it is very difficult to get girls to work their mechanics on their own, in front of a mirror because they feel stupid doing so.

When we use video to show a player major things she is doing wrong - not when we break down the smallest aspect of, for example, a swing - we are really doing something that could be done in front of a mirror. And if a kid under-trains by performing a swing or her windmill motion without a bat and ball, I think she can condition her muscle memory almost as well as she can on the field. I expect this can be accomplished with an underweight ball but I hesitate to suggest either that or a significantly underweight bat. There are just too many risks associated with this practice.

So in summary, I believe there are benefits to both under- and over-training. Those benefits are somewhat limited and these techniques need to be used sparingly and intelligently. No pitcher is going to get anything out of using a bowling ball! I hope I have explained myself well here but if you have questions, comments, etc., please feel free to write in with them. The only thing I ask is that you do not simply provide your opinions or tell me how you think it is OK for pitchers to throw full windmill using a 16 ounce ball. I have, I think, made clear why I am against this. I would prefer to be pointed to scientific studies which refute my opinions rather than merely consider contrary points of view.

Some Common Catching Mistakes

2010-01-15T05:11:00.000-08:00

Most fundamental mistakes, though certainly not all, begin at one's connection to terra firma, the feet. From there, the most common mistakes move up to the general stance though many of these are caused by the positioning of the feet. And then there are the little nagging habitual nuance type problems that plague most, if not all, players. The Catching position is no exception to this general rule.

Catchers make all sorts of big and little mistakes. But what I guess bothers me is many of these are actually taught by a majority of team coaches. No team coach can possibly know every position and I doubt many individuals can be a real expert in even one position. As team coaches, we have so much to be concerned about that it is virtually impossible to focus enough on one position that we become masters of all there is to know about it. Yet many coaches presume to know their most critical positions which undoubtedly includes the catcher. The reason private coaches exist in our world is that these individuals focus on one aspect of play, teach it, and then adjust their own thinking in accordance to results and the different opinions of their peers, or at least they should do this. If we team coaches presume to know a single position and teach what we know to our charges, it is critical for us to really study all the varying opinions about different nuances private coaches teach. we must approach the subject with humility. We must really think things through before we teach and then instill a habit to the play of our charges.

Like I said, there are a number of common mistakes catchers make. Today, I want to go over some of these. But rather than start with the feet and work upwards, I want to do the reverse. I want to go over some finer points and then drop back into the larger fundamental issues because I believe this 9is the right way to have you really consider some of the important issues.

First of all, I start with the fist. Many coaches say to their catchers, "make a fist with your throwing hand and put it behind your back or knee during the pitch so that you don't break fingers on foul tips." The motivation is right. They don't want their catchers out with a broken finger or two. And that particular problem is a common one. But the advice is actually quite wrong.

To begin with, the phrase "make a fist" implies that one does what one would do when throwing a punch, close the four fingers tightly and then wrap the thumb into the fist. That does not work to preserve a catcher's hand on a foul tip which strikes the throwing hand. What you want instead is to close the thumb and then wrap the fingers in behind it. If you did that and punched someone, chances are even that you would break your thumb. But you're not throwing a punch. You're protecting your thumb, arguably the most important digit for playing softball. Secondly, if you try this, you may notice that it is almost impossible to make a tight fist thumb first. That's a good thing because the tighter you make the fist, the more likely you are to experience a broken finger. There must be some give in the closed hand so that there is a shock absorber to the impact of the ball. A fist with thumb on the outside is tighter than one with the thumb inside. And that creates the give or shock absorber effect we need. The primary goal of making a fist is to preserve the thumb and the secondary purpose is to preserve all the other fingers by not leaving them hanging out there to be busted by a wayward ball.

Next, if you advise your catchers to place their closed fist behind their back or knee, I want you to perform a long study using videotape. Videotape every catcher you can find who puts their hand behind their back or knee. At the moment the ball is about 5 feet from the hitting zone, note where the catcher's hand is now located. At least 90% of the time, the catcher will have pulled her hand out from behind her and brought it towards the glove. This is a natural human reaction. Most people cannot help this. Most people cannot be trained to keep the hand back because it is a natural motion to put both hands in front of you in order to protect oneself.

If you force yourself to think about a frontal knife attack, you probably think the best and most natural move would be to dodge the incoming weapon. But, in fact, most people who are attacked like this do not react that way. Instead, what they do is instinctively try to protect themselves by putting up their hands. Obviously your hands and arms are not much defense against an incoming sharp knife. But that is what people do. That is what is commonly discussed as an instance in which the victim "put up a fight." But they put up their hands and arms because the body's most reactive tendency is to protect the vital organs. -; You can live with injuries to your arms and hands but you cannot live with a knife wound to your vital internal organs and rather than chance the injury and dodge the incoming person, the reflex action is to protect using the extremities.

So catchers are just as ill advised to put their throwing hands behind them as they are to make a punching fist. The first reaction is to pull the hand out from behind you. And when the ball is fouled, you are more likely to be struck. If you have a punching fist, that strike is going to bust a finger. catchers would be better off if they made the catching fist and then placed the throwing hand behind the glove by a few inches. If you watch a catcher who does this, what you will most likely notice is the throwing hand moves in tandem with the glove hand. The "fist" remains behind the glove and protected.

As side notes to this discussion, you do not want the hand right up against the glove because if will absorb shock on hard pitches. rather keep it back those few inches so that when the pitch is caught, it won't be struck by the shock absorbing glove and so that as the glove slows down, the throwing hand will be right there next to the glove. Lastly, the catching fist, with the thumb on the inside, is a much more natural way for the hand to go into the glove to get the ball. Because the four fingers are not tightly wrapped and because the thumb generally springs open immediately upon releasing the fist, it is just a hair quicker.

Another common error catchers make is putting on those ridiculous pads attached to the shin guards behind the knees. This would seem to be an innocuous mistake but let's take a look at it. What are those things for? What are they supposed to do? Protect the knees? Get serious!

The first time I saw those pads on a set of shin guards, I thought to myself, "I wish I had those when I caught. My legs would not have gotten so tired." Then I watched a catcher wearing them and realized that they are actually never used, not should they ever be used. It is easy to watch catchers giving signs to their pitcher and think they are some sort of seat which protects the knees by not allowing the upper and lower legs to close to tightly together. But if you put on a pair of shin guards with those things attached and then give some signs or pretend to, the first thing you'll notice is they are bearing no weight. That is, the pads behind the guards are too small to get your butt to without bringing your upper and lower legs too closely together. Even if you did bring your legs together enough, those things are soft and spongy. They can bear no more weight than a pillow. They crush up like any foam object when weight is put on them. They not only don't bear weight and thereby provide absolutely no support, but they tend to encourage catchers to sit when that is the last thing they should be doing.

As a final assault on the shin guard pads, there is one real effect they do have which is a negative one. But discussing this brings me to a mistake many catchers make which has nothing to do with any of the other stuff in this piece. The mistake many catchers make in travel and high school ball is not backing up first base.

When there are no runners aboard and a ground ball is hit to the infield, a catcher should run or trot down the first base line in order to retrieve the ball in the event the throw gets away from the first baseman. If she does that, about half the bad throws will be retrieved before the runner can advance to second.

Obviously, if there is a runner on third or second, the catcher must hold her ground and be there to cover the plate. But with runner on first, I would prefer she back up first on grounders because the runner from first should not even make third before she is able to again get back t0o home and cover her bag. The one exception to this general rule is when there is a runner on first and the batter bunts. In that case, there isn't much purpose to backing up first and the focus should be on either getting the ball if the bunt is within 5 or 6 feet of the plate, or telling the infielder where to go if it is further out.

For years I have watched fastpitch softball catchers not back up first. It bothered me but I wrote it off as just one of those things. Then I watched good girls playing at showcases and realized real softball catchers do in fact back up first. If they have those stupid pads on the backs of their legs, not only do they look foolish running but I imagine those pads bouncing up and down distract them and also perhaps slow them down a bit. So take those do nothing pads off your shin guards. They serve no positive purpose and the guy who invented them already has made enough money from his invention.

The next mistake catchers and their coaches make begins the move down towards the feet. When catchers repeatedly make bad throws to second, the natural reaction most coaches have is to tell their catcher that she is not "finishing the throw." What they mean and sometimes say is she is not following through. Unfortunately, that usually has nothing to do with the bad throw.

The most common error which is made when a throw to second sails to the rightfield side is she is throwing three quarters (like a two seam baseball fastball) or she is actually sidearming it in order to be fast. Both mistakes are bad. A third common mistake happens to the catcher who continually throws high and that would seem to be thje result of not following through. That may have something to do with it but is not usually the reason.

Generally sidearming catchers eventually play another position due to the sail of the ball and repeated errors caused thereby. Aside from the throw being an error, it also places the SS in a precarious position as she reaches to catch the ball right into the path of the incoming baserunner. Those who value their SS generally get pretty mad when their catcher repeatedly throws balls on the RF side of second.

Three quarters throwers also get some sideways sail on the ball but many times they are throwing three quarters to, again, be faster. It isn't so much a matter of finishing the throw. Yes sidearmers and three quarter throwers can learn over years of experience to adjust their throws and hit the mark. Similarly the 12 to 6 thrower can learn to adjust her throw and get it lower. But what is most commonly missing from the analysis is foot positioning.

Everything in athletics begins with the feet because they are our connection to the Earth. There is little you can do if your feet are improperly placed. You can't field a ball; hit; or throw, if your feet are in bad position. Catcher's feet are critical to many aspects of their play and we'll get to this in a moment but the point here is: if your catcher is making inconsistent or bad throws, don't look at the release point or finishing point of the arm. instead, watch her feet. When she attains proper foot position on a consistent basis, most likely her throws will be more consistent and better. If you want to know how the feet should be when throwing out a baserunner, you should consult a coach or, better yet, get Dave Weaver's New England Catching Camp video. If you fix the feet, your catcher's throws will be better.

Now, to the most critical element, to the item which caused me to write today's piece, to the single most common mistake in positioning which most catchers do and most coaches never correct or do not know to correct. The catcher's stance and foot positioning are the most common mistake.

Let's take a look across the broad spectrum of catchers. If you take a simple survey of catchers in travel ball and high school, what you will find is the majority of these girls are up on the balls of their feet and toes on every pitch. It does not particularly matter if they are just receiving the pitch or have a potentially stealing runner on base. They adjust their body position with a runner on but they do not typically adjust their feet. I'm not saying they should necessarily adjust their feet with runners on. Rather, I'm simply noting that they are up on their toes most or all of the time.

Let's take a second survey. Ask a bunch of coaches, team and private trainers, whether this is correct or not. You will get a few people who will say that it is wrong and then explain why and how a catcher should position herself. But most of the answers will be either that it is right or that it doesn't make much difference to them but they would prefer that all their defensive players be up on their toes at all times. Some few will answer that they want their catchers to be on their toes at least when runners are on base. Only the first group, which says they want their catchers to not be on their toes or balls of their feet, is correct.

I expect some folks at this point are getting a little anxious if not downright mad at me. Some have just left because while they doubt I am right about the catcher keeping her hand behind her back and the fist thing is just a ridiculous comment to make since it really doesn't matter. What really cheesed them off was this foot placement thing. This guy is wrong. he just doesn't know what he is talking about. Most catchers are up on the balls of their feet and most coaches teach it that way because ... well ... it's right. That's the way I learned it and I was an all-county catcher. This guy has gone too far this time.

OK, throw a punch at me if you want to. I can take it. But if you have stayed and are considering what I have to say, start reading again.

In order to verify what I am about to say, you're going to need to go out and get yourself a catcher or a reasonable facsimile of one - somebody else. So go get somebody. I'll wait. I'm in no particular hurry and this point is so critical that the rest of the class will just have to wait for you. Get moving. Go get a catcher.

Tell your catcher to get into receiving position while making her stance begin with the balls of her feet or on her toes. OK. Now take both your hands and put them on your catcher's shoulders. Give a slight push and over he or she goes. It's hard to be balanced while crouching on your toes. Your catcher is unbalanced (maybe I am too but that's not relevant). That's test one.

Second test time - ask your crouching catcher to reach out to her sides with each hand as far as she can reach without moving her body. Mark the spots with balls. Now move those balls six inches away from her and the spot and ask her to pick them up. The first thing she'll do is shift her weight to the opposite side of the ball and then step with the foot on the ball side and reach for it while picking it up. That will probably happen equally on each side though one side will possibly be better, quicker and less awkwardly than the other.

For a third test, do the same thing but move the balls a full foot away. the distance at this point should be about the inside line of the batter's box on each side. In other words, all we are asking her to do is retrieve balls on the ground within the distance from the inside of each batter's box, left- and right- handed. The retrieval is slower and looks even more awkward. Again, if you had accurate instruments, you will find that she is slightly faster to one side than the other but both sides take fairly long.

The fourth test is to place a ball on the ground to her side as far away from your catcher as the worst pitch you have recently seen. That likely is a couple inches inside the batter's box on either side and the results will be similar to the previous tests.

Now, finally, put a ball three to four feet in front of your catcher, about at the plate, and ask her to pick it up. She will either get up awkwardly to get it or fall over forwards. Neither movement is particularly elegant looking and neither is a particularly fast motion. Something is wrong with this "on-toes" stance.

The reason we would like our defensive players to be "on their toes" is so they are able to react quickly. That seems logical enough. But we forget one simple thing when 3we encourage catchers to do this. When an infielder is on her toes, she gets there while watching the pitcher go into her motion. She does it at the last possible second like the way the batter perhaps loads. If we were talking about batters, we would never encourage them to step into the box and then load immediately while waiting for the pitcher to step onto the rubber, take the sign and then begin the pitch. That's because early loading causes the muscles to stiffen up and slows down the swing. Yet, we tell our catchers to throw the ball back and then load immediately, even before the batter gets into the box. How quick should we expect her to be regardless of how being on her toes effects her ability to move laterally or forwards? If anybody's muscles are too over extended to explode at the right moment, it is those of the catcher. But this is a minor point.

The more important points having to do with proper foot positioning of the catcher involve the acts of receiving and throwing out baserunners. The proper positioning of a catcher's feet are flat footed - heals down - and with the weight slightly on the outside of the feet.

I was watching two catchers ply their trade recently while standing with the father of one. one girl was flat footed, the other on her toes. I was with the father of the girl on her toes. He was commenting about each kid in a constructive way. He noted that he thought his kid was the better catcher but the other kid had better lateral movement, particularly to her left, particularly on balls in the dirt. I didn't mention the flat footed thing to him because I have done so before and he takes my comments to be wrong. But it was clear that the other girl had better lateral movement precisely because she was flat footed. I'm getting ahead of myself so I'll come back to lateral movement shortly.

Perhaps more importantly, while this fellow noted that his daughter had the better arm, he noted that the other kid was a little more accurate. As games wore on, this became more evident not due to watching more throws but rather because the kid on her toes got tired more easily. As she got tired, she had greater and greater difficulty getting her feet into proper position to make an accurate throw. The other kid, probably just as tired as the on her toes girl, continued to make accurate throws and I believe this is because it took considerably less effort to get into throwing position with the flat footed approach.

There is good reason why a flat footed catcher has better lateral movement but rather than explain this in detail, I'll demonstrate it to you. Hopefully, you let your demonstrating catcher go back to her De Grassi program. You don't need her for this one. Instead, I'd like you to experience it for yourself.

Get into the catcher's crouch on the balls of your feet. No imagine a pitch a bit outside and move to catch it. You either turn a bit sideways or you lose your balance to the side of the pitch. Now do the same for an inside pitch. Basically the same thing happens. Now try this with a wide base, flat footed, with your weight very slightly on the outside of your feet. What haoppens is your body shifts slightly and gracefully to the place of the ball. So the lesson is, when a catcher is on the balls of her feet, she cannot move to catch balls to either side of herself without getting a bit unbalanced or shifting her weight sideways. That's not good for a couple reasons.

When we incorrectly teach "framing" (Gosh, I hate that word), we emphasize the glove movements. We tell girls to pull the ball back "into the strike zone" as if that might engender a strike call from the umpire. I've discussed that before and don;t wish to bring it up in detail again. But let's just acknowledge that a catcher is fooling nobody when she pulls a ball back into the strike zone. What she can do instead is easily catch a marginal strike without giving the umpire any sort of body language hints that the pitch is marginal. That is accomplished when she moves only slightly to the side with just a little body shift. If she reaches, steps, or obscures the ump's view because she does not have good lateral movement, chances are pretty good that an ump will call what is really a strike as a ball. So having that good balance, position, and lateral flexibility is the real key to "framing" properly.

Perhaps more importantly, the flat footed girl with the better range had that better range because of her flat footed stance. To see what I mean, take up each type of position and imagine yourself catching an obvious ball well outside the strike zone. You should see, if you are performing this honestly, that you can move much more easily from the flat footed position. Thus, your range has improved.

Yet even more importantly, we teach catchers not to catch balls in the dirt but rather to block them. If you get into each position and then try to block a ball in front of you and to each side, what you will find is that getting into proper blocking position is A LOT easier from the flat footed position. Not only is it easier, it's faster. And when the average high school catcher has no more time to get down and block than a major league baseball catcher, she needs that additional time.

I have grown so frustrated listening to catchers' father complain that they just don;t understand why she didn't block that ball when she does it all the time in drills in their garage or basement. Yes, she does do it in those drills and she has built up the muscle memory but she still does not have enough time to A) recognize and B) drop and block when she is on her toes. To see what I mean, go get your catcher again. De Grassi is over anyway. Find a tennis ball and tell your catcher to pull her shin guards out of her bag and put them on as soon as she gets those "knee protectors" off.

Bounce the tennis balls at her low and hard and tell her to drop and block from each of the two positions. Bounce some right at her and then go to the sides, gradually further and further out. f you are consistent and push so that the balls are harder and harder to block, I think you will see that not only does she drop and block more easily, but also she has greater range with which to block. Better yet, if you ask her to retrieve the ball and get up after dropping and blocking, I'm gonna guess that she will do so faster from the flat footed position.

I didn't want to get into the proper foot position for throwing because I want you to consult experts on this. But I will add at this point that once you understand that, it is a heck of a lot easier and quicker to get into that position from the flat footed receiving position.

To sum up this piece, catchers should make their fists opposite to a proper punching fist, with the thumb on the inside. They should not be taught to keep their throwing hand behind them because they will immediately counteract any protective value reflexively. Take the knee protectors off the shin guards. They do not protect knees and serve no purpose. teach your catchers to back up first. All real catchers do this. When catchers make repeated bad throws, look at their feet, not their arm follow throughs. Learn a little something about the proper positioning of the feet in the various catcher's stances - giving signs, runners not on base, runners on base. Flat footed is better. Flat footed is right. If you consider these things and follow through with training, your catcher will break less fingers, she'll not look silly with flapping knee protectors, and she'll be a better player than she was doing these things the wrong way.

Duck - Iguana Warning!

2010-01-14T09:07:00.000-08:00

I was really looking forward to our trip to Florida last week. Either I'm getting old (very likely) or global warming (highly unlikely) is causing temperatures to drop this winter. The pre-Christmas snow created a pretty backdrop to the usual, though this year more reserved, holiday lighting spectacular in my neighborhood. But after the first day, I would have preferred a little warmth to the dirty slippery stuff. Then it rained and everything pretty much disappeared. Then it got pretty darn cold again. So, I was probably looking forward to a couple days in the Florida sun more than some fairly high quality Rising Stars winter softball showcase games.

It came as news to me that Florida can actually experience sub-freezing temperatures as well as, gasp, snow. I watched the weather before we left. Friday looked OK. Saturday threatened a little rain late in the day. Sunday would be cool. I wasn't worried. Florida always gets a little rain in the afternoon, doesn't it. If we could get 3 of our 4 scheduled Saturday games in, that would be just fine. It could rain a bit and that would be no big deal. And, so what if it was a little chilly on Sunday. 45 is still what we call Indian Summer where I live. I went so far as to pack an extra hoody. I was prepared.

We crammed ourselves into what pass for seats onboard the Spirit Airlines flight to Fort Lauderdale. It was an uneventful flight, if more than a little claustrophobic. We landed, collected our equipment bags, found our rental car easily and got to the hotel in short order. We spent a little time figuring out where the fields were located relative to our accommodations and were pleasantly surprised to see that nothing was more than a half hour away. We found dinner at a chain restaurant, held a team meeting and settled down at the bar while our high schoolers played elevator tag and watched Jersey Shore (a show about low-life New Yorkers) on MTV.

The TV was on near the bar but folks were too loud for me to really follow what was being said on the news. There was something that caught my eye about "if you think this past week was cold, wait for next week." But all I took from that was, after we leave, it is going to get cool here again.

The next morning we had a very reasonably scheduled 9:30 am practice game. Our team played poorly but it was good to be out in the sun and watch some softball for a change. It wasn't quite warm but very pleasant. Our showcase game later in the day was also a softball disaster but the weather was decent and we actually played respectably for an inning or two. We hit the ball. We made some decent plays. We scored some runs. The game was decidedly less embarrassing than our "practice" one. And all was well with the world.

During the evening, the "extreme exposure" games were held and I'll get to them in a minute. The weather was still decent. We visited the main site and bought some tournament sweatshirts. The food there was reasonably good though nothing to write home about. The equipment for sale was enough to keep us occupied before the games. We stood around and chatted then watched the games before going home and hitting the hay.

I awoke about 4:30 the next morning to see what the weather was going to do. We were scheduled for an 8:00 am start and I wanted to advise my kid on what to wear. When I arrived outside the hotel, it did seem pretty cool and the wind was kicking up. But I, not having checked the weather very closely, still held out hope that we would get in 2, maybe 3 before a Florida rainstorm shortened the day. I told my daughter to wear her under-armour and carry the hoody. I grabbed my hoody and down vest as we headed out for the fields about 6:30.

A few raindrops fell and the wind whipped as we approached the complex. Someone noted that they hoped we got in 2 as we huddled in the stands while the girls warmed up. Then the rain got sort of steady and the temperature dropped. By game time, the rain was decidedly steady and cold. I believe someone checked the temperature and found it to be about 40-45.

Nobody really hit the ball that game. I think our team had the only hit. The pitchers had great difficulty getting the ball over and walked a few kids. There were numerous wild pitches and the runners who got to first pretty much all scored. Backstops were deep and sometimes girls got 2 bases on one WP. It reminded me of rec games at 10U rather than showcase games. After 3 + innings of abject misery, umpires on all fields at our complex called rain delays and then rainouts. We went back to the hotel and called the hotline repeatedly to learn if our next games would be held. Finally we learned that everything at our complexes was called for the day and we settled in to watch the NFL playoffs.

The next morning, we were again scheduled to play the early game. We got word that everything was going off as scheduled for us and that we had been granted an exhibition game after our first and only scheduled game Sunday. We were mostly satisfied with this since we had been shortchanged by the weather Saturday. Some wished we had been given yet another game but that was before anybody went outside to check the weather.

As we got outside to head to the fields, the cold bit into our faces and butts. We rushed to our cars to get out of the wind and cold in the hotel parking lot. As car engines warmed up and frost was scrapped from windshields, the readings of our thermometers read an outside temperature in the range of 30-32. Burrrrr! We drove to the fields hoping that temp.s would rise a bit as the sun came out. The rain had stopped. The clouds were breaking up. We thought that if the temps would get up to the previous day's levels, everything would be OK.

While I was standing there along the sidelines, a parent from our team told me she had seen an interesting story on the news the night before. It was a "falling Iguana warning" story. I said, "falling what?" To tell you the truth, I wasn't aware there were Iguanas in Florida!

Just in case you have not heard this before, they do have Iguanas in Florida. They are, of course, cold blood reptiles. When the temperature falls to a certain level, 5 Celcius, their bodies go into a sort of involuntary state of suspended animation - similar to hibernation. Their breathing and circulation slows, extremities and non-vital functions stop working, and, because they live in trees, they have a tendency to fall. I suppose that, given the touristy nature of Florida, the newsies wanted the unaware to be careful around trees so as not to have the bejesus scared out of them. I know I might have been scared to death had some Iguana dropped out of a tree near me.

The parent from our team told me that she and her party had gone out after seeing the news specifically to look for falling Iguanas. They weren't disappointed. In about a two mile stretch, they had seen four on the ground. One was unfortunate enough to have been found by a turkey vulture who busily ate it alive. Ah, such is girls fastpitch softball!

But seriously folks, this story is about softball. For beginners, I want to point out some things I learned during my brief vacation. I had known about Rising Stars showcase for several years. What I did not realize, however, is that of the several of these things they hold each year, the winter one, generally the second week of January, is not a particularly important one. That is not to say there are no college coaches in attendance. There are some, just not a ton. We did not see the numbers we saw in California around Halloween. And that was far lower, I'm told, than the numbers who came to scout the Rising Stars showcase held in mid October.

It occurred to me that Rising Stars ("RS") does not publish coaches expected at each event and rather lists any college that has ever attended one of their showcases precisely because they do not want to call attention to the fact that the winter showcase, for example, is more sparsely attended. This is their business. They want teams to pay and come. They are not being dishonest by claiming more coaches will be there. They are simply just not highlighting the fact that this event draws fewer coaches.

It should have been obvious to me and anyone else that the winter showcase, not falling within the NCAA recruiting window, was likely to be a lesser event. It should also have occurred to me that while the fall showcase is next to impossible for a new team to get into, it was fairly simple to get into the winter show because the biggest name teams are not there.

There are many very highly regarded organizations in attendance at winter RS. About 25 states were represented plus Aruba and, I think, one team from Canada. I wonder what the Aruba kids thought of the weather! The level of play was mostly very good, aside from our team and a few others. Many high level players whose teams were not there arranged to guest with other teams. But we did not see very many of the top 20-50 Gold teams. I understand that many teams were elsewhere for another event. other teams are practicing to get ready for spring qualifiers and the summer showcase circuit.

The umpiring at RS was very good, better than California had been. Teams generally played at the right level for their resumes. The tournament is arranged in twenty something 7-team pools and the teams in each pool played just the teams in their own pool, except for any practice or subsequently arranged exhibition games.

The teams spanned the range of experience from 18U Gold teams down to 14U Pony teams. Most 16U teams played against other 16Us. The 14s played either other 14s or weaker 16U and 18U teams. There were, of course, exceptions, as some teams chose to hide their age by altering their usual name slightly to not highlight the age group they had recently played or would play the next year.

In general, the play was ordinary showcase play in which books and scores are not really kept and in which players are frequently rotated in order to provide opportunities for showcasing their skills. I've mentioned this before but for the sake of those who might have missed it, teams do not usually play to win at these kinds of things. If, for example, a pitcher is throwing a perfect game through her scheduled 3 innings, she is going to come out to make way for pitcher number two regardless of whether the score is 0-0, 1-0 etc. Similarly, a stronger player is going to be pulled in favor of a weaker one merely because that is the way the game is played. Nobody sits so the team can win. That comes as a shock to many but that's just the way it is. Of course there are exceptions but those involve teams which simply just do not understand the way showcase ball is played.

You can easily identify the showcase neophyte parents at RS. They are the ones who treat games the same way they treat travel ball games. They get upset when their kid hits a shot and some very skilled outfielder hauls it in with a great play. They get upset when their team threatens but doesn't score because the "idiot coaches" have that kid in the lineup and she strikes out. They get worked up when the third or fourth pitcher on the other team looses the plate and starts walking kids. They act as if winning and losing actually matters.

By contrast, the parents who understand where they are rarely cheer except for a good play or hit ... by anyone. If some kid gets up and goes yard for the other team, they clap. If some SS on the other team makes an all-star play, they clap hard and yell "nice play!" If their kid drills a pitch and it doesn't find the ground, they are happy because she had a really good at-bat and hit the ball the way she knows how to. If a kid on either team hustles and plays hard, folks are happy for that kid. These games mostly lack the competitive edge we are all accustomed to and that is the way it has to be.

The extreme showcase games are even less competitive. They are perhaps one of the better parts of this tournament. RS has a camp early on Friday before the regular games start. Then everybody plays a regular showcase game. And then, Friday night, they hold the so called "maximum exposure" games. The maximum exposure games generally involve sophomores and juniors arranged into 11 or 12 player teams. They play 6 innings in which 5 or 6 batters, depending on roster size, hit and then switch sides. Everyone is guaranteed 3 innings at their primary position and then they play wherever the team needs a player. It was great fun and the level of play was very good. We saw some wonderful pitching performances, some very good hitting, and outstanding defense even considering the number of kids out of position and the fact that these girls had not worked defensive plays together before. Girls from one showcase team were generally not placed on the same teams.

Everyone seemed to really like the extreme exposure games. In fact, I heard at least one person saying "this is the way showcase should be played." He wondered if it might not be a good idea to arrange an entire showcase using this format.

Most of the kids at RS were sophomores and juniors. The 14U teams obviously had some freshmen and 8th graders. But the vast majority were 10th and 11th grade kids. The extreme exposure teams and games seemed to be organized along grade lines. One game involved mostly soph.s while another had mostly juniors. The quad we spent most of our time at seemed to have 2 games of each grade going on. There was the soph game I was at and the next field over was juniors, then the next soph.s, then the next juniors. It is noteworthy that all of the college coaches were watching the juniors. I suppose this is a final or almost a final look at certain kids before offers are extended in July. Yes, they'll see kids at NFCA camps and a few showcases in the spring but they must make up their minds soon and this was probably a last look for many kids.

So what I learned is, RS organizes the pools according to the way it sees the level of each team, there are neophytes everywhere including this level, the coaches here are more interested in juniors than they are at other venues, the extreme exposure games are perhaps the best part of RS, and winter can still be winter even in the sunshine state. Additionally, I learned that regardless of anything I may have said in the past, teams which consider themselves to be underaged still sometimes go around bragging as if it is some sort of badge of honor.

The exhibition game we were granted was against a team in a higher (weaker) pool than us. They looked pretty small so we made inquiries as to why. It turned out that they were either a 2009 or 2010 14U team, I'm not sure which. They had a few older looking girls but most were pretty darn young and their pitching was decidedly weak. Their outfielders played shallow. And they could not hit very well.

When we inquired as to the age of the team, one person proudly told us the 14U/15U thing and how they had won their games 22-1 and 11-0, against older kids. They wanted everyone to know that they had come in as a very young team and kicked some butt against the 18Us. I doubt they did that. I think it is very likely that the teams they faced were either the same age as they were or were very weak older teams, mostly perhaps about the same age.

We beat this "young" upstart team pretty easily. And we were a pretty darn weak team whose roster included 15s and 16s. We were not an 18U team in the classic sense. I saw several better 2010 14U teams this past fall. But this team insisted on bragging on their extreme success despite playing against those evil older girls. Oh well, I suppose you just can't prevent teams from making fools of themselves.

Myu kid pitched the opening two innings and allowed one runner on a walk. We quickly scored 5 and then our girls began fooling around. It was very cold. There were no college coaches around. After this we were heading home. And these younger girls were not very good. Our next pitcher gave up a run on some silly play. Our girls started goofing off at the plate. Then we put in our third pitcher as time ran out. She walked several kids and we misplayed some softly hit balls. They scored a couple runs and the time ran out. It was fun but just not real good ball.

Overall, I would say we had a fun time going to Rising Stars. We got to play the Gold Coast Hurricanes 16U and actually played a couple good innings against them. My kid hit a shot against the Canes that might have gone over the fence were it not for the 35 mph gusts at the time. She had some very good at bats and we caught her swinging at a pitch in the dirt on film. It is a great picture. I'm gonna have it blown up and made into wallpaper for her bedroom!

If you want to go have some fun while playing against good players, I do recommend Rising Stars winter showcase. But try to avoid Spirit or similar airlines. We were significantly delayed on the way home and given no good reason for it. We got home at 4:00 am Monday and my daughter had to miss yet another day of school. Many teams can probably get into the winter showcase even the young ones. But don't expect a ton of college coaches to watch your kid. If you are a soph. or junior, get yourself into the extreme exposure games. And before you head down to sunny Florida, make sure you watch the weather. Running out to the car to empty your already packed suitcase to put on everything you brought with you is not the best way to deal with the weather. Oh, yeah! If it is extremely cold, stay away from trees. You don't want to be struck by any falling Iguanas.

Lil Bit Of History Repeatin

2010-01-05T05:40:00.000-08:00

Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.

It appears as if those currently in power in the US were not paying attention in their college classes whether you consider economics - multiplier effect of government spending vs. private investing; history - causes of the protracted duration of the Great Depression and of stagflation under President Carter: mathematics - 4 minus 2 plus 3 does yield 5 but when the same circle is partitioned into 5 vs. 4, the result is smaller partitions, not a larger circle; or psychology - when a family's expenses rise from $100 to $125, the tendency is to cut spending to $80. But I digress. This is fodder for another sort of blog and would appear to have nothing to do with softball. But it does support the theory that whomever fails to heed history is doomed to repeat its mistakes. And that does have significant implications in our sport.

Many years ago I observed what I thought was an oddity. My kids were taking pitching clinics and private lessons towards the end of a season. We interacted with a number of other players of all ages and their parents during that span. The oddity I observed was a tendency to lose interest in the off-season, the resulting drop off in attendance at lessons or practice sessions, and the attempt to start up about a month or two before the following season or even after the next season began.

Over the span of a couple years, I often conversed with folks who had decided that they would stop their kids' softball training right at the end of the season. Then I saw them again and picked up my conversations when they started up anew. The dynamic which played out is noteworthy and instructive. But more instructive is the reality of the same dynamic occurring year after year with regularity.

I once put together a team in the fall which included certain pitchers who threw very well at tryouts. One of these kids almost completely stopped throwing in the off-season. Lessons were cut from once per week to once per month, if that. Personal practice sessions were totally shut down. By the time we started live-pitched batting practice, the results of this off-season were horrendous. She couldn't throw for 15 minutes and what she did throw slow were meatballs with no movement and little speed.

As indoor workouts progressed to scrimmages and tournaments, the kid had trouble getting back in to see her instructor. When early spring weather got in the way, she just didn't throw any more than she had during winter. I just could not throw her because her pitching was that bad. And they quit the team for an interesting reason. The father noted to me that "she needs to throw to get better." Really, that's what he told me. I just said, "I know."

Another kid I had on that team had a lot of potential. She had a good arm. She was starting to swing the bat pretty well. Her fielding mechanics were OK but we could work on that. But as fall turned into winter, the only throwing and swinging she did was in anger at her siblings.

This girl did get "back into" her lessons sometime late in the year but as soon as we began our indoor workouts, those lessons ceased under some notion that we were going to cover the same ground in our workouts. The kid's swing fell apart. Her fielding mechanics got better but because she had not thrown at all in the off-season, she ended up hurting her arm and missing almost half the season.

When Howard Kobata gives clinics in cold-weather locations during the indoor season, he provides a warning to anyone interested in participating. He instructs them to get out and throw as much as possible before the clinic or face the consequences. The primary focus of these things is getting the ball out of your glove quickly to make a throw to your target in as short an amount of time as possible. The techniques involve body and foot position but the drills involve a ton of throwing. After the first hour, you can usually tell who took the advice and who did not. Many girls are rubbing and stretching their arms. Some have to drop outduring the first session or do not show for the second due to sore arms. You see many of the same kids at the Kobata clinics year after year. Strangely, it is often the same kids who develop sore arms each and every year.

I once knew a kid who was a gifted athlete. She was long and lanky but pretty strong. She played several sports and was good at most of them at an early age. She could play any position on the field though she never really caught. She was a pitcher who could move the ball pretty well thanks in part to her Osterman-like finger length, at least for her age. She could play infield or outfield equally well. She had a defect in her swing and struggled sometimes with the bat. Her parents had her in pitching and hitting lessons when I met them during the season. But they stopped these immediately after the summer. Her pitching gradually dropped off over a couple years because she neither practiced it nor took any sort of instruction for half the year. The defect in her swing would go away after a half dozen sessions with the hitting instructor but immediately after it was successfully corrected, her parents would stop the lessons and it would creep back into her swing.

Year after year, I would have the same conversation with the father. He would say, "I've got to get her back in to see the instructor. We're gonna start pitching as soon as I can get in there." He would also say something like, as soon as it gets a little warmer out, we're gonna start pitching practice again. Weeks would pass. A few tournaments would take place and her pitching was pretty bad. Then they would finally get back in to see her instructor about midway through the season and she would gradually get better but did not progress the way one would expect.

The defect in this girl's swing would really trouble the father. She would go whole tournaments without a hit. Then he would make time to have her see the hitting instructor. The next tournament, she would be a little better. The next ones were gradually better and better until finally it seemed like she was going in the right direction. Then the instruction would cease and she'd be back where she was.

Like I said, this kind of thing happened over and over and over again. At first, I didn't think much about it the first time. But you know, when you hear something over and over again, it isn't hard to put two and two together. I came to expect the same kind of comments and the same kind of playing difficulties each season. And that's kind of what happened.

I say "that's kind of what happened" because I saw history repeating itself but, you know, kids get older. As they do, the small problems get bigger. A kid who struggles at the plate due to some defect which gets reinforced over several years finds it more and more difficult to overcome that defect. A pitcher who does not progress each season will find herself in a little too deep when she moves up to the next age group again and again until one day she finds herself in 16U, 18U, or high school varsity. History does not merely repeat itself but rather repeats itself with a vengeance as time wears on.

Many of these instances of history repeating itself might be characterized as the "playing to get into shape" myth. When I was a youth, kids often played three sports and those filled the entire year. Today it is more common for a young athlete to play one or, at most, two sports. You can argue that this is a travesty of the modern world and I won't dispute you. But we live in reality - the world as it is not as we wish it were - and reality is more and more of the single sport phenomenon.

I understand why kids cannot compete in more than one or two sports. If, say, a girl likes softball, basketball and soccer, she will play these sports first at a recreational level and then attempt to play club as her interest grows. Those reading this blog probably know that travel softball involves a season which runs from thaw to the end of July, a fall tryout, a fall scrimmage and/or tournament season, a month or two off, and indoor workouts starting no later than January. Other club sports have their own grinds.

I was talking to one of my daughter's friends, a thirteen year old, who plays club soccer at a high level. Her team is one of the top 20 soccer teams in the country. Soccer is more organized under a single umbrella so I feel comfortable making this claim. During her off-season, this kid sees no fewer than 4 separate trainers each week. Before you think we are talking about some sort of soccer robot, this is a normal kid who is about as well-rounded as any of her peers. She just happens to be good and has found a very good team. Even at a lower level than this kid plays, the soccer kids are working throughout most of the year.

A few years back, I was talking to a coach of a boys' club basketball team. I knew they had just competed at some large, national-draw, end-of-season tournament recently. So I asked the guy if he was happy to have some time off to relax and not worry about basketball for a while. He replied, "Oh, no, it's always basketball season. We start back up in a few weeks."

It's like that in higher level youth sports. That is reality. It is very difficult to compete in more than one sport except at very low levels because the seasons all run into each other.

I can think of a few kids who have tried or are trying to compete in several sports before they get into high school. Often they must choose one primary sport to play club ball and then a couple secondary sports to play either only rec or lower level club. A very few kids have or are trying to play higher level in more than one sport. I've heard about a kid who plays high level softball, basketball and soccer. She is good at all these and still finds time for school. But the grind is inhuman and I don't think I'll go into that. Suffice it to say that I have heard more than once of the girl running from a tournament in one sport to another in another multiple times on some weekends. Not many parents would be willing to do that. Not many kids would hold up physically or mentally under that stress.

Further, it becomes increasingly difficult to compete with the kids who play a particular sport year-round. Not every high school is the same but, for the most part, I would say that the starting members of any decent athletic team at our local school are all year-round players. The basketball players all play some sort of club ball. They compete during the school season, have some time off, and then play for summer teams. The same is true for other sports whether there is a significant youth club program in the area or not.

With regard to field hockey, there are a number of girls who play the sport at the club level and several who got into it because it was offered by the middle school. When they got into high school, they figured they could continue to play it the same way they did in junior high. But what they find is some girls develop greater interest and start playing club for almost the entire year. When that it isn't the predominant case, what is common here is for high school teams to form leagues in the off-season. Coaches of the varsity squad are not permitted to interact with players but some parent will supervise the team. They play indoor or out depending on the time of year. Field hockey is a fall sport here but the other day I went to watch an indoor competition which consisted of players hoping to make varsity next year. I looked at the league standings on the facility's wall and realized just about every high school in the area is represented. Even school sports are an almost year-round pursuit.

So the situation of the one sport kid is probably the most common reality. Unfortunately, this can sometimes result in kids not really being in shape for their sport at certain key times of the year. If you play softball at a reasonably high level, your team's annual schedule may preclude you from participating with the school field hockey, basketball, or soccer team's off-season league or with a travel club in another sport. But you do not really do any good off-season work unless you make a concerted effort to do so.

You get through the fall tryout season and perhaps play weekends through early November. You do nothing in December and then start up once or twice weekly workouts in January until spring. In the spring, you play school ball, travel tournaments, or both. This lasts into the summer and sometime in July, your season ends. You are physically and mentally exhausted and need to take time off. But during the following fall season, you are not really working that hard. So by the middle of November, you are almost completely out of shape.

I realize that the discussion I am engaged in can get a little tricky. On one hand, I am claiming that girls can only play one sport because the season never ends. On the other hand, I am stating that girls get out of shape. How is it possible to get out of shape if you're playing during the full year?

I am not really talking about being generally out of shape. I'm really addressing being out of shape for the sport. A girl could be in excellent physical condition including muscle flexibility, etc. But if she has not thrown a ball in two or three months, she is not in shape for softball. Just like the kid who attends a Kobata clinic without having thrown in several weeks, she is going to develop a sore arm. The further problem is that she may not get sufficient time to recover if, for example, she gets that sore arm in school ball and has to practice or play every day. This is a particular problem for catchers and infielders. I have seen more than a few kids develop arm problems during the high school season and not be able to heal until after the season.

If a kid is a pitcher who has not practiced for more than 10 weeks, she is going to have a hard time working back anywhere near where she left off. Sometimes this can be particularly problematic. In our school ball, the first day of practice happens early in March. The team does drills for very few weeks and then tries to do scrimmages almost immediately. Then the real games begin early in April. That isn't much time to prepare. That is not enough time for a pitcher to get back to where she left off, let alone make progress.

I am a fan of kids being given sufficient off-season rest. When activities involve intense physical exertion or can cause repetitive motion injuries the way softball can, it is advisable to have a significant period of rest. But if that period extends over too long and sort of slides into a slow, late start, injuries can develop and difficulties ensue. Worse, many times when a pitcher or other player is dissatisfied with early season performance, she can press too hard in order to make advances and cause her own injuries.

A pitcher might look for an increase in speed and throw her mechanics off kilter thereby leading to an injury of the back, shoulder or knee. She might try to spin the ball too hard and hurt an elbow or wrist. There are any number of possible scenarios.

A batter might have worked shoulder, back, etc. flexibility all off-season. But if she never picked up a bat and took cuts, she may find herself over-swinging early in the year which can lead to all sorts of injuries. It is one thing to do yoga or stretching 5 days a week. It is quite another to rip at a pitch explosively 50 times a day after a three month layoff.

Secondarily, I am talking about allowing mechanical skills to lapse. It is not great when your musculature isn't where it was as you start back into intense practicing. But muscles are not the only thing about your game that can atrophy. Mechanical skills can too.

The most well schooled veteran athlete has some difficulty recovering her mechanics at the beginning of pre-season practice after a significant layoff. The junior members of the travel softball circuit have more difficulty, especially if they have done no preparatory work or been involved with instruction. College pitchers often have coach mandated layoffs with heavy weight or other sorts of training workouts. It can take them several weeks to get their mechanics back to where they were last season. But for the most part, these highly developed athletes need the time off more than they need to pitch because their mechanics are well set by then. The same is not true of 11 year olds.

It stands to reason that if an athlete has swung, thrown or pitched several thousand time each year over 8, 10 or more years, her mechanics are not going to leave her for good after a couple months. But if a kid is in her second or third year of lessons for hitting or pitching, the muscle memory has not developed enough to be set in stone. If her mechanical lessons and practicing are for half a year or less, it is quite possible that she will be far behind where she was at the end of the previous season unless she does some sort of off-season work to retain and further enhance them.

Lastly, I am talking about not making appropriate progress from year to year. As girls age up from 10U to 12U and so on, it becomes more and more apparent who is doing the off-season work and who is not. In my early pitcher example, it was patently obvious. I suppose I focus more on pitching than anything else because my kids pitch. But I also know that when I look at a girl during the fall and she's pretty good, I expect her to be at least that good when we start working out or get outside to play scrimmages. My hope when I brought her onto the team was that she would be at this particular point when we start up and then make progress throughout the year. I am not hoping that she will be behind and then get back to this point towards the middle or end of the year. And pitchers may make progress during the actual season but they make more of it if they retain their skills and then make some progress during the off-season.

Recently a travel organization held its first practice of the new year. Most kids had not thrown since the first week of November. There were sore arms. But they practice once or twice a week and the kids will recover. It was apparent that few, if any of the pitchers had thrown at all recently. several girls had control issues in the spring which went away as they worked outside during the spring and pitched tournaments during the summer. By fall, most had really hit their strides. But at this practice, they were far behind where they had left off. The coaches met, rearranged workouts and now they'll have to put aside an hour for just the pitchers to work. They realized after that first practice that their pitchers are not throwing at all on their own. They have to make sure they throw at least once per week now or risk some serious problems at early tournaments. Also, many of the girls play high school ball and they want them to be ready to endure those rigors. There is no other option. They must conduct pitcher workouts. That is probably a waste of otherwise good team practice time / facility rental.

I discovered this same sort of problem several years ago. What I did was find somewhat cheaper space which i could rent for a shorter duration than the full team practices. I conducted pitcher-catcher only workouts for that segment of the team. And because this was outside the normal course of team practices, I had the pitchers and catchers pay for the space separately. Do you know what happened? I spent more time listening to excuses about why this or that kid couldn't come to the workouts.

Quite often kids could not make these workouts because they played rec basketball or did other activities which were reasonable under the circumstances. But these kids were not doing anything on their own. I conducted these workouts because I had to, not because I wanted to. If they had been doing any throwing at all, I could have saved time, effort and money

I also ended up personally spending more of my own money to cover for the kids that didn't show up. Say I had 6 kids and the space rental was $60. nbsp; I told each kid that it was $10 a session. Often I had three kids which cost me an additional $30. And my pitchers were not well prepared for the season. if I had it to do over again, I would charge everyone up front and make attendance mandatory. The only excuse I would accept would be if a kid was doing her own throwing and attending lessons. And I would be the arbiter of whether I believed the work was being done. if she wasn't throwing well enough, I would require her to attend.

You know, this sport is very difficult. It requires considerable effort in terms of the season's tournaments. It requires considerable effort to develop one's skills. It requires off-season work. The dedication needed to succeed in fastpitch softball is as much as any other sport, sometimes more. Kids who pitch must attend lessons unless they are working with a parent who has an equal knowledge base to professional instructors. Those lessons cannot merely be for 3 months of the year. Kids who want to throw well, must throw often. Kids who want to hit need to see professional trainers and work at drills on their own. Kids who want to be good fielders have to attend clinics like the Kobata ones. They must enhance their mechanical skills through whatever means they have. You cannot be good at this game on a part-time basis. The other girls who are working their skills will most definitely pass you by.

I believe in a six week resting period after the rigors of the season are over. But more than that is going to be a problem. While an absolute rest period is important, it is equally important to remember that what we are resting from is an over-taxing season. Once the period of rest is over, it is very important to begin pre-season preparation.

Pre-season preparation is generally nowhere near as intense as in-season stresses. So we really are not ending a season, giving rest, and then immediately throwing kids back into the fire. What we do not want to get into the habit of doing is ending the season, resting, and then procrastinating about starting up work again only to find time has slipped away from us. So I'm not saying that every pitcher fr0om age 8 up ought to throw six times per week, 52 weeks per year. I'm saying that after a tough season, yes, by all means, give her 6 weeks of not seeing a ball. But immediately thereafter begin throwing some and work your way back up to whatever your top level of training is. The same is true for every other player.

If you have had 6 weeks off without swinging a bat, start swinging one. If you;ve got the room in your house, basement, garage, attic, start today. if you have no space available, put on your winter coat and go outside to do it. I know its cold out there but I don;t think you will get frostbite inside of ten or fifteen minutes.

Don't take 100 swings at some 65 mph machine pitched balls. l; Take 10 swings wherever you can today. Take 15 tomorrow, 20 on Thursday, 25 on Friday. Take off for the weekend if you need to. But start back up on Monday taking 20 swings again until you build up to 50 or 100. Then stay there.

You do not have to do this 15 or more minute workout every single blessed day. The first week might only be three or four days. The second week might be one additional day. You can get up to 6 or 7 days per week quickly. And you'll have to because, folks, it is already a good ways into January 2010. In just a couple weeks, it will be February, the shortest month of the year which happens to be followed by March when many of us start getting outdoors and the high school teams start their tryouts. That means you have less than two short months.

If you are a pitcher or fielder who needs to throw and you have absolutely no space, you're in a bit of a bind. But there must be something you can do. Pitchers can pitch without a ball in a hallway. They can also do portions of their pitching motion into a laundry basket filled with towels using an actual ball. Players who want to throw inside of little space can take a knee and throw into that same laundry basket. They can slo perform throwing motions without a ball in very little space. What all this takes is commitment, commitment to do something softball related every day or most days no matter how silly it seems at first.

You can take up a ready position in the hallway or in front of a full length mirror and visulaize fielding a grounder or flyball. Practice your footwork and make a throw without a ball. Do 10 or 20, more if you can. Then run down to the laundry and get that basket. Snap balls into it. Practice you underhand flips. You may be surprised how much of a throwing or pitching motion you can accomplish in a ten foot space with a laundry basket. And finally, resolve to go somewhere and do some real stuff at the first opportunity.

As soon as there is any sort of warm day, get out and throw. It snowed 2 feet here before Christmas. Then it got rather warm outside. Kids could have gotten out and tossed a ball for 15 or more minutes just to do it, if they wanted to. Then it got very cold here and snow flurries have been falling ever since. But one day in January or February, it is going to get wamr for one or more days again, at least I hope it is. Get out and do something when that happens!

There are any number of facilities around which can help out a softball player for a reasonable price. No, most of us cannot go every day and rent an hour or more worht of time. &nbsop; But we can afford to go out and rent a half hour to pitch or throw a bit say 3 times before March. if we do all these other things and then get in a couple sessions of throwing or pitching before our outdoor practices begin, we should be OK. But we should probably do more.

If there are reasonably priced clinics around, and I believe there are many in most places, we should sign up for them. I know economic times are tough and many of us are struggling just to make ends meet. You do what you can. But if there is a gym or other facility nearby where you can spend 20, 30, 40 bucks and get in some off-season preparation, it will be money well spent.

If you just cannot wing it this year and you have no space in which to throw or swing a bat, don't feel bad. But understand that if you do nothing and then go to your first practices or games, you cannot expect things to be just like they were at the end of last year. You probably will struggle to make progress. You may struggle to keep up with other kids. But this is a tough year. And you will survive.

On the other hand, if you are able to do most of these things, if you are able to go to clinics, if you are able to work indoors, but you do not, well then, there is no excuse for you whatsoever. And if each year, you always seem to get a rough start because you haven't done anything in months, well, you can either learn from your own history or be forced to live it again and again. Groundhog day was a decent movie. But in that, the main character actually progressed each day. He was able to learn from his own mistakes. Groundhog day is, what, maybe a month away? Don't let history keep repeating itself over and over again.

Seasons Greetings

2009-12-28T06:21:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to write something with which to close out 2009 and ring in 2010. 2009 has been a difficult year for many of us economically. I hope the next one is better for everyone. May you all have health, happiness, a few extra sheckles, and most of all, some very good fastpitch softball in the coming year. It is often difficult to summarize the happenings of a year gone by. But I'm going to try by listing out some of the themes I have tried to cover and briefly (hopefully) going over them.

I suppose the purpose of this blog is simply to share information and experiences. It has been gratifying to hear from many of you, especially when you validate some of my thoughts. I don't mind hearing when you think I am wrong about this or that but it is particularly good to hear from folks far away that my discussions are relevant to their situations. I love it when I tell some anecdote or discuss a series of events demonstrating something and someone writes in to ask if I live in their area because what I discussed is exactly what happened to them! I think when this happens, usually I live nowhere near the person and the reason my anecdote rings true is because we are not so different even when we live a thousand miles or more apart. Human nature is human nature. Sports parents are sports parents. Softball is softball, whether it is played in Ohio, Florida, Texas or elsewhere.

My most common overall theme in this blog has to do with information. There is no greater handicap than having bad information. One would be better off to have absolutely no "knowledge" than one would be if one wrongly thought one had the right information. I say that not as an expert but rather as one who has suffered from possessing incorrect information more times than I would like to admit.

I think that through experience, an inquisitive mind, decent instincts, persistence, and a healthy dose of humility, one can overcome bad information. My aims have often been to share wrong information, explain why it is wrong, and hopefully replace it with better information.

The first bad piece of information I received happened when my kids were arguably too young for organized sports. Other parents told my wife and I that if we had any design on our kids playing sports at all, we had better get them involved at very young ages, like 4 or 5. I felt that this must be wrong because I knew I was too immature at 5 to play sports. Looking objectively at my kids, I felt they were far too uncoordinated and did not possess sufficient interest to play any sort of organized sport by 5. Sports were just another activity to them like baking cookies, playing with water pistols, or going to a water park.

We had our two daughters participate in "gymnastics" which was really just a more advanced (and expensive!) version of the play areas at Chuckie Cheese or Gymboree. They tumbled and bounced around on springy mats for an hour or two each week. But they had very little interest in doing anything hard and so their gymnastics days were numbered. They had fun, were physically active but neither kid was cut out for a sport in which the tiniest, most flexible kids are granted the opportunity to spend huge sums of money in order to be tortured and eventually feel the sting of abject failure as soon as their bodies betray them.

They did a little equestrian. One kid seemed to be pretty gifted at it. She had great posture and worked very well with the horses. The other kid was coming along well too. But do you know what equestrian costs? Own a horse? Are you kidding me? I'd rather buy a new bat, glove, cleats, uniform, etc. every season!

We did the youth soccer thing but our experiences there were mostly negative. I know very little about the game despite my older sister's near engagement to a professional soccer player many decades ago and one of our high school's players eventually becoming the coach of the USA national team. I never so much as watched a game during high school. The only things I knew about soccer were those I learned in phys. ed. class, no hands, you can't punch anyone, not even Kevin Schumacher, in the face to prevent him from scoring - I had liked playing defense until that point. That pretty much sums up my understanding of the game.

We took our then 5 year old to the local soccer clinic. I say clinic but the word that really comes to mind is anarchy. The local youth sports organization hired professional coaches from some soccer academy and had them put on something for a bunch of 4, 5, and 6 year olds who were too young to really get involved in anything more sophisticated. These coaches essentially taught drills to any parents stupid enough to volunteer and then split the group up into "teams" to work those drills. Then the "teams" were brought together and what they called a "game" broke out.

I was just stupid enough to volunteer. I realized my mistake when a parent and child approached me before clinic started one day and the mother, referring to me as "coach," informed me that she was just dropping her kid off and his father would be picking him up. Seems the couple had been divorced for some time and couldn't stand the sight of each other so neither was wiling to risk being in the same place at the same time. I became the babysitter because I had opened my fat mouth and allowed myself to be called "coach." Coach? I was never a soccer coach!

My older daughter was a participant in the alleged soccer clinic but she found she didn't like the sport very much. What she disliked was the way the boys (it was co-ed) always hogged the ball and didn't let her try to kick it into the goal. The younger kid was a spectator who discovered she didn't want to try playing because it seemed to make everyone all sweaty. She was a kid who worried about dying whenever her homeostasis got out of whack and sweating seemed particularly dangerous to her. So we abandoned soccer very quickly while still worried that our kids would be relegated to the library if they didn't find something quickly.

We tried basketball. I won't go into that other than to say it was co-ed and the boys hogged the ball even more than they did in soccer. It was fun but I know my sports and could see that my kids just didn't have the desire to play this thing the way it is typically played. We stuck that out much longer but eventually, when softball really kicked in, abandoned it too. Thankfully, by then, my younger daughter was less concerned about dying from perspiration.

When we finally got onto the softball field, something just clicked. My kids didn't complain about the heat or getting sweaty. They were mostly upset because the rules of the game, as they knew them, were not being followed. One daughter complained when teams batted their full lineup rather than changing sides after 3 outs. The other seemed annoyed when she fielded a ball and threw to a teammate who couldn't catch it buyt even more annoyed when an "umpire" called an obviously out kid, safe, so she wouldn't cry. They both wanted scores to count. They wanted to play "the real game."

As a lifelong lover of baseball, it was gratifying to me that my kids seemed to like the sport of softball. They both got very serious whenever they were at practice. They didn't draw pictures in the infield dirt. They wanted to hit the ball when they were up at bat. They liked to play catch with me in the yard. They wanted me to pitch batting practice to them on off days. They just seemed to like everything about the game.

This gratification caused me to make my first big softball mistake. I allowed someone to teach my kids to pitch. I've discussed this several times before so I won't go into it now. What I want to tell you is that I was so concerned that my kids get involved in some sport at a young age that I lost my head when they found something they liked. My judgment faltered and I allowed them to become pitchers. I have been paying financially and physically ever since.

I have digressed. My point here is that when parents tell you, "things aren't like they were when we were kids. Today you have to get involved in sports by kindergarten or you will be too far behind when you try later." Nothing could be further from the truth. You can try every sport but don't get impatient and never be discouraged. Your 5 year-old is unlikely to demonstrate any real acumen when it comes to athletics and the kids who do are often done with sports by the time they reach 8. If you cannot get your kids involved with something until they are 8 or 9, do not fret and do not hesitate to do it at that point out of fear they are too far behind to participate.

Another fallacy I learned during the early years is the old "well rounded kid" conundrum. nbsp; How do you make sure your kid is "well rounded?" Have her participate in everything and focus on nothing, of course.

As my kids focused more and more on softball, we often heard that one. "Sara doesn't really take softball as seriously as your kids. She is more into her dance classes, the piano, school, her social life. And that's OK. We want her to be well rounded. That's important, you know. When it comes time for college, the schools want well rounded kids, not those who have focused on just a few things."

Well, first of all, being well rounded is important. Kids ought to do well in school. They should also pursue athletics, if they can. They should have intellectual pursuits outside the classroom. They should experience real charity work. They should have a summer job at some point before they graduate high school. Music is important. There are any number of activities kids should try to see where their interests and skills lie.

We should not take a kid and alter her life so she can spend 18 hours a day playing softball or the piano, to the exclusion of all else. But well rounded does not mean one season of cheerleading, another of gymnastics, yet another of the chess club, while never really focusing on something and seeing it through to a logical conclusion. Colleges do want well rounded kids but they want to see a well rounded kid who has a few pursuits they have taken pretty far and seriously. Being really, really good at softball, basketball, the violin or chess does not preclude a person from being well rounded. Athletics do not prevent one from developing a social life, being a scientific genius, or doing charity work.

The next fallacy involves the notion that, if you are playing rec softball, the only way you can break into "travel" is to be invited to the party. The idea goes that only the very best rec players will ever play travel and those kids will be recruited by some travel coach who sees them play rec. That is not how to get involved in travel or club softball.

The first item of this I would like to clarify involves evaluation of your local rec league. The full spectrum of rec leagues includes some that are absolutely horrendous, some that are truly outstanding, and most which are mediocre or worse. If you are uncertain of the quality of your rec league, go watch progressively older girls. If the 14s, 16s, and 18s all stink, chances are your league stinks. And when I say "stinks," please use your own judgment. You can probably tell without any assistance from me.

I remember when my kids were 8 and 10, I went to watch the older girls play a rec game. These were perhaps 16s. The first baseman had difficulty catching a throw from short. The pitching was almost as weak as it was at 10U. I believed that if my ten year old were given just a bit more training, she would have had little difficulty surviving the 16 year old league. That was a bad sign. Later I saw our local high school team play and realized that none of the kids from the rec league could make this team. That's when I knew our rec league stunk.

Secondly, if your rec league stinks and your kid really likes softball, you ought to get her involved in travel. That is the only way she is going to get good enough to make the high school team. As you look out at the 14s and 16s of your rec league, picture your kid there. That is her future if you stay with a poor rec experience and do nothing more.

Next, travel teams are put together via tryuts. They do not have scouts. Yes, they sometimes recruit kids from rec leagues but there is no organized effort. If you want to try travel, go to tryouts, multiple tryouts. If your kid doesn't make any team, have her continue to play rec ball, work on her skills, and try again next year. Do not assume that because your kid isn't the best kid in the rec league she'll never make travel. Get some instruction, practice skills, tryout, repeat.

The next piece of bad advice involves kids already playing travel. There are a couple of fallacious notions in travel softball that I have tried to make you aware of over the past year or so. The first of these is the idea that kids who are good at say 10 or 11, and only these kids, are going to be the best players later on. Often the kids who are best at 10 and 11 do become the best players in high school but that is because they work at it. They're good at 10, fall in love with the sport, and work at their skills because they love the game. They are not the best at 16 because of some natural gifts they were born with. If that were the way things worked, teams from China, Russia, Germany, Argentina, etc. would be much more competitive at the international level. Success in softball has less to do with natural talent than it does with fundamental skills worked at for years.

A kid who is tremendous at 11 can easily drop off and become a marginal player later because she doesn't put in the time and work. Likewise, a marginal player at younger ages can become an impact player after she grows, becomes stronger, and her coordination matures, assuming that she is working on softball skills. If a kid really likes the sport but does not thrive in travel ball, that is not a reason to give up. I have seen far too many stars fall and marginal players rise to think that all the best kids are easily identified by 11 or 12. If you're in travel but struggling, redouble your efforts, go to clinics, see some coaches, and keep trying.

The next fallacy is the "winning team" approach. This divides into a number of very different directions and I'll have to take these one at a time. The first direction involves parents who suffer through a bad season and then think that what they really need is to find a winning team for their kid. The idea is that girls must experience one (or more) of those winning seasons in order to feel good about themselves and really develop in the game. What cost are you willing to pay in order to have your daughter on a winning team and what exactly is a winning team?

I can think of any number of examples of kids whose parents steered them to winning teams. In one case, the kid was a pitcher who just barely made it. She typically pitched one game on Saturday, usually 3 or 4 innings, and that was about it. She wasn't good enough to play the field. She wasn't good enough to pitch on Sunday. The team won quite a bit but she was not responsible for the team's record in any way, shape or form. She gained no greater confidence. She merely pitched less than she would have on a mediocre or bad team.

Another kid tried out for and made a very good team after a pretty disappointing year with her previous team. The girl was able to break into the batting order and played some outfield that year. The next year, she broke into her desired position in the infield. She grew quite a bit from the competition for playing time. But the team's winning had little to do with it. &nbap; Rather, she had good coaches and was one of those who thrive competing with teammates. Not everyone does.

And what is winning? What constitutes a "winning team?" I have seen several teams that won quite a bit. Some teams have completely avoided good competition in the interests of sporting the best possible win loss record. In a 50 plus game season, they might have been something like 55-5. Now, I understand that it is very difficult to go through the opposite kind of season, say 5-55. But there is a whole universe of possibilities between these two extremes. And going 55-5 while playing no noteworthy teams is not necessarily a positive experience. These 55-5 teams very often fall apart because their players want more than merely the best possible win-loss record. Yes 5-55 teams also fall apart. Actually, they very rarely hold together. But if you are looking for a team to play for, you will probably be better served by going for the team with a 30-30 record that plays the best possible competition and improves as time goes on. The best teams are those which strive to play against the best competition regardless of win-loss record. The worst teams to play for are the 55-5 and 5-55 ones.

The next prong of the "winning team" fallacy says that good players always play for good teams and bad teams always have bad players. I have seen any number of mediocre players on very good teams. I have seen some of the very best players on very poor teams. Reasons for winning and losing do not always depend upon the athletic abilities of a given team's players. And the ninth kid on the best team is very often not nearly as good as the best kid on one of the worst teams. Playing on a winning team is no panacea for developing a good player.

This progression leads me up to the next prong which involves the college recruiting world. There is a popular misconception that whether a team wins or not is very important. The idea goes that if a team is winning all the time, the college coaches will come to see them and recruit their players. This idea gets manifested in some very weird discussions.

Where I am, there are several long-standing established showcase teams. There are also some teams which have stayed together for several years and been very successful in age group ball. Sometimes the winning age-group teams are within the same organization as the established showcase teams. Very often they are not.

The problem which develops is, at some point, some of the girls on the successful age group teams want to play in college. So they leave to play for the established showcase teams. The age group teams resent this and endeavor to break into the showcase world. They complain that the larger, more well known showcases discriminate against them due to politics. Often the newcomers cannot get into the better showcases and when they do get in, they play their games relegated to the "back fields" where, of course, there are no college coaches.

There are any number of problems in this prong of the fallacy. First of all, showcases do not have a lot to do with winning and losing. As their name states, they exist for the purpose of showcasing talent, to college coaches. If a college coach wanted to go see competitive ball, he or she could just go watch ASA Gold or 16U "A" qualifiers or national championship tournaments. But they do go to showcases and they are there to watch particular girls. They are not there to identify winning teams so that they will then know which teams they should focus on for recruiting purposes.

I'm not sure where this idea comes from but it exists out there. I have heard any number of discussions that suggested that the established showcase teams are not the best and this or that age group team can beat this or that showcase team. So what? What does that prove?

Showcase teams very often do not play to win games at showcase tournaments. Heck, they may not even have the absolute best softball players on their rosters. If say a showcase coach must decide between one player who might be graded at a 90% rate on her softball skills and a 75% on her academic record and another who is an 85% player and a 98% student, the coach is going to take the 98% student. That is, as they say, a no brainer.

Colleges want recruits who can stand up academically. They very rarely want a softball player who may not meet eligibility standards, let alone thrive at their institutions. Showcase team coaches are evaluated on the number of recruits they are able to place, not on their win-loss record. If you were considering joining a showcase team, would you be more interested in the coach who has successfully placed a high percentage of his or her kids over the past 5 years or the one whose win-loss record is best while less than a quarter of all players are ever recruited at all?

So if better students make better prospects at most universities; if showcase coaches want recruitable players; if the idea is to get kids and college coaches connected, where does winning fit it? It doesn't.

I can think of a fairly large number of very good softball players with poor academic records. In one case, there was a junior, the right year for recruitment, who was outstanding on the diamond but believed to be a C student and 19 years old because she had been left back so often. In another, there was a kid who could have been recruited by at least 50 D-1 schools but for her grades. In another, there was a kid who could really play and her grades were OK but her board scores were so poor that one must assume that her grades are almost irrelevant since she must have had some "help" along the way. In yet another, there was a kid who could play any position on the field, and probably could make most D-1 teams based on softball skills, but she had absolutely no interest in ever going to college for academic reasons and her high school course load consisted chiefly of remedial courses. All these girls were unrecruitable but very good softball players.

Does it take a genius to extrapolate that it is possible that a winning team might have all unrecruitable players on it while an established showcase team might have weaker players who are all highly recruitable?

To go a step further, sometimes talk turns to the relative coaching skills of some age group coach and the showcase team's coach. That's absurd. Players at the showcase level are pretty much responsible for their own softball skills. The coach you want on the showcase circuit is the guy or gal who has the relationships with college coaches. If you could join a team which won most of its games thanks to wonderful coaching and softball talent but on which the coach has no relationships with any recruiters, would you? Why? What is it you are after?

If I am going to go to the expense and trouble of letting my kid play showcase ball, I need to get something out of it. What I need is for her to get showcased. What I don't need is for her to stand proudly at the end of the year and tell me her team's win-loss record. Once you add up the airfare, lodging and meals, let alone tournament and team costs, there is nothing about showcases which should lead you to be concerned about win-loss records. The only things which matter are getting into schools and hopefully getting a little help with the costs. The only trophy in showcase ball is college acceptances and aid notifications.

Because a team's winning record has little to do with whether a player garners any attention at all, very often even the best winning programs at the 16U level begin to collapse because girls seek something different. I can think of a couple very high level teams, teams that were extremely successful at ASA 14 and 16 A nationals, which broke up subsequently precisely because it was time for their girls to seek showcase attention. Conversely, many good but not great age group teams stay together and try to force their square team into the round hole of showcase ball. These teams, their players and parents all complain bitterly about the "overly politicized" world of showcase ball. Yet they should already understand that the softball world has taken shape before they got there and will exist long after they are gone. We live in the world as it is, not as we wish it would be. if you want to play before college coaches, join a team which plays before college coaches.

Finally, while it may be an absurd picture to paint, it is conceivable that one or more of the players on the best team is not particularly recruitable in terms of softball skills. Put another way, college coaches would be out of their minds if they pursued only players from the teams which ranked amongst the highest in the land. You might get yourself an inferior player who for whatever reason is able to hide on a very good team while missing a kid who is far superior but has little on her squad in terms of pitching, hitting, or defense.

I think the notion that college recruiters go to see only winning teams stems from the same virus that causes some folks to think that college coaches will just somehow find you because you are talented. Those that believe this generally suspect that if a kid is a really good high school player, the college coaches will hear about her and just show up to watch her play. That's more than somewhat unlikely.

I remember observing a showcase team made up of some very inexperienced (showcase) kids. Coaches told the girls that they had to take the first steps. They needed to register with the NCAA clearing house. They needed to peruse colleges' web sites, choose some schools based on where they wanted to go and which schools were academically suited to them, complete prospect questionnaires, and make contacts with coaches. They needed to invite coaches to come watch them play. Then and only then would they find any success with the recruitment game. Still, you could see by many of the girls' faces that they had done none of this and still hoped to be recruited based purely on how good they were. They were a little surprised and disappointed when nobody showed up to watch them play despite being on high profile fields. There were coaches in attendance. They had come to watch kids they were already following, kids who had made the contact and played the recruitment game.

Winning records have little to do with recruiting. Yes, the teams that go deep into ASA Gold and 16U "A" nationals will garner some looks. But that is not how the bulk of the recruitment load is carried. Many colleges have little hope of landing the ace pitchers for the top 10 Gold teams. They don't even try. After you get past the obviously gifted kids, many of the rest seem like an indistinguishable pack, indistinguishable until you get to the academic record and/or meet the kid and see what her personality is like.

So those are some of the common misconceptions, fallacies, and errors that pervade our sport. I hope I have shed some light on a thing or two which perhaps confuses you. I hope I shed light today and this past year. I hope to shed more light in the coming year. Happy holidays to you. May the new year be very good to you and yours.

Parent Trap

2009-12-03T05:47:00.000-08:00

Before I begin today, let me say that I do not know what it is like to be a mother. I am, of course, a father. I was the last of 5 siblings to have children. I have daughters, not sons. Before I became a parent, I was an uncle. My sisters all had boys. So while I do not have personal experience being a father of a son, I can say that I have observed, up close and personal, the different ways fathers and mothers relate to their sons and daughters. There is a difference. Also, parents are not particularly aware of the ways they relate outwardly to their children and how their behavior appears to others. The discussion I want to engage in today, one about parental conduct in travel softball, is very difficult and I expect many just won't get it. My perspective is as a father of daughters, but it also, I hope, can be applied to mothers and fathers of both sons and daughters since I have observed all the various permutations.

This discussion concerns the way parents outwardly relate to their children within the context of travel softball teams and tournaments. The reason why this is critical is because it really does matter, mostly to the kids themselves but also it can have unforeseen and unintended consequences with others.

I have observed parental conduct as a newcomer to a team, as one with a daughter guesting, as member of the old guard on a team, as mere spectator, as a head and assistant coach, and from just about every other imaginable point of view. I have seen all kinds of behavior and I'm not sure I am positioned properly to judge all of it. But I can tell you about some of the more extreme examples and how I interpret them.

I want to draw on some images. So I have to tell you some stories.

I have a friend whose daughter has played gold level ball for a few years. Back when she got involved with it, I ran into the father at a showcase. He told me of the instruction he had received from the staff of the showcase team. They warned parents against the sort of conduct they had observed over the years in younger aged tournament ball and gave several examples of what to avoid. The gist of that went something like, "make yourselves invisible at showcases if you want your daughter to make favorably impressions with the college coaches."

This father began his experiences observing his daughter playing showcases by sitting beyond the outfield fence. He arrived at the field, made sure his daughter had her stuff including water and money, and knew how to get in contact should she need something. He saw her off to join her teammates. And then he disappeared from her life for the day.

I say I ran into him but I went to a game his daughter was playing. We had talked by phone prior to this so I went to see if I could find him but had a little difficulty locating him. He told me he would be in the outfield and I scanned the fence to find him but he wasn't there. I expected to see him leaning on the fence. There were some people doing that or sitting in chairs next to it but he wasn't one of them. So I gave him a call on his cell and he said, "look at rightfield and now I'll lift up my arm so you can see me." There he was! He had been lying down in the grass, almost completely out of sight! He had done this purposely because he wanted to be virtually invisible.

This is the model of good behavior for a parent at a showcase tournament.

There is a girl, now off to college where she plays softball, who was a youth and high school pitcher. She tried out for and made various teams over the many years of her career. You could always find where she was playing tournaments even if you didn't know her team because her father always stood out. You wouldn't find her if you looked at the girls on the bench. But if you scanned the dugouts and sidelines, you would invariably not miss her father.

I say "you" because I mean you, the reader. You don't know the girl or her father but you would know them if you happened to be where she was playing. He'd be the guy constantly talking to his daughter and giving her signs about which pitch to throw and where. He was frequently on the coaching staff of these teams but when he was, he was exclusively concerned with his own daughter 100% of the time. Sometimes he might talk to others briefly but he was focused on his daughter. That wasn't just true when she pitched. That was true when she played SS or any other place on the field.

This conduct by the father occurred not merely in travel ball but also in HS. She was a varsity pitcher and I was shocked to see the same sort of behavior there. For a couple years, he merely signaled pitches to her. Then, he actually wormed his way into the dugout and called her pitches directly from there. No matter where this kid played, the father was involved a bit more than he should have been and trying to control what his daughter did on the field, even when she was as old as 17!

I was at a high school game with different teams once when a group of parents happened near my perch along the outfield fence. They were discussing some pitcher on one of the teams. I don't know this girl and it was several years ago so I never really figured out who she was. These parents were talking about the pitcher's prospects with a certain college. They said, and I have no way of verifying it though it does sound within the realm of possibility, "she convinced the college coach to come watch a high school game and she came only to see the father calling pitches by sign language from the sidelines. She packed up and left after crossing the kid off her list of prospects."

Again, I cannot judge the veracity of these comments but they sound plausible. If a coach were looking for a self-sufficient kid to fill the circle, you can imagine what she might think. If a coach merely wanted an effective pitcher, she might ignore the strong parental influence, assuming the kid had several effective outings in front of her. On the other hand, unless the father was planning to go to college with the kid, I know I would want to see how she pitched without him calling the shots. I'd like to observe how she worked with catchers.

Compare and contrast these three stories. How do you analyze them? How do you see yourself fitting into the spectrum of possible behaviors? Are you more like the father sitting, hidden out by the fence, or the father calling all his kid's pitches, perhaps worming his way into the dugout to be a pretend coach?

Let me tell you, I am not like the father by the fence. But I aspire to become like him. I am a nervous, tense person most of the time. I find I can turn this off sometimes, rarely, but I have yet to do that at a softball game. I find that any softball game can make me tense. I get tense watching games at every age level whether I know someone on one of the teams or not. My kids' softball games make me really tense. I suppose I like to be tense and that is why I like softball. But I do not want to ever do anything to harm my kids. I want to do everything I can to make my kids' softball experiences as good as they can be.

When I was an older "kid," about age 20, I had a friend who stood something like 6 foot 4, was otherwise rather large, and was very loud. We regularly referred to him by his nickname, "big and loud." I was known as "not as big but just as loud." I don't know where I got my voice from. It is too bad that it is married to abject tone deafness or I might have been an opera star. When I played ball, I annoyed more people than I would want to admit because I never shut up. I talked so much that many of my teammates mocked me. But I did it on purpose because I was catching and it broke hitters' concentration. Still, that need to talk nonstop with full voice pervades my being whenever I am at a game including my kids' softball games. You would easily find my kids by looking for me at games, unless I am coaching in which case I show a little more discretion and restraint!

Early on, my kids were busy trying to perfect their pitching motions and pitches. I provided nearly constant vocal reminders to them while they were in the circle. I just couldn't help myself. Do this, do that, faster arm, snap it off, hit your spots, spin it hard, etc., etc., etc. almost constantly sprang forth from my pie hole. When my youngest started out in 10U travel at the age of 9, I sometimes went so far as to signal her pitches. The team coach was someone I knew and he began to encourage me to do that. he said he didn't mind because he had no idea and wanted her to be successful so the team would win. So I started acting just like that father of the high schooler I mentioned earlier, acting as pretend coach.

In later years, I started getting involved in coaching so that I was no longer merely calling or signing from the sidelines. I enjoy coaching, particularly coaching other people's kids but I don't like coaching my own. I found myself too involved with my own kids, especially when they pitched. I started calling pitches for all the pitchers on my teams. And I was constantly coaching my daughters when they pitched. That's fine, I suppose, but the reality is they would not be able to grow as pitchers unless I took a step back.

At some point in my kids' softball careers, I attended a large clinic at which kids of all ages were present. Somehow, I got into a conversation with a guy whose daughter had been playing showcase ball with a well known gold team from the southeast for a year or so. She was a very accomplished player who was being recruited by a couple schools. This fellow talked to me for a while and then asked if I was coaching my daughter. When I told him I was, he said I should look to cut that out soon, "by the time she reaches 14." He went on further to say that otherwise she would not develop fully as a ball player. He did not speak about how others might interpret a player's father being a coach, but rather was focused on how that might effect my daughter, herself.

Since I heard these words, I have tried to extricate myself from coaching my kids' teams. Unfortunately, I have been cajoled into coaching by someone who knew me or been convinced to help out on teams that were short-staffed. So I have not yet succeeded in pulling back fully. I keep trying and as I say that, I hear Yoda, the Jedi master saying, "Try not, Do, Or do not, There is no try." Wisdom aside, I suspect there are many of us who coach our daughters' teams against our better judgment and the advice of others.

Many of us who do not directly coach are more like Sandra Bullock in the recently released movie "The Blind Side." (I highly recommend this film to anyone - I no longer go to see movies very often as most really stink. This would be the exception.) In the film, Bullock watches over her soon to be adopted son very closely, especially when he is at football practice. At one point, she gets frustrated with the coaching, marches onto the field and proceeds to give instruction to her son with the help of some of the players.

The story is a true one with a happy ending. The film is very good. But this particular scene got under my skin because it tends to support a bad notion, the idea that it is right and good for parents of young athletes to walk out onto the practice field, perhaps even the game field, in order to instruct their children about what they are doing. This is not a great thing.

In case you might think that parents would never do anything of the sort, I assure you that you are mistaken. Parents very often do exactly that. I was once running an indoor practice in which we set up an infield and ran situations, especially bunting situations. I pulled the girls into a circle before we started and explained what it was I wanted them to do. Then we ran plays. Unbeknown to me, one father was sitting behind the protective net by first base where his daughter was playing. He constantly gave her instruction. He also instructed the other 1Bs. His instruction was directly contrary to what I had told them. I couldn't understand why they could not perform a relatively simple play the way I had instructed them to do it. later I learned what had been going on and corrected it. I gave the father a stern talking to. Thereafter, he stayed in his car during indoor workouts.

On different occasion, we were playing a game in a tournament and suffering through some pretty bad umpiring. Everyone was on edge because most of the calls had gone against us and some were ridiculous. After one call, as it happens a legitimate one, a father walked onto the field to question the umpire about the call. I stood in stunned amazement as the father entered the playing field. Fortunately one of my assistants caught him before he crossed into play and told him to go back and sit down. I gave him basically the same talk I had given the other father.

Lots of the sort of bad behavior is displayed after parents become familiar with the coach and team. They engage in regular conversations, get comfortable with everyone and then lose their heads when games get stressful. Usually this does not happen right away because, just like on job interviews, people have their guard up the first couple times they meet you. But some folks are not at all restrained. Some folks act badly as early as tryouts.

I have had my kids go through tryouts annually since we got into travel ball. I9 wanted them to get experienced trying out so that when they had to do it for real, it would be no big deal. I practiced this in my life at times I was not looking for jobs. I would send out resumes and go on interviews years and years before I was ever actually looking for a job. I figured it would be good for my kids to do the same. Also, I wanted to see how other teams conducted their tryouts so mine would be more professional looking. In any event, what I saw at these tryouts frequently left me speechless.

I can understand a little good natured cheering at all times around the softball diamond but at tryouts, this should probably be a little less loud and frequent than it is at games. Some parents insist on giving their kids encouragement even in this tryout setting. It can be a little absurd but there is nothing wrong with it per se. I guess I prefer to be pretty quiet when it comes to tryouts others are conducting when my kid is involved. I watch but keep my mouth shut. Many parents cheer but others are much more involved than that. They scold their kids when they make mistakes. They walk over to the dugouts when kids are coming off the field and give instruction to their kids. Some transgressions are worse than that.

A travel coach friend of mine wrote in to say, "I think that parents really need to know they can actually do more harm than good during try-outs. The last thing a coach wants is parent issues. I have seen kids rejected due to their over-the-top intense parent. I don't want to deal with that and neither would you. One guy actually went out on the field during try-outs and caught his pitcher-daughter. When asked to let a player catch her, he called pitches from behind the back-stop. Unreal. Dad was told he was the reason the kid was overlooked. She is a very good pitcher, but not worth dealing with dad ... Best thing to do is stay in your car or on the bleachers and just observe!"

In my own experiences, parents can be problematic at tryouts and coaches should always be on the lookout. I had one set of parents behave themselves through tryouts, occasionally cheering but never saying anything directly to their daughter. Then after the tryouts, they questioned me excessively long. I kind of got a bad feeling from them but I ignored it. That was a mistake. It is OK to ask questions after tryouts to learn about the team and organization. But there are common sense limits.

For example if your daughter is asked to be on my team today, right after tryouts and the rest of the roster is also set, there is no way I can "guarantee" her a certain amount of playing time at a particular position. I can say that today she is the best or second best pitcher, catcher, infielder, or whatever but that does not mean she will perform so in games or that some other kid is not going to earn her position next spring. So, why ask about it? Why ask, "can you guarantee my kid infield playing time?" You can get a sense of how many other girls are pitchers, catchers, etc. before committing to the team. But you will never receive a contract and you shouldn't ask for one unless you want to scare off a coach.

I heard from one coach who was asking some girls to play for him. One of the girl's parents called the coach to ask questions before committing. That phone conversation lasted an hour in which the parent needed to know if a couple other girls were being asked to join and then whether they were likely to get the kind of playing time they would be looking for. This parent couldn't commit unless the other kids were coming. And they wouldn't be coming unless ... So on top of asking about her kid's prospects on the team, she had to be concerned with the others as well. The same lengthy conversation took place several times with a parent of each of the kids. After the last conversation, the coach drew a deep breath, pulled out his list of phone numbers and called each family back to inform them that he had completed his roster and their offers were no longer extended. He was not going to deal with these people for an entire year.

I held a tryout once in which I really only needed a couple kids, a pitcher if someone stood out, perhaps a catcher, and a utility player. The rest of my team was set. 7 or 8 kids showed up. One wore these super-kewl sunglasses despite it being very cloudy out that day. Those represented her attitude. She was pretty sure she was all that and more. Her mother felt the same way about her kid. She figured out who my wife was and sat next to her apparently on purpose. She talked non-stop and afterward my wife had a migraine. Not a good start!

Thuis kid wore a weird smirk on her face too, another attitude thing. She was convinced she was a good player and going to make this team. She wasn't and didn't. Back then I always liked to catch the pitchers because I wanted to observe movement and speed for myself. I caught what she suggested were fastballs, changes, curves, and drops. To tell you the truth, I was not able to discern between the pitches. Worse, the mother sat there and told my wife how she "knows your daughter is fast but my daughter is more of a finesse pitcher. She doesn't have your daughter's speed but she has better movement and you'll see that as they get older, movement's more important."

Why on Earth would you say such a thing to a coach's wife if you wanted to make the team? the kid had no movement, not even close to my daughter's. She couldn't change speeds even if she could throw moderately fast. Her curve and drop spun but didn't move at all. It was as uninspiring as it could be and the kid was not even close to as good as my younger daughter who played down an age group. I wouldn't take her on ability alone but I really was not going to have her anywhere near my team once I heard what the wife had said. What if she had been marginal? What if I was seriously considering inviting her?

In another case in which I was not a coach, there was a girl who was perfectly nice and a decent player. Her father, on the other hand, was another story. I won;t go into details but he had absolutely no restraint when it came to what he said and his choice of words to say it. After the first season with the team, a few girls left the team and they held tryouts. After the tryouts, the coach called the father and said, "I am not asking your daughter to join the team this year. She made the cut but you did not." The fgather had to be removed from the team and, therefore, the girl was not invited. That is a shame.

OK, so those are some stories about parental conduct in the softball setting. I said at the beginning that fathers probably relate to daughters differently than mothers do. I guess I didn't develop that so much as just give you examples of each. In the end, I want you to walk away from this understanding that your conduct as a parent of an athlete has an effect on numerous intended and unintended others. It will effect your kid, perhaps in ways you don't want it to. It might color her prospects at tryouts or with her team. It may effect the way college coaches look at her if that is where you are. You must restrain yourself. You have to think about the way others perceive you and your child, and how you would like them to perceive you.

End This "Travel" Myth

2009-12-02T07:50:00.000-08:00

Something triggered a memory I have previously discussed in blog entries on related topics. I want to air the issue again because while I feel foolish for ever having believed a certain myth, apparently others have been told the same story. I would like to see the myth gone forever. I would like folks to understand the way things really work when they want to either leave rec for travel permanently or merely experiment with it.

A long, long time ago (and I can still remember how that music used to make me smile), my kids were dabbling in youth sports like Goldilocks playing with the sleep-number-bed control box. This sport was too hard, that one too easy (boring). Then the oldest played her first game of softball and the comments about why she didn't like the game ceased. Instead, she said, "I wish they played with real outs .. like when you get three outs, the other team should be up instead of having everyone bat." She also said something about not liking it when a girl ran to the next base on a foul ball and nobody made her go back. I thought to myself, we just may have something here.

In the early years of playing rule-based softball instead of clinics where everything was allowed, my kid was not particularly good but she worked very hard and the coaches repeatedly noted that if there was an award for most improved, my kid would get it. She was very young in a league which had an age group that spanned three years and she was holding her own. Before long, her age was not apparent in her playing skills.

We began some lessons to try to refine some of her skills since she seemed to like the game more than I had hoped. That's another story and not relevant to today's discussion. At some point, I heard about this thing called "travel" and became curious as my daughters skills progressed to where the competition in rec was no longer quite as appealing. I opened my ears wide and began to eavesdrop on others' conversations, particularly whenever the word "travel" was used. I overheard several discussions but didn't learn what I wanted to know, how one got involved in this thing called "travel."

I took note of who apparently was already involved in travel and resolved to question them about it. One fellow had an older daughter who many said was a good player. She played "travel." This guy seemed to be the resident expert as I overheard many conversations in which he appeared to be the authoritative speaker on the subject. So I began asking this fellow about travel and working my way around to asking him directly how one gets involved.

Eventually, my acquaintance offered up his sage words of advice. Eventually, he let me in on the "secret." He said, "If a girl is really good in the rec leagues, the travel coaches will hear about her, come watch her play, and then ask you to come to a tryout or even ask you directly if your daughter will join their team."

With this sage advice in hand, I proceeded on my way. I worked with my daughter hoping that I could bring her skill level up to the point at which she might garner some travel attention. We continued with lessons. One day her instructor asked me directly if I had thought about getting my kids into travel. I told him that I had and we would like to do it but don't know how to get involved. I suggested that I had heard that trav el teams ask you to join but this advice seemed to me to be wrong. He confirmed my suspicions and told me to keep my eyes and ears open for tryouts and just go.

My wife and I started looking in every corner we could find so that we could educate ourselves on the subject since our available resources had led us down the wrong path. Somewhere on eteamz, via a softball forum or some such place, we read about a tournament taking place in our area. That's another story I have told on here before so I'll skip it today. In any event, we decided to see if we could get a tryout for the team hosting the tournament. After numerous e-mails, we finally got a response and subsequently got involved in this strange, hidden animal known as "travel."

Now, after many years of participating in travel as a parent, coach, etc., I want to dispel the myth or, at best, misunderstanding that some people still spread. Travel teams do not have crews of recruiters out watching rec games looking for players. They do not scout towns, teams, or players. The only way a kid gets "asked" to play travel ball is if a coach's kid also happens to play in some rec league, the team needs players, and the coach observes someone who would fill his open roster spot(s) well. Sometimes such coaches have few requirements, like for example, does the kid have a pulse and respiration. "Can she run faster than she walks? Oh never mind, we'll teach her how to run." "Does she own a glove, oh never mind, I have some spare gloves, she doesn't need a glove." Sometimes, mere pulse is enough.

I'm not kidding about the pulse thing. Sometimes there are so many travel teams around that it becomes next to impossible to roster the minimum number, 9 players, let alone the advisable one of 11 to 13. They want their daughters and other kids on the team to be able to play and they'll take just about anyone to fill out the roster. I've never been stuck like that but have seen many teams that were.

So how does one find a way into the "secret world" of travel ball? There are, of course, several avenues. The first is what frames the backbone of the myth. Sometimes girls are asked to join teams. That's somewhat rare but it does happen. Another way occurs when a girl playing for some travel team that is holding tryouts to fill open roster spots tells her teammate or girlfriend to come and tryout. Coaches of teams who have children playing rec ball sometimes ask kids on their rec teams who have shown some promise or desire to get involved with travel to come to a travel practice. So, in these cases, entrance into the travel world is provided via personal relationships.

Another way to get involved in travel ball is via the local rec all-star team. These teams usually play something like the Little League or Babe Ruth tournaments and then end. But sometimes the coaches or players want to do more so they sign up for some tournaments. They may find a degree of success at these or they may get stomped. Sometimes a travel team is born of such experiences or sometimes you may learn something about the travel world when your rec all-star team plays some team you didn't know exists. Perhaps you will recognize a kid or parents from your rec league, your church, or even from your neighborhood. Go over and start asking questions of them. But maintain a healthy degree of skepticism when they tell you that their child was asked to join this team because the coach was at her rec game.

If you have your softball playing kids involved with any sort of instruction, the instructor and others attending the clinics or lessons are an excellent source of information concerning travel teams as well as which might be looking for a kid. Some of our instructors are the virtual hub of information flow in our area with respect to travel teams seeking players. I haven't directly benefited from this when it came to my own kids but I have spread the word about open spots or tryouts via instructors. They almost always know what is going on around them. Also, when kids are in multi-kid clinics, the parents of other kids often know what is going on or are involved with teams that open slots. They can be a great source of information and, possibly, invitations to practices or tryouts.

Aside from being asked or learning about tryouts through your acquaintances, one can use these relationships to gain entrance via "guesting" opportunities. Teams often have trouble getting enough kids to play a particular tournament because the family or other obligations of roster members make them unavailable for a day or two. While the team seeking players for one tournament might never need a guest again, you still gain entree into the travel world and learn useful things. For example, you might learn when the team your daughter is guesting for is holding its tryouts. You might learn completely unexpected things such as you really like the way the opposing coach handled things with their girls and while you never realized that particular team existed just two miles from your home, you would like your daughter to play for them. So you walk up and ask that coach when they are conducting tryouts. He answers by saying, "Well, we're looking for a kid right now. Why don't you come to practice Tuesday, 6:00 at the elementary school."

I have seen some pretty strange things happen. For example, some girl is asked to guest for a team and that team's first game is against a team whose coach is a co-worker of one of the girl's parents! I know a guy who reads this blog who got his daughter involved with travel last year only to learn that one of his best friends, a friend he has known since childhood, runs one of the biggest and best travel organizations in the state. He ran into him at a tournament the organization was playing. He had spoken to this guy at least weekly for twenty or more years and never known that a good portion of his life was devoted to travel and high school softball.

Aside from personal relationships, all-star teams, coaches and parents of kids you meet in passing, there are a couple other ways to get involved. Teams almost always have need of roster members between years and they conduct formal tryouts which are publicized in newspapers, via softball message boards, or in postings where your kid takes her lessons. Good organizations field teams at multiple age levels and often more than one team in certain age levels. The key to being ready for tryouts is to understand when teams hold them.

I have mentioned the softball annual cycle before but I'll go over it quickly again because it fits into this discussion. Teams generally form up in August / September and play some sort of fall schedule. They then give kids off for a month or two - some teams don't give a break and some teams give a break longer than 2 months. In either case, indoor practices often begin sometime from November to January and end around March. The teams then begin playing tournaments in March or early April. The season often concludes with a final tournament sometime in July or early August, after which the cycle begins again.

This means that teams generally conduct tryouts in late August or early September. Sometimes, when teams have difficulty filling their rosters, the tryouts are extending into late September, sometimes as late as October. It is not unusual for a team seeking a 12 member roster to find only 11 and play its fall schedule while keeping its eyes open for a twelfth player. They might conduct tryouts at any time during one of their practices. Many times, this extends into indoor training season so that extends your opportunities well into the winter. In rare cases, teams still cannot fill their roster even after they begin playing spring ball. So tryouts can be conducted after the season has already begun.

To sum up, the typical way into travel ball is not via a travel ball scout observing your kid playing rec ball and inviting her to join a team. That can happen but more often, kids just go to tryouts. Sometimes they are asked to guest in order to help out a team stuck in a bind. Instructors often know who is looking for what sort of player. Use all your available resources. Talk to people. View softball forums online. Look around at your lesson center and see if there are postings. Read your local newspaper. Talk to people you know as well as those you don't. Ask direct questions concerning tryouts and roster needs, if you happen to be somewhere with coaches or parents of travel players.

Finally, if you think you might want to try out this travel thing, don't be afraid of trying something you don't know enough about. Don't assume that when you get to some travel team tryout or practice that everyone there is going to be some sort of softball monster player. There certainly may be some but there will probably be average kids as well. if the other kids seem better schooled than your kid, keep in mind that they may have benefited from good coaching and/or frequent practicing. Your kid, given the same coaching might have more upside potential. And the coaches might see this. You shouldn't be afraid of trying our a travel team because you think your kid is not good enough. You would be shocked by some of the players on a typical tournament team. Even when they look good in tryouts or practices, their lack of real ability might surprise you when it comes to game time. Just give it a shot and see what comes of it.

Additional Comment

A reader of the blog wrote in to remind me of an additional way to get involved in travel, start your own team. Many travel teams start this way. For example, say your daughter has a bunch of friends playing softball in the rec league, some are excluded from all-stars or the rec league's travel program, and some just want to play with other kids, a parent can sometimes pull together a full roster, sign up for some tournaments and just go play travel.

This can be a very tough road as these teams often get started a bit late their first year. If the team can stay together for a second year, fill roster needs via tryouts, and get themselves into better and better tournaments, this can be a great way to go. "If" is the middle word of the English language, however, and sometimes the "ifs" do not come out quite as well as they might. So I have some reservations to add.

For one thing, teams pulled together on the fly need to have some direction about what they want to accomplish. &n bsp; There needs to be a longer-term perspective. Sometimes, these teams can fall into the trap of playing the same weaker tournaments some town teams play. They never see the better competition. I can say from observations that several teams like this have stayed with weaker tournaments because their perspective was to play only those events that feel they can win. They avoid playing things in which they might go 0-4 or lose their first game of elimination play while learning a great deal.

If you are putting together something like this, it would be best if somebody helping to coach the team had some travel experience. It isn't necessary but it is helpful. If nobody has any experience, it can still work but it is necessary that somebody at least have an idea about what is going on in the full spectrum of competition in the travel world.

As an outsider joining such a team even in its second year, there are some additional reservations I'd like to mention. For one thing, it can be very difficult to join into the social fabric of a team if everybody aside from you is already friends. Of course they doesn't need to be true but it is something to look for. I know of many happy outcomes in which a girl joined a team on which everybody was friends before she got there.

I also know of a team of friends which held a tryout to fill open slots. The slots were open because some of the friends had decided they no longer wanted to play. At the tryouts, kids already on the team stuck to sitting on the bench while other girls performed drills. The girls on the bench watched closely, made fun of kids when they made mistakes, often laughing out loud, and generally were unfriendly to all others outside their circle. The team filled empty slots eventually. Those girls stayed with the team for that season and left to find better, more friendly circumstances. The process repeated itself each year thereafter as more and more friends left the team, replacements were picked who could not crack the inner circle, and so on. Eventually, the team folded as its reputation became known, replacements could not be found, and an otherwise good team began to falter. My point is, join a team in its second and third year with your eyes wide open to the social realities when such teams are filled with one circle of friends.

Why Stress Fundamentals

2009-12-01T05:59:00.000-08:00

If you spend time on any large softball forum, you will see very little discussion about real fundamentals. The subject is just not exciting enough for a good read or heated discussion. Instead what you generally see are these convoluted discussions about sophisticated topics, using words you have never heard, brought up by either real experts, those pretending to be such, or people who have no idea what they are talking about. People would rather use big words and engage in the complex then deal with what really matters, fundamentals.

I want to tell you a story that just happens to be extremely timely at this moment. Once there was a young man who was what you would call naturally gifted athletically. By gifted athletically, I mean he was both fast and quick, had good flexibility and strength, was gifted with good hands and eyes, as well as the coordination of the two; he could convert coaches words and descriptions into action; he could watch others play a sport and copy the good parts of their mechanics without taking on the bad; he was motivated to be good at the sport of his choice and became one of the most renowned prospects within it at a young age. This young man rose through the ranks of his sport rapidly and as he got older, he began to play with and against others who were similarly "gifted" with "natural" ability.

The young man became a professional in his sport and rose up to its highest levels. When grouped with the other top athletes, he still stood out. But as his game began to be scrutinized, he was compared unfavorably to several.

The young man was named Derek Jeter. His sport was obviously baseball. His defensive game was compared unfavorably to everyone from the other local MLB team's SS to others within his league and outside of it, not to mention the gentleman who plays the next position over from him. In fact, at times, minor league SS prospects were compared favorably to Jeter in terms of range and other aspects of the position. Most recently, the negative comparisons have died down quite a bit and the man was recently named American League Gold Glove Shortstop as well as Sports Illustrated Magazine's "sportsman of the year."

Wha happen?

Not for nothin but, if you live anywhere near da Bronx, you know wha happen.

Wha happen were several things. First off, the team replaced their stocky, hard hitting, poor foot speed, lousy fielding first baseman with a certain tall, athletic Gold Glover. That made a huge difference to be sure but there was another basket of changes that made a bigger impact.

A certain coach worked with Jeter, watching his fielding mechanics and various aspects of his defensive game. And you know what? This coach changed some things Jeter was doing. For one thing, he moved him deeper. That changed the path he took to the ball. More importantly, he adjusted or corrected Jeter's ready position.

Let me say that again for effect. One of the biggest improvement Derek Jeter made, the thing he did which moved his status from defensive liability or second rate SS to Gold Glove winner and arguably the most heralded athlete in his game was an adjustment to his ready position.

Are you getting this? I just said that a professional athlete who is assumed to be a member of a small elite club of fellows who are, at least potentially though probably at this point likely, first ballot Hall of Famers had his ready position adjusted and that has made all the difference.

Ready position? Isn't that the first thing anybody teaches? How can a professional get that far without a nearly perfect ready position? The answer is we can all always improve even the most fundamental aspect of our games. Professional athletes, even HOF-destined professional athletes, are no exception. If you want to improve your game, look at the basics, not the sophisticated stuff.

If you examine what professional hitters do when they get into difficult times, you will find that they always go back to the drawing board. They go back to the tee and examine their fundamental mechanics. They do not ask ace pitchers to throw batting practice for them. They do not go into the batting cages and tell the coach to turn the speed up above 100. They do not read books about new and better hitting mechanics. They do not start emulating the swing of somebody who happens to be hot right now. They go to the batting tee and review videotape regarding their hitting fundamentals.

While examining the college recruiting game in softball, I have heard several stories which do not seem to compute in my puny head. Once somebody said, lots of times coaches don't even watch the actual games when they go to showcases. Many like to watch warm-ups because they get a better sense of the kid from that than they do from the games. Players are warned against being nonchalant before and after games, and most especially during warm-ups. I can accept this but, on the other hand, I have watched so many teams warm-up like professionals and then when we got into the game, our band of scraggly goof-offs have kicked their butts. What on Earth can you tell from warm-ups?

There are lots of things you can see from an individual player during warm-ups. &nbsop; You can judge attitude, seriousness, approach to playing the sport, etc. More importantly, you get a really good sense of a kid's fundamentals from warm-ups. It is virtually impossible for a kid with poor fundamentals to pretend to be a really well-schooled player repeatedly while fielding simple grounders. Likewise, it is almost impossible for an extremely well skilled kid to go about her business using bad mechanics during a warm-up. On the other hand, when 3 to 10 balls are hit into play during the course of a game, it is almost impossible to gain a sense of a kid's fundamentals when she fields somewhere between 2 and none of these.

Also, it is very possible that some kid with absolutely fantastic skills will have a tough day because her grandfather died the night before, she was forced to stay up all night to complete a school project, she caught a stomach bug from her little brother, her boyfriend gave her heck because she spends too much time playing softball, the teacher in her otherwise favorite subject gave her heck because she spends too much time playing softball, or for any number of reasons. maybe the pitcher throwing today always misses her marks and the SS finds herself out of position because she was expecting an outside pitch for a ball and a perfect, down the middle strike was thrown. There are so many possibilities for something external to a particular player to cause her to look bad that it defies reason.

There once were two catchers on a team with two pitchers. One pitcher hit the mark all the time. The other missed more than 50% of the time but she was a hard thrower and still found success. The catcher who caught the control pitcher looked like an all-star in almost every game. The catcher for the less accurate pitcher spent way too much time with her back to the field while chasing balls bouncing around the backstop. At some point, folks watching the two drew the conclusion that one catcher was much better than the other. Then, one day, the good catcher caught the wild pitcher and the bad catcher caught the controlled one. Everyone's opinions of the two catchers changed instantaneously.

If you were evaluating catchers, would you feel more confident in your assessment if the catcher were catching somebody who always hit her marks or one who always put the ball in the dirt? If you were evaluating infielders, would you feel better about your assessment if you watched a game in which she fielded two or three easy chances cleanly or you watched her field 20 reps in a row during a practice? If you were evaluating a pitcher, would you feel comfortable watching her mow down a team of batters about whom you knew absolutely nothing? Or would you rather focus on her mechanics, speed, movement, ability to hit spots?

OK, enough of that. My point is recruiting coaches often watch warm-ups because they want to observe fundamentals. It is easier to judge fundamentals in drills with repeated reps than it is to see them on display in a game. They want to watch fundamentals because fundamentals are critical. And why they are critical is what this is really all about.

If you watch some games at various age levels, before long, you should form an understanding of why fundamentals are critical. At 10U or 12U, girls who are the best athletes make all the plays. It does not so much matter if they are fielding balls properly or throwing correctly. They are athletic. They move well enough to the ball and get there because they are fast and/or quick. They pick it up cleanly because A) they are confident in their abilities and B) the balls just are not hit as hard as, or with as much spin as, they will be soon. They make the throws accurately because they have experiences making good throws under little pressure, not because their throwing mechanics are right.

Take the successful athletic kid with poor fielding mechanics and move her gradually up in age group. Her success will begin to falter because her mechanics are bad. I have watched some middle infielders who make all the plays at 10U or 12U but who do not get in good ready positions, don't field with two hands, or otherwise make a travesty out of what are normally viewed as sound mechanics. These girls get rather frustrated when everyone catches up to them athletically or strength wise, when the balls are hit so much harder, when everything seems to have a weird spin on it. They also have difficulty getting outs when the kids' baserunning speeds pick up. They do not field properly to make a quick throw and when the girls start getting under 3, they make a lot of late throws to first. l; Then they start rushing everything to make up for their poor mechanics and the wildness begins.

Throwing mechanics, in particular, hold kids back as they get older. I have watched many otherwise decent outfielders cause major problems because they are side-armers. A couple RFs come to mind immediately. Maybe you have seen this sort of thing? There's a runner on first when a basehit reaches right field, down the line. The RF rushes over taking a good line, picks the ball cleanly and fires a side-armer to third trying to nail the runner from first. The ball sails past the line and out of play, more than 60 feet up the left field line! Ugh!

As girls age, like I already said, balls are hit harder and with more spin, runners are faster, and there just is more and more pressure put on players to do everything right, to do everything extremely fast. Girls who have sound fundamental mechanics seem to rise and those who do not, fall. Give me the super-athletic kid with sound fundamentals every time. But if given the choice between the weaker athlete who has sound mechanics and the superior athlete with poor fundamentals, I'll take the former. At some point, you just cannot help a kid who is completely disinterested in fundamentals or who has atrocious ones. That point is probably sometime between 13 and 14. So work kidsensively on fundamentals from the time they start playing until ... there is no until as Derek Jeter can attest to.

Yesterday I wrote a piece about improving softball by improving rec ball by improving pitching and fundamentals. Today I am not fixated on the lowest levels of the sport, but rather the highest. Ignore fundamentals in favor of what you deem more important aspects if you must but consider what happens when the kid who knows where to go with the ball can no longer pick it. Consider the accuracy of the strong armed girl whose throwing mechanics stink. Consider the success rate of the infielder whose foot position is always is improper. Consider how well your team does when everybody fields with one hand, pulls their gloves to their throwing hand while taking excessive amounts of steps, and then fires a rocket to the base after the baserunner gets there.

Football is perhaps one of the most complex games on the planet. We often hear broadcasters talk about the "skill positions." These broadcasters have never tried to put a block on somebody. If you do not have blockers who are capable of blocking properly, you cannot run the ball and the only thing that will come out of your passing game is a continual line of star quarterbacks sidelined with concussions, or broken bones. Blocking is fundamental. Blocking is boring. Blocking is critical.

If you coach a basketball team on which everybody could teach Coach K a thing or two about sophisticated plays but on which nobody can dribble, set a pick, make a pass, or shoot properly, good luck. It makes no difference how much your kids know about the game if they can't perform the fundamentals well.

So why do we put girls on a softball diamond and then worry that they know where to go with the ball? Why do we put the course in back of the cart? Why do so many of us not spend time on fundamentals because they are boring when those fundamentals are the single most important aspect of the game?

Now Is The Time

2009-11-30T07:42:00.000-08:00

Many, if not most, of us are in the off-season. Yes, elite travel players aged about 14 and up are working towards winter showcases in Florida and elsewhere. Many warm weather states are playing their winter seasons. And in the cold states, some few are making plans for indoor winter ball or their indoor workout sessions. But that's travel ball and what I'm about to discuss has nothing to do with that. Right now, my thoughts are with rec programs around the country. Officers and other league officials are making plans for the coming season including tryouts which will happen for many right after the holidays. In going with the catch phrase of 2009, how about thinking about some sort of "change" for the 2010 season?!

When my mind drifts back to rec ball, a couple images come to mind. For one thing, there are those eternally long games between large teams (15 or more) of girls aged 7 to 10. Another image that comes to mind is of girls in the 12U division who really are not interested in playing softball at a high level but just want to get out and socialize with their friends. The final image that comes to mind is of the older divisions which have depleted rosters either because most of the skilled players are somewhere else, perhaps in travel, or because softball is competing with school and other activities.

These are macro images and when I think of each, a couple sub-set images come to mind. In the 10U age group, typically you have about half the girls who have never played anything beyond tee ball and about half the girls who have already played a full year, possibly more, of real softball. Of those who have played some, there is a smaller sub-set of girls who have attended clinics on their own or possibly gotten involved with travel ball someplace where they played 50 games outside the rec league, practiced all winter and developed their skills well beyond the newbies.

Generally, the pitching stinks in this category except for a very small group of girls who have actually taken lessons, perhaps even pitched travel ball for a year. There are not nearly enough of these girls to go around to all the teams and because the league restricts girls from pitching more than say 3 innings a game or week, the games almost always degrade into walk-fests with a few hits when the pitcher finds the strike zone and the wrong kid, some travel kid, is at bat.

Games usually have some sort of time restriction like 2 hours and thank goodness for that because nobody could take any more. A game might start out with a bunch of walks and then somebody hits a grounder that exceeds the reach of any infielder and rolls past the outfielders. Finally the last outs are recorded and the teams switch. the next half inning might proceed like the first or the other team might have one of those travel pitchers. In any event, it continues until the score is pretty high, the travel pitcher ends her permitted number, or some such. Nobody has really gained from the experience. But everyone goes out for ice cream or speeds off to a family party or other event. Meet back here Tuesday or next Saturday and we'll replay the same game against another team.

At 12U, most of the girls are more coordinated and there is more "quality" pitching. A few teams have one travel pitcher, possibly two. Some teams do not. Generally the teams that have pitchers will make it to the playoffs by blowing out the others. And then there are some quality games, quality for the more serious players, that is. The less serious, less skilled kids will be either at home because their team is no longer playing or stuck out in the outfield and overwhelmed by the opposing pitching. Games are shorter throughout the season and particularly in the playoffs. Bragging rights are established. And many girls start considering leaving softball for something a little more interesting and exciting, or something they can actually excel at.

In the older age categories, there is a massively reduced number of players because girls have left for other activities because they have absolutely no confidence on the softball diamond. Some play although they are not serious about the game because they can still hold their own and there is nothing else much that interests them. When basketball or some other event conflicts with their rec softball games, they choose the other activity which causes teams to have trouble fielding 9. There are fewer and fewer teams and age groups are often combined in order to have enough teams with enough kids to play games.

This is the rec softball pyramid. We start out with too many kids to count at age 7 or 8 and end up with too few kids to bother counting by 15 and 16. Competition stinks in the early ages. It gets marginally better in older ones and then degrades as the number of participants depletes. It is a shame for a truly great game.

But what do we do about it? Like I said, right now is the planning stage for many rec programs. If I have accurately described rec softball, ultimately, We can really do only one of two things. We can leave it alone and assume nothing will make it any better, or fooling with it might make it worse. Or we can try to make some positive changes. What some of these changes could be are the subject of today's discussion.

Some leagues divide up the girls between 8U and 10U or 8-9 and 10U while some have leagues where 7 and under are relegated to tee ball while everyone over 8 and under 10 plays in a single league. The differences in coordination, strength, athleticism, etc. between a youngish 9 (let alone 8) and an older 10 is considerable. IMHO, girls aged 8 should not be playing with the 10s. It would be preferable if programs could establish separate leagues for 8U and 10U, even perhaps divide up the 9s and 10s into competitive and less competitive play.

If for example, you have 8 teams of 10U in which all different skill and age levels are represented, what would be wrong with creating 2 divisions, based partly on age and partly on skill. These would then play against just 3 other teams rather than having a single 8-team league in which some kid who could not field a grounder or make a decent throw to first must play against another who has played a year of travel ball in addition to rec. So my first recommendation is to consider dividing up your 10U league into competitive and less competitive divisions. If you do not wish to do this at 10U for whatever reasons, consider doing it for 12U.

Next, it is almost painful to watch the pitching at 10U in most rec leagues. Yes, there are some which train their pitchers and that is generally a better league. Many just conduct tryouts and leave the teams to their own devices. One team has one great pitcher and many poor ones. Other teams have decent pitchers who do not walk the world. But overall, the total quality of pitching is very poor.

Right now, when budgets are being established and plans for the season are being laid out, why not consider addressing the pitching issue? What you can do is bring in a professional instructor to train a group of pitchers at weekly clinics. If a professional trainer is not within the realm of budgetary possibility, comsider talking to local high school coaches to get a kid pitching at that level who would volunteer to work with the kids. Every high schooler who aspires to go to college must perform a minimum number of hours of community volunteering. This would be a fun way to earn one's required points.

These clinics could be conducted during the late winter months in some school gymnasium or other facility. Presumably the local rec league can gain access to a school gym for free or some sort of nominal charge. You get your space, some balls, an instructor and see how things develop.

The pitching clinics should not be some sort of free benefit provided by the league that anyone who wants to come whenever they want to come can feel free to attend. It should be mandatory for all girls who state they want to pitch in the league. There could be a nominal fee to cover expenses. If a professional instructor would accept $200 for a two hour clinic and you were able to squeeze 20 kids into a lesson, $5 - $10 per kid is not bad for one or two hours worth of Saturday afternoon baby sitting for a girl to gain the opportunity to stand in the circle. Add to this the other costs and divide by 20 or have the league pick up those costs. The point is, this could be accomplished for very little cost per aspiring pitcher.

One league I have spoken about in the past puts the word out that anyone who wishes to pitch must attend their pitching clinics which have a paid instructor plus some high school volunteers. A good instructor can easily handle 20 kids but give him 2 high school aged, softball playing girls and everything goes very smoothly. Attendance is taken at these clinics. Girls who want to pitch must attend, regardless of excuses provided. If your clinic consists of 8 to 10 sessions, you might allow any one girl to miss 2 but more than that and they are no longer pitchers. yes that's tough politically but if you want your league to provide a quality experience, trust me, this is a necessary step.

Girls who attend their own private lessons, could be exempted or have a reduced number of sessions, provided that it is clear that they are actually attending lessons and do not need additional work in a group setting. This can easily be seen in tryouts or at a first clinic session at which skills are evaluated. Don't simply accept anyone's word that a particular kid is in lessons and therefore has a valid e4xcuse not to show at your clinics. Otherwise, you will most certainly see more kids laying claim to being in lessons while your league's pitching improves only a bit.

The point about improving pitching is not merely some way to alleviate parental pain caused by sitting through horrendous walk-fest games. There is a better reason to take the plunge and do this. While hitting is very much a mechanical issue that should be addressed in a vacuum, it is also critical for hitters to see decent pitching, as mush as possible. When walk-fests take place, nobody benefits, not the struggling pitchers, not the bored fielders, not the batters who never get to take swings. When a league's 10U pitching improves, everybody benefits. Batters take their cuts. Fielders field balls because batters are hitting them. And the game moves along so nobody is caught yawning either in the stands or out in right field.

It should be noted that when 10U pitching improves, 12U games are better too as kids move up having actually pitched somewhat well. Others have fielded real grounders or flies. And batters have real experiences of seeing strikes and ripping at them.

As a side note, there is another pitching related issue which can be addressed to improve your local rec league. That issue can be addressed either in a non-competitive 10U or, if you have a 9U or other pre-10U league, there. That issue is walks.

One way to deal with the issue is to alter the number of balls required before a batter is walked. At young ages, 6 might be the magic number which changes the game for the better. If that doesn't cut down the number of bases on balls, there is another approach which is guaranteed to. Abolish them. That is, do not permit walking. When the pitcher throws 4 or 6 balls, have a coach pitch.

One league we were involved with had a rule which limited walks to 4 per inning. After that, a coach pitched the rest of the inning. That did not really work all that well. Almost every inning began with 4 walks followed by, of course, coaches pitching. if you want to do that sort of thing, why not put 3 runners on base, give the batting team a run and then have coaches pitch the whole thing? Of course, this also solves nothing. So, instead, consider doing away with walks, just at this low level, and allow pitchers to try to throw strikes to each and every batter without facing the risk of boring their teammates to death.

A peripheral issue involves the way teams are set up. Say you have 8 teams in your league and 16 kids have attended the clinics. That works out nicely since 2 pitchers could be placed on each team. But that is never the way it works unless you design it as such. if you want to improve your league's games along with the pitching, conduct separate drafts of pitchers and other players. The teams which go first in the pitcher draft go last in the player draft. And do not allow two parents who also happen to have their kids in pitching lessons to coach on the same team. Split them up. I don't really care who is friends with whom. The league exists for the good of the largest possible number of participants, not to ensure that Sally gets to play with her best friends.

This raises an issue unrelated to generally improving a rec league but I want to address it nonetheless because it is a thorn in my side. How many times have you seen this kind of thing happen: Matt, Sara's dad who is coaching the Marlins or Phillies has Sara, an ace pitcher on his team. His daughter knows Jane and Mollie who are very good softball players that can also pitch in a pinch. They know Maggie, Allie, Kristen and Lauren, also good players. The group conspires to go to tryouts and not really try. Matt is able to draft all 6 girls plus his daughter and they crush all comers in the league once games start. One of the 7 always pitches, another always catches, and the others make up the infield. They bat 1-7 with the "other girls" filling in remaining spots and sharing tim e on the bench. This kind of stuff cannot be allowed to go unpunished. It happens all the time across this nation and most other league participants are hurt in some fashion by it. Enough of that. If a league president knows about such shenanigans and is too spineless to put a stop to it, he or she should not be president.

So that is pitching and two related draft issues which could be addressed in order to improve a rec league. I believe that this issue alone, if it is resolved, will lead to a better rec league. But I'm going to delve a bit further into other areas because I do not believe resolving this issue alone will lead to better participation, particularly as girls age up.

Another area which can be addressed is fundamental defensive skills. So many kids progress through rec softball without ever really knowing how to field a ball or make a throw or catch that it is mind boggling. Kids come out for the lowest levels and coaches do make an effort to teach their teams how to field and throw. But before long, they come to the conclusion that half the kids can do it and the other half cannot. They also conclude that the only way they are going to win games is to take the kids who can field and throw, put them in the infield, and then teach them where to throw. They encourage these more naturally gifted kids to take over control of the game. If the ball is hit to the outfield and you can get it, go get it. Don't wait to allow the others to try to make a play. Just take charge and make every play you possibly can. While there is nothing wrong with the philosophy of going for everything in general, it can devolve into the old "Bad News Bear" scene in which one kid races back and forth and catches the ball right in front of another kid. That's not good.

A better approach is to require coaches to teach basic skills. That's tougher than it sounds since most coaches: A) do not have the slightest idea of what basic skills are, let alone how to teach them; B) see the rec league as a way of raising their own egos or providing their kid with a winning experience; or C) do not want to be told how to coach or structure a practice since they played college ball and the league officials did not. Leagues must coach their coaches.

If you go watch a very good rec league, one of the elements of play which will strike you is the fundamental skills of the players. This league might just be blessed with better water or soil which yields a better crop of athletes. But if that happens year after year, most likely the water and soil have nothing to do with it. There must be another reason. Most likely they teach all the participants those fundamental skills.

Many towns have certain requirements their coaches must meet. They have to attend the safety training class. They must attend a meeting which tells them that they should emphasize certain things like fun, basic skills, and team work, not winning. But even when these perfunctory meetings and classes are conducted at which all the good intentions are laid out, nothing much changes. We have to find a way to force or coerce coaches into teaching sound fundamentals, putting the emphasis on the right thing, or otherwise improving everyone's experience and learning.

The first issue is to make sure coaches know fundamental skills. For this, perhaps a film session followed by an open discussion would suffice. There are videos out there which teach fundamentals. Most are addressed to players but there is no harm in having coaches watch them. An alternative is to bring in a competent local high school or travel coach. I say competent because there are plenty of incompetents. I know of some high school coaches who parents of players would like to sit down and teach the basics of the game to. If the local high school coach is merely taking additional pay for the least possible amount of effort, perhaps a travel coach would be willing to come in and help out. If he or she pulls many of their players from the local area, this can only benefit their program.

The second issue is finding a way to make sure the coaches teach the skills to their players. It is nearly impossible to draft up a specimen practice regimen, require its use, and then enforce the requirement. Nobody takes kindly to this sort of control from league officials. But some sort of requirement for teaching skills is absolutely necessary at young ages.

There are a couple ways to resolve the issue. One is to require coaches to conduct practices of a certain duration consisting of a certain amount (say half of practice) of fundamental skills teaching and practicing. [; The second half is theirs to do with as they choose. This can be tough to police unless a league rep can attend practices regularly and watch in order to enforce the rule. A secojnd, more effective way to enforce the requirement of spending a certain amount of time working fundamental skills is to take away the practice time and put it into "clinic" time. You have 8 to 16 coaches looking to practice their players. You have say 160 girls looking to practice. Rather than conducting separate practices by team, use half the time to conduct clinics at which the team coaches are instructors under the supervision of a coordinator who directs what is to be done, when and how.

A league which, for example, plays its games on Sunday and Wednesday could establish some sort of Saturday clinic schedule and then allow teams no more than one practice outside the clinis per week. Coaches might work with their players for some of the time but be supervised by league officials or the coordinator while conducting the drills. There are many ways to conduct these clinis but you can figure this out for yourselves.

As a final comment about clinics as opposed to practices, I find that many leagues do this sort of thing but only at the youngest age levels. It would be best if these kinds of skills clinics could be continued at least through 10U. It would be better if they continued up to at least 12U, though in more sophisticated form.

And as a final comment about coaching or policing coaches, some sort of evaluation program should be implemented. It should be formal and standardized. It must involve the players, parents or both. Each participant's family ought to receive an evaluation form concerning how the team was run. The form should contain a questionnaire which grades coaches ability and willingness to teach fundamental skills. The questions must be objective such as:

"Fundamental skills" (circle all comments that apply)

"I (my daughter) was taught fundamental skills more than / less than half of all practice time"

"I (my daughter) had ample / insufficient time to learn these skills"

"The coach was knowledgeable / needs work on his understanding of skills / ability to communicate those skills with the kids."

I think you get the idea. No, I don't have a specimen questionnaire for you to use. You need to draft one up which mirrors your organization's values. But keep in mind that you want a high level of participation in the process. Getting 50% or less of these questionnaires back is not only a good thing, it makes the entire batch completely useless. You cannot evaluate coaches based on a half return rate. You need a minimum of 75%. Also the process must be anonymous. Specific comments, if you allow parents to provide them, cannot be read back to the coach. When the process is over, the overall grade is the only thing which you share with the coach.

For example, a coach might be told, you had an overwhelming response which indicated that you do not like to teach fundamentals or you need to work on your communication skills. A coach might be told that the majority of respondents felt that you put winning too high on your list of priorities. Again, I think you get the idea and can do for yourselves.

So, these are my suggestions to you to improve your rec league. I have no vested interest in this. It really just popped into my head this morning. I suppose I know where it all came from. I was discussing some softball issues with a web friend. He directed me to a forum which discussed all sorts of softball issues in his state. I was struck by how similar the discussion was to similar forums regarding my state. I was also struck by how many of the same issues pop up all over the place.

One of the issues which was raised had to do with "how do we bring our state's softball up to the level of California?" In that discussion, one of the readers wondered why CA players were so good. All sorts of reasons were givewn and most I take issue with. For one thing, there is this assumption that the only good ball is played in CA. Last I looked Florida is making some large inroads. Further, there is very good softball being played in Texas, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, Michigan, Georgia, etc, (sorry if I missed your state).

For another thing, everyone assumes CA has better softball because it has such great weather. yes, they do have great weather but not everywhere in the state. Some places are way too hot to play ball in the summer. Some places actually get snow. Some places are just grand to play softball 365 days per year but, you know, I know of some teams that play in colder, less pleasant climates who play over 100 games per year, play indoors whenever the weather is no good, and otherwise ought to be able to compete with CA teams. Yet there must be other reasons because one particular organization which does this and who I am thinking about is good but hardly the best around.

The fact is CA has been at this fastpitch thing longer than most places. In my state and many others, girls were playing slowpitch or modified for many decades before they gradually moved over to fastpitch. Heck, there are some high schools which still play slowpitch in a few places around the country. Fastpitch hasn't really been around many places for very long. I think that people either don;t know or forget that colleges in the SEC and ACC have not fielded softball teams for very long, mostly less than two decades. Until the game has been around for longer and things have sorted themselves out, just a few places will continue to yield the largest, highest quality crop of softball players and teams. The question cannot be what does CA have that we'll never have which allows them to produce better softball. The question has to be, what can we learn from other places about how to improve our softball. One, important place we can improve is the quality of our rec leagues. If we drastically improve our rec leagues, the entire game in our region will improve. But not only that, also more and more girls will come to appreciate our game. More and more girls will have fun p[laying softball well. That is why I wrote this today.

"Change" is the catchword of today. We do need to make changes in many aspects of our lives. It cannot be change for change's sake. It must be change for the sake of improvement. I've laid out a few areas in which our rec softball leagues can change. Pitching is key. Fundamentals are almost as important. As you, the league officials, plan for the coming rec season, how about thinking about some positive changes?

Stable Of One?

2009-11-24T06:05:00.000-08:00

I received an e-mail from a regular reader which suggested I put a little something into the blog regarding the overuse of pitchers. I have to note that in the past, I have tended to fall on the side of the argument which believed pitchers could throw as long as they liked and as long as they were not generally worn out. But my views on this are undergoing some changes and I'm about to put forth arguments which differ from what I have said in the past. This subject is somewhat controversial. I know I will hear from the other side in short order.

When I was first involved with this sport, somewhere along the way I read about how underhanded pitching was a much more natural motion than overhand. That is a somewhat obvious observation although not, in my view, a very careful analysis of the realities of windmill pitching. The notion was proffered that softball pitchers could throw virtually endlessly. They would wear out their legs and brains long before their arms or shoulders showed signs of strain. That is why, I read, you see so many of the top pitchers throwing so many innings, especially in the championship setting.

For years, medical professionals have warned us in the softball community that while the overhand and underhand motions do effect the joints differently, we would be mistaken to conclude that windmillers could go on forever, without ever suffering serious consequences to their joints, tendons and ligaments. We know that very often pitchers do suffer injuries. Yet we have seen so many very good teams on which the ace of the squad pitches 14 or more innings on a single day, sometimes on back to back days. We also recognize that there are not enough good pitchers to go around. We take these observations and conclude that if a girl is going to be a top caliber pitcher, she had better get used to pitching more than a single game on any day and be prepared to drive herself to physical exhaustion in championship brackets. Coaches put together teams knowing that they only have one true A level pitcher but reason that if they can get a kid here and there to just eat up one of their three games, the ace will take care of the other 14 innings.

Softball is just different. It certainly is not baseball. I saw the pitcher from (insert top 25 NCAA Div I team) throw 16 innings to keep her team alive on the WCWS. Obviously, good windmill pitchers can go the distance more than their baseball counterparts.

Let's take a look at just a little history. Long ago in baseball, pitchers threw a lot more than they do today. Some baseball pitchers threw full double headers. Some pitched back to back days, some back to back to back. A few baseball pitchers threw one game with their right arm and another with their left. Pitchers often played other positions when not pitching. Remember, Babe Ruth was a pitcher in the major leagues before he began to focus exclusively on hitting home runs.

When sports grow older, they often go through transformations. In the early days of football, not only did they wear very little padding and their helmets were laughably inadequate, but also players often played both ways, offensive and defensive teams. As the sport progressed, teams recognized that they got better results with 11 guys dedicated to offense and a different 11 to defense. nbsp; They had themselves specialists for functions like punting and field goal kicking but that was about it. Later on, they discovered certain position players were more well suited to certain types of plays. Certain blockers were better at pass blocking, run blocking or pulling and other types of plays. The same held true for other players like running backs and tight ends. And the same held true on the defensive side of the ball. Players were shuttles in and out based on expectations regarding the type of play likely. Defenses and offenses got more and more sophisticated to the point that coaches established whole "packages" of players for defensive situations. Now almost half the defensive team comes off the field to be replaced by another "package" of players depending on what is going on with the down and distance. Football has become almost as sophisticated as baseball!

(If you find that you are a purest who believes football teams are wrong to run players in and out on every play, you should consider that offensive teams do not generally agree with you. That is why the whole no-huddle offense was created - to take away time for coaches to make up their minds which package to send in and to sometimes prevent them from making any changes at all.)

Baseball, at least in terms of pitching, has become perhaps the most complicated sport on Earth. Like I said, in the day, pitchers threw often. They also often pitched complete games. Later, pitchers got into a rotation in which they threw every 4, then 5 days. Then, as time wore on, there came an era of the "fireman" who was a relief pitcher that was as dominant as a good starter. The fireman would come in when the pitcher seemed to be out of gas, generally in the 7th or 8th inning, sometimes earlier, sometimes in the 9th. The fireman typically pitched innings, not batters.

Teams noticed when their competition stopped trying to stretch out their pitchers to a full 9. They took notice when a fresh guy came in after the starter walked the leadoff hitter in the 7th and the fresh guy shut their teams down. Before long, the fireman was something they had to have. And the number of complete games dwindled. In the current era, we see things much more complicated than that. There are middle relievers, 7th inning guys, 8th innings guys, and closers.

Not very long ago, the only guys anybody worried about were the starters and the closer. Then it began to be recognized that teams without a true 8th inning guy were losing games when maybe they shouldn't. All of a sudden, the 8th inning guy became more important. Then the same became true of the 7th inning guy. Today it is fairly normal for a starter to go no more than 6, possibly 7 innings, another specialist or two to come in and throw just one inning in the 7th or 8th, and then either the 8th inning guy or the closer comes in to try to seal up the victory.

Even more extreme, many baseball teams carry a guy just to get out a single lefty, perhaps two, late in the game. These guys are probably the oddest breed of them all. Can you imagine a point in your pitching career where your warm-up pitches are 3 or 4 times more numerous than your game ones? These guys sometimes warm for 15 minutes and then come in to throw a single pitch! And I have heard team general managers complain that they are dissatisfied with the guy who is their "lefty specialist" and the market for such players is too thin!!!

There seems to be some dissatisfaction amongst purests regarding this kid-glove treatment of pitchers. They seem to think that teams are babying pitchers and this is leading to a weakened state of the game. Notable amongst the purests who want to extend pitchers in terms of innings and pitches is Nolan Ryan, whose pitching record stands in stark contrast to the way pitchers are treated today. He threw complete games. He was not beholden to any sort of pitch or inning count. He just gutted it out when he got tired. And he is going to try to get things back to the way they were with the team he runs.

Only time will tell if baseball will move back to a more rigorous pitching schedule. But one thing is for certain, the results, not anyone's philosophy, will push the action. If stretching pitchers out results in wins, particularly world series wins, then everyone in baseball will eventually follow suit. If it does not, it will not continue. And, even if we see more complete games in the future, we will not see the role of good relievers diminished very much, if at all.

Some of the reasons that baseball pitchers do not go as long today as they once did have to do with the ball and game conditions. Some of them have to do with the batters. Some of them have to do with medical reasons. And some are just plain common sense.

When baseball decided it wanted more balance between offense and defense because folks were not happy paying big money to go watch a pitchers' duel in which one team had 3 base hits and the other 1, they began taking steps to "level the playing field" between offense and defense. In the old days, outfield fences stood out near the horizon. Those were brought back in by large percentages. The pitchers mound was lowered. The ball was juiced. In the olden days, a pitcher threw what was practically a bean bag at a batter way down there who needed to hit the thing 450 feet just to hit the fence. Today, the baseball pitcher throws a super-ball straight at a batter who, if he check swings too hard and makes decent contact, has a very real chance of going yard.

Batters have much more sophisticated training today than they had in Ty Cobb or Ruth's generation. They have more video analysis than NASA once did. They have machines which train their eyes to hit all manner of pitches at all speeds, even those not humanly possible. There are numerous folks with doctorates in medical fields analyzing the most efficient swings. Coaching has become more and more sophisticated because, as anyone with a sports page this time of year can tell you, there is gold to be earned in them there hills. If hitters are not better trained today than they were 20, 50, 100 years ago, I'd be shocked speechless. These guys take batting practices in which there are video screens set up with tapes of the guy they are going to face tomorrow throwing. The hitters of today are more well prepared, if perhaps not better athletes than those of yesteryear.

They also undergo more strength and athletic training which is geared to hitting homeruns or just plain hitting. Pitchers have sophisticated prep too. But that does not diminish the prep batters have before they face them. Batters also get customized laser vision correction which sometimes gives them incredible vision comaprable to the games greats when their genetics would have failed them. The worlds of video analysis coupled with medical and sports training professionals has tailored training regimens to make them more effective. The entire world of technology seems destined to make baseball pitchers' lives more difficult.

And on top of these developments, batters have become more well schooled as the game has progressed. They make adjustments to pitchers, pitches, and to situations. All the knowledge of the previous generations has been passed down in the game. The hitters of today truly stand on the shoulders of those who went before them. The result is pitchers get run out of games earlier and earlier. Few pitchers have nearly as much success the second time through the lineup as they had with the first. Very few survive their third time through. &nbvsp; Only the absolute best can do more than that.

To go further, medical professionals have had many more years of examining the results of over-pitching in baseball. Each and every year, better and better understanding of injuries occurs. Over much time, we have come to understand that the pitching motion is very hard on the body. We have cut down the amount of pitches to the point where things like the "Joba Rules" in which a young pitcher for the New York Yankees had his number of innings and pitches held to a very low number in the name of preserving the longevity of his career, are becoming more commonplace despite the wisdom of the Nolan Ryans of the world.

So that's baseball and, to a lesser extent, football, two games which have a longer history than softball in the sense of person hours spent playing and examining the structures of the game in order to put together more wins. In both, a high degree of specialization has formed. Teams whose success and failure rides on their ability to win games and, hopefully, championships have instituted relatively high degrees of specialization. Nowhere is that more drastic than with baseball pitching.

To contrast baseball with fastpitch softball does not take a genius. I suppose that is why I am able to do it! Fastpitch softball much more resembles the baseball of Ruth and Cobb than it does the game of today. Teams will often use just one pitcher in the semifinal and championship games. Girls are called upon to throw 10 innings on Saturday and 14 or more on Sunday. Pitchers play the field when not pitching on today's lean travel team rosters. They very often have Ruthian hitting skills. Teams can sometimes jump on the back of one pitcher and ride her to high levels.

The result of seeing these pitchers aligned against us throw back to back games and play when they are not pitching is we come to the conclusion that we should expect this out of our best pitchers. We should search for an ace who can carry the entire team on her back. And the result often is that the team's best pitcher is expected to pitch one heck of a lot of innings, sometimes more than her body can take.

Our game is also becoming far more sophisticated. If you doubt this, consider the that 30 years ago, the SEC and ACC schools didn't even field teams in fastpitch. High schools in most states had either slow pitch or modified fastpitch. Softball did not merely take a back seat to baseball, it was required to ride in the pickup trucks' bay with the feed and livestock. And that was during hail storms.

Today there are fastpitch teams everywhere. More pop up every year. Schools are dropping slowpitch in favor of our game. Position players are going to see position specific private coaches. All players at pre-college higher levels are going to see sport-specific trainers. Batting instructors are far more numerous than they were 5, 10, 20 years ago. Teams travel all around the country to play against better competition. Whereas players from Florida were recruited for just church leagues twenty years ago, today it is becoming somewhat rare for a college team to not have some kid from there. A team from Florida actually won ASA Gold one year. And other states are quickly following suit by developing their programs to compete with the best.

As far as the game itself goes, the pitcher's plate was moved back to 43 feet from 40 with the specific idea of balancing the game's offense and defense. Some few dominant pitchers continued to strike out batters in droves but overall, there are more balls hit into play than there once were. While baseball is still the money sport and the money provides much of the sophisticated training, there is naturally a crumb phenomenon in which the best baseball technology becomes available to softballers. Hitters are better and the deck is stacked somewhat against pitchers.

On top of these developments, we are coming to recognize that pitchers, be they windmill or overhand, all have pretty high incidences of injury. The truth is there is nothing particularly natural about any pitching motion. Underhand may be more natural than overhand but it ain't something that is easy on the body. Pitchers can develop back problems, knee issues, and, of course, shoulder and arm injuries from overuse.

Further, it would be one thing if everybody in windmill pitching threw mostly fastballs with a few changes or a curve mixed in the way baseballers do. But that's not our game. Our game consists of rises, drops, screws, curves, etc. Again, it does not take a genius to recognize that windmillers contort their arms to make the ball dance.

I recall seeing a still photo one time of a pitcher right at ball release. This girl was wearing your typical uniform top so you could see her entire arm and shoulder. She was throwing a drop or a curve in the shot. She was a fairly skinny kid with not particularly much flesh to hide her muscles, tendons and ligaments from view. In the picture, as she released the ball, the muscles on her arms looked like elongated rubber band balls. You could see the actual fibers straining underneath her thin skin. The strain in tendons and ligaments was also apparently visible. The overall picture was one of almost her skin being transparent. Strain was plainly visible.

I would hazard a guess that this kid threw as many as 50% of her pitches using that particular pitch. Girls in our game do come to rely on one or two pitches as their bread and butter while using other types of pitches for set up or to throw the batter off their mainstays. And that "out pitch" or pitches is generally something that requires considerable strain, well beyond the mere fastball. It is common for an ace to be a dropballer, riseballer, or some such. The result is an incredible amount of strain on muscles, joints, tendons and ligaments, more than is evident in the statement that underhand throwing is more natural and less stressful on the body than overhand.

We do see college squads using more than just the ace in most istuations beyond the conference or NCAA championships. Typically, many colleges have three or four pitchers who see a fair amount of action. Typically, the same kid will not appear in both games of a routine, middle of the season, double header. When she does, it is usually for just a part of each game or most of one and little of the other. And many times, when she is used in more than one game, it is due to an injury to one or more of the other pitchers.

High school squads usually do not have the depth to use more than one pitcher most of the time. They may have a kid who fills out innings when they are playing weaker teams. But against the mediocre and good teams, a single kid is used unless they find themselves in one of those rare games in which they luck into a big lead. Sometimes, when scheduling puts demands on a team, the same kid might throw 7 innings in the morning and 7 in the evening. Very often, the same kid is pitching complete games on multiple consecutive days. It can be quite a grind.

Travel rosters, typically consisting of no more than 12 kids, sometimes 11, rarely find they have tremendous depth in pitching. Certainly a few fortunate teams have a wealth of pitching. But, as anyone in travel can tell you, if you have too much pitching today, you won't for very long because the pitchers who see too little action will quickly leave. Travel teams often have one ace plus a couple other pitchers who vary in terms of abilities. I have been involved with or known teams that have one good pitcher and several mediocre or below. I have been fortunate to involved with teams that have a good amount (3 or 4) of pitchers who can each throw 4-7 innings successfully almost any day. That's a real luxury.

By far the most common circumstance I have seen occurs in which a travel team has one kid who is head and shoulders above the other pitchers. Maybe she is an absolute flamethrower or perhaps she has a great mix of speeds. Maybe she is one of the few who can truly master the rise or maybe she is really a refined girl destined to play D-1 softball and be good at it. In any event, these teams often overuse these aces.

They start out Saturday with a plan of giving each kid a game and alternating their relief pitchers. Then they get to their first game and the number 3 struggles so they bring in number 1 who is still scheduled to start game three. She works four innings and then goes back to CF for game 2. Then in game 2, number 2 pitcher does very well until maybe the 4th or 5th when she loads up the bases. The team would like her to finish but they lost the first game, need to win this one, and are currently leading by a couple runs. So, in comes the ace to throw a couple more innings. There is a one game break and then game 3 starts. Of course, the ace is scheduled and will pitch it like usual. She's gone 13 or 14 on the day and tomorrow she will be expected to pitch 14 or more depending on how deep into the tournament the team goes.

This tremendous workload for the ace pitcher is done all the time in the travel world. There, luckily, the games come just once a week, unless the team scrimmages a lot during the week or has the ace pitch live batting practices a couple times. Still, it places tremendous stress on the pitcher's muscles, tendons, ligaments, and lest we forget, brain.

I was talking to someone on a fairly typical travel team the other day. His daughter was a pitcher at 12U for an ambitious team. They played something like 100-110 games during one year. That is a lot even for top travel clubs, at least in my experience. This team was the typical travel club in that they had 3 pitchers. One struggled that year because she was younger. The number 2 was pretty good but could not get batters out after the second time through the lineup. The ace, this guy's daughter, pitched the lion's share of the innings. In about 100 games, averaging perhaps 6 innings, yielding about 600 innings on work, this guy figured his kid pitched about half to two thirds. That's 300 to 400 innings! You know what? After that season, she got hurt.

There are more injuries to windmill pitchers than anyone likes to talk about. Sometimes these injuries are traced to non-work-level reasons. Sometimes the tracing is done for self-serving reasons. I have often heard folks talk about how their ace pitcher got hurt because she is generally out of shape or because she must do something wrong with one of her pitches. It isn't the pitching that caused the stress, it was the kid's fault. Many times, the injury is pegged to a reason that isn't the kid's fault but is just one of those things. I think she slept on her shoulder wrong. Her parents have bad shoulders (knees or whatever) and she inherited them. S0ometimes it is game related but not in any way related to pitching. She hurt her foot running the bases and was over-compensating for that when she pulled a muscle in her arm while pitching.

Excuses are like ..., everybody has one. Everybody has more reasons to explain something than they have excuses!

We examine data in order to trace and locate cause and effect. Pitchers, by the numbers, get hurt. It does not so much matter that we can use anecdote to blame something other than overuse. Co-incidence does not necessarily indicate causality but one has to wonder about the relationship between pitching too much and other factors. On top of this, we have the whispers of medical professionals in our ears. They are warning those of us who believe firmly that windmill pitching doesn't cause strain that perhaps they are wrong. They are telling us that the strains of the windmiller are similar enough to those on baseball pitchers to take a closer look. They are telling us that we need to have more pitching and to use it.

I hope I am at least causing travel and other coaches to think about how much they use pitchers. I hope I am getting you to at least think about it. The game is quickly maturing though it will never mature as much as baseball or football - there just is not that kind of money around. As it matures, there will be more and more need for more pitchers. I think we are starting to see this development in the college game. Eventually that may make its way down to high school though depth will still be a problem. We need to at least consider it for the travel game. Parents of ace pitchers should watch the amount of time (innings and pitches) their daughters work. m Pitchers should not allow themselves to be used when they are overtired. A stable of one is just not enough.

Lesson Buyer Beware

2009-11-18T05:50:00.000-08:00

As if life were not complicated enough, we Americans are charged with significant responsibility via the simple phrase, "ignorance of the law is no excuse." We are obligated to know all the laws applicable to these United States when those laws and everything which explains, defines, and clarifies them would fill a very, very large library with so many pages that it would be impossible to read them all in a single lifetime! That body of law is constantly increasing at almost an exponential rate. There are attorneys who spend their entire professional lives working on tiny portions of the overall body of law. And these individuals find that they learn something new about their area of specialty on practically a daily basis. Even these studied, experienced professionals make monumental mistakes. When it comes to using a professional attorney, the client must endeavor to understand the law and to "supervise" the hired professional lest his or her mistake cost the client in ways that cannot ever be rectified. So it is with lawyers, so it is with all experts.

Ignorance is unacceptable when it comes to the law. It is also at least inadvisable in every other aspect of our lives including sport. We must constantly keep abreast of the entire body of knowledge pertaining to our own pursuits. We must therefore endeavor to gather and assimilate as much knowledge as possible. I can't speak for you but I know I learn something new about softball on a daily basis.

There are so many sources regarding mechanical and other issues that I know I could never have enough time to read, understand and evaluate them all. I struggle with this. I'm one of those who wants to hear the right answers and to understand the complete logic string which underlies them. I do an imperfect job but I do try.

When I am dealing with a subject about which I know too little, I almost always defer to experts. They not only know their subject far better than I can learn it in a short time, they also are able to explain it much better. So, when my kids wanted to play softball and then to pitch, I knew I was out of my league. I had to defer to an expert. Actually, I have deferred to several experts to teach my kids about pitching.

I am not the type of person who normally can be a passive buyer of these kinds of services. Many are passive about their daughters' pitching lessons. I see them all the time. They are the ones who sit in their car while taking phone calls or engage in unrelated discussions during their kids' pitching lessons. They don't know a lot and because they are busy in other aspects of their lives, they do not have the time to delve into things. I understand and respect that. Loads of people just do not have the time to go further. But I am not able to take that same approach. I have to understand what is being taught. And I question almost everything. Sometimes, I get unexpected surprises from sources previously unknown to me.

I am going to get into pitching from a mechanical perspective today. But before I do, I want to at least mention something about batting which contains a parallel lesson. From the time I first got involved with fastpitch softball, I heard about something called the "west coast swing." The very term insulted me. I heard it as "this is the way the softball hitters in California do it and, since CA has the best softball, they must be right." I started t0o try to understand what the west coast swing was and what its underpinnings were. After a while, it became clear to me that those who talked about this swing were really talking about a style which was often referred to as "rotational." I dug further and was fairly easily able to trace it back to essentially the Ted Williams school. It became clear to me that the question was not one of fact but rather of opinion. I read Charley Lau and others who had written books and articles on the mechanics of hitting. Before long, it became clear to me that many of the claims of "west coast" swing instructors just were not true. I won't go into the details right now but basically, I came to understand that the swing was not a new style, was not endemic to the west coast, and was not necessarily superior to other types of swings. It also became clear to me that loads of people made trade specifically by touting the "west coast swing" and they were loathe to admit any fallacies which were promulgated by them or their kindred. In fact, they were willing to argue every single point whether they believed their position or not. Some of these experts were quite wrong but they stuck to their guns.

More recently, what I have observed is a much lower frequency of folks referring to the "west coast swing." I have also heard many of the professionals who teach swinging start to move away from a purely rotational mechanical style. Many have stopped referring to "rotational hitting." Most no longer argue all of the points they once touted.

As I said, this piece is about pitching. There are several aspects of fundamental pitching mechanics which have given me trouble over the years. One of these is the stride. Another is hip closure at release and thereafter. There are a number of conflicting pieces of advice and "expert testimony" on these issues which I had consumed over the years and now I am trying to sort it all out.

I could not fail to hear Michele Smith talk about pitchers and the degree of angle of their hips. She always speaks about a 45 degree angle. This advice was in direct conflict with what most of the pitching experts I have seen were telling me. Yet, I am somewhat convinced that I merely misunderstood someone or everyone. So let me see if I can explain the issue and why it caused me so much consternation.

When a windmiller pitches, she stands with two feet on the pitcher's plate - her shoulders and hips are necessarily square to homeplate. We call this "closed." As she goes into her windmill and the arm is over the head, she has her hips and shoulders square to third base (first base for a lefty). We call this "open." So the pitcher opens the door and then pitches. What follows ivolves the subject of closing all the way or partially.

I have often disputed Michele Smith's charterization of a pitcher maintaining the good 45 degree angle with her hips as she released the ball. It seems counter intuitive to me because if you try to duplicate it, what you end up with is a motion in which the pitcher must hold herself back - prevent her hips from closing after releasing the ball. It is sort of a linear pitching approach, if you will, b ecause she is sort of slamming her back side leg and hip into the front side after ball release. This puts stress on the front leg, particularly the knee and also seems to hold back natural force from body momentum. But I think I slightly misunderstand Michele.

Recently, a reader of this blog, a friend of mine over the past several years, asked me about the timing of the various parts of the pitching motion. I have struggled with his questions and comments for quite a while and still have not answered him. I suppose it is difficult to put it all together. And hip closure really complicates things.

One of my daughters is more "hippy" than the other. Their pitching coaches have always advocated hip closure in order to promote speed as well as ball rotation on certain pitches and as a way of better controlling the location of pitches. When I questioned one the instructors, he told me that the pitchers who advocate hip openness are generally six foot tall girls with long arms who throw 65-70 without really trying. He went on to say that everybody else needs to close their hip in order to generate the speed needed to compete with these ladies.

That was a simple enough explanation and I bought it since it seemed somewhat logical to me. I saw many girls pitch with open hips and they did generally seem to be taller kids with tremendous speed. Then I saw the Japanese great Ueno and noted that she closes her hips. She throws faster than most - she may actually be the fastest pitcher in softball, I'm not sure. And Ueno is rather diminutive when compared to most Olympic pitchers. She's something like 5-6, 5-7. That cleared things up for me since my kids' coach was validated. Still, I was left with some unresolved issues because of something which happened repeatedly over several years.

Have you ever experienced anything like the following? Your kid is pitching practice when she swings her arm around and strikes her leg with the ball as she comes to the release point. Now that's an interesting occurrence. First of all, the pain must be absolutely excruciating as it drives her body to the ground. Tears follow shortly thereafter. But the pitch itself is something I wish I could bottle because some of the most fantastic curves I have ever seen in my life usually result. I mean, we're talking about a curve which has double the sideways action of anything I have seen world class pitchers throw! If you could harness that pitch - obviously without the pain - you could put out just about any fire in any game at any time. What's possibly worse than the pain, however, are the bruises that result. If this kind of thing happened anytime close to a regular doctor checkup, I'm sure I would find myself locked up and my kids in protective custody. Nobody would believe such a bruise would be self-inflicted. It looks as if it was caused by an adult striking a child with a bat while using all their strength!

In any event, I think this striking of the leg with the pitch is caused by excessively early hip closure. Girls have their curves and it is probably impossible to both close the hip and have a decent arm circle. If you try to do both, what you get is agony and ugly bruising. So there's got to be a better way.

The arm needs to stay in a nearly perfect circle. If it isn't on that track, frist of all, you lose power. Secondly, and more importantly, if the arm is not on a nearly perfect circle, you put too much stress on the shoulder. if you do something in your motion which takes the arm off track, you may cause shoulder injury, perhaps significant injury. This injury potential is really the subject of this piece and how I learned of that conclusion - it isn't my own - will be explained toward the end.

So, if a pitcher cannot pitch the ball around her hip, if she must be open to some degree, then Michele Smith has to be right. On the other hand, if you test this out, you will find that in order to keep the hips open, you have to hold yourself back and that will reduce power, and so she has to be at least partially wrong. The answer is the hips must be open at ball release and nothing should be done to hold back the ball side after release, which means that many or most pitchers should be closed when their bodies come to rest after the pitch.

In fact, it is worth noting that pitchers cannot gain any additional force by forcing their hips closed at the end since that must happen after ball release and it is impossible to get any additional speed on the ball at this point. Once the ball leaves the hand, it is going as fast as it ever will. More to the point, once the back leg pushes off the plate, it has no impetus from which to add any additional force. After push off, the pivot leg has used up its potential to generate force. Thereafter, anything it does to the pitch is caused by its enertia, its forward momentum. Allowing that momentum to continue is what caused the hips to close. Closing the hips doesn't add force but, I believe, preventing the hips from closing causes speed to be diminished since it requires force in an opposite direction. You shouldn't cause your hips to close. It should just happen as the result of an otherwise correct motion with good arm speed.

To sum up, a pitcher needs to keep her arm in a nearly perfect circle from the time she starts upwards until she releases the ball. In order to accomplish this nearly perfect circle, the pitcher must have her hips open in order to get the arm through to release. Hip closure cannot add force, it follows proper mechanics. Ueno closes her hips because her motion causes this to happen. That is, I believe, that. Michele Smith is not wrong but you do not need to keep your hips open at 45 degrees after you have released the pitch. My daughter's coaches are wrong because they believe closing the hips causes force to be added. And, most of all, trying to affirmatively close the hips may knock the arm out of its nearly perfect circle which can cause injury. So, buyer beware.

The second issue I said I would discuss is the length of the forward stride before ball release. Here I have real issues since some of the coaches we have seen emphasize this while some are diametrically opposed to a long forward stride. To understand the issue, the first coach of my kids told them to stride out very hard with an aopparent objective of a landing spot about 5 feet away. This was more or less of a leap in which the back foot was dragged forward. And my kids were little at the time so 5 feet is about right. Now that they are bigger, over 5 feet tall, the stride comes to around 6 feet.

The coach opposed to this kind of a stride advocates a normal walking stride. For me, at about 5-9, and known for having short legs, a walking stride is about 2.5 - 3 feet. There's quite a large difference for anyone of any height and leg length between a normal walking stride and the pitcher's stride the other coach advocated. The pitching stride would be about double the walking stride.

What made me concerned about this issue of shortening the stride was I have seen all the top pitchers throw. I know the pitchers circle is 8 feet from the midpoint of the rubber. I watch these top pitchers routinely land near or on the line. Some come awfully close to exceeding it. When the coach who advocates the shorter stride asked one of these top pitchers about stride length, she agreed with him that it should be short. Yet when she pitches, she lands 8 feet from the rubber. She's just about 6 feet tall! Her walking stride couldn't be any more than 4 feet or so.

I was stuck on this issue of stride length for a couple of years. I didn't give it much thought because my kids continue to take fairly long strides. They haven't "corrected" themselves and shortened up. Now I am glad they haven't because I just read the definitive study on this.

On the link I am about to give you is a study of pitcher's mechanics. It was conducted at the 1996 Olympics. Its chief concern is injury. It seeks to explain pitching motions which cause the least amount of injury. The largest percentage of pitcher injuries in fastpitch softball are those to the shoulder. So the motion which puts the least amount of stress on the shoulder while generating the fastest pitch is the best. The link is here: http://www.softballclinics.com/olympic/olympics01.html

Please take the time to read this study because you really must educate yourself in its findings. You cannot simply rely upon the experts since they often disagree. And when it comes to injuries to your children, ignorance of the realities is absolutely no excuse. You are the buyer of pitching lessons. Let the buyer beware.

Somebody Always Gets Shorted

2009-11-17T05:23:00.000-08:00

I am happy that the high school federation decided to move the pitching distance back to 43. My state adopted it for this year, good move. I am also happy to learn that other youth bodies are likewise moving back to the same distance. It is insane to have pitchers in high school pitching from a different distance than they do in age group play. It is just too much to ask of kids this young. They throw for their high school team Monday through Saturday at 40 feet and then go play in front of, perhaps, college coaches on Sunday at 43. Windmilling is just too hard to have kids jumping back and forth in an effort to locate their pitches where they need to be. So the fact that most, if not all 16U and 18U youth play will be at the same 43 feet as most, if not all, high school play is undeniably a good thing. But, as usual, somebody gets shorted. And that somebody seems to be the 14 year old freshmen.

I have seen nothing about any sort of 14U play being pitched from 43 feet. Maybe some organization has adopted this distance and I missed it. But from what I have seen, ASA 14U is going to be pitched at 40 feet for the forseeable future. The same is true for USSSA, PONY, NSA, etc. I think this may be a mistake.

In some high schools, freshmen do sometimes pitch varsity. Of course, it is very likely that even if they do not, their JV or freshman games will be at 43. I know that the NFHS rule change was for varsity but I have not heard of any state which adopted the 43 feet for this year having a sifferent pitching distance for the junior circuits. There's good reason for that since JV and freshman pitchers are often brought up for a variety of reasons. Also, hitters likewise suffer when the pitchers are moved around.

It does not take a genius to figure out that 14 year-olds equate to freshmen. It does not take a genius to know that this is a tender young age at which the distance confusion is likely to take a significant toll. One could argue that perhaps freshmen should be excluded from varsity softball - indeed I know of one school which follows this policy - but from a practical reality point of view, many schools could not play competitively without their freshman varsity pitching ace. They do not want to see any sort of rule prohibiting 9th graders from participation in any sport, least of all softball.

The discussion does not end here since, 13 year-olds equate, generally, to 8th graders and middle school play is likely to continue at 40 feet. I would like to see that come to an end since the boys pitch at full distance from middle school on. But the other side of the argument is some middle schools use 7th, even 6th graders to pitch their games.

The bottom line is somebody is going to get shortchanged. I don't wish to continue the analysis infinitely. I do want to say that when I advocated for HS ball at 43, I had in mind a number of girls who I had watched struggle with their command at 40 feet after playing the winter showcases and other tournaments at 43. Then I watched them struggle yet again to acclimate back to 43. It was a bit too much. But I neglected to consider 14s doing likewise when, obviously, the struggle for them is yet more difficult. Somehow we must resolve this. And I do not believe that 14U ball should remain at 40 feet. If we leave it at 40, most talented pitchers will skip the 14U ranks and move directly to 16U. That would be very bad for 14U ball.

Off-Season Errors

2009-11-12T07:27:00.000-08:00

I think we make a huge off-season error when we ignore the value of rest. Some folks force themselves to completely avoid anything even softball related when out of season and some folks consider the off-season an opportunity to practice even more than usual. I think the bigest error is to go to one of the polar extremes.

There is little question among trainers that rest is an absolute necessity. The very notion of exercise involves working muscles to the point that they get sort of "injured" and then repair themselves while getting even stronger. The body needs time to heal itself. This is why even the most strident workout evangelicals usually advocate taking one day per week to do no exercise. They also tend to advocate taking extended periods of rest every so often, like 4 weeks every 6 months or something along those lines.

When you work out by performing repetitive free exercise, using devices to isolate muscles in motion or lift weights, you basically rip muscle fibers which are then replaced by new ones. Done properly, the athlete will feel pain caused by acid buildup in the muscles as well as increased blood flow to allow for healing as well as feeding the new, more numerous muscle fibers.

As an exercise program progresses, usually athletes feel very sore early on and then the soreness diminishes over time. This is usually not indicative of a reduced amount of soreness but an acclimati0on to the kind of pain caused by the exercise. There is a different kind of pain caused as muscles become more and more exhausted and the body needs more rest and time to repair itself.

It is often difficult to differentiate between real injury and the sort of soreness one experiences when engaguing in an extended period of exercise. Particularly young athletes have difficulty distinguishing between the pain of injury and that of soreness. Worse, their parents have even more trouble evaluating their dhildrens' complaints.

Every kid is different even within a single family and each has his or her own threshhold of pain. One kid complains as if she has a broken body after a single day of exercise. Her sister speaks as if she is just a little sore when in reality she has a broken bone or a partially torn muscle. There is every sort of pain threshhold in between the two extremes and parents are left guessing when they hear their children register complaints.

What makes it even more difficult to evaluate complaints is athletes learn to deal with pain. Their pain threshholds do not remain stangnant. As they age and gain more experience training for sport, they become better able to cope with ordinary soreness. And sometimes when they are actually injured, they mistake the pain with soreness.

I know this to be true because I broke my arm during a football game and did not leave it until a quarter later when I was knocked out. I returned to practice a couple days later and lasted 2 or 3 more practices before my arm swelled so badly from the break that I could not put my shirt on. My brother broke his arm but didn't learn about it until a few weeks later when he was goofing around and dislodged the bone at the point of break. Ouch!

My daughter broke her foot once and complained briefly about it. Two years later she hurt the same location and when we took her for an xray, we learned that the bone had been broken quite some time earlier - when she originally complained about it. Whenever she complains now, we take her immediately to the orthopedic doctor!

Her sister used to complain of pain when she felt any sort of comfort. That kid had some quirks early on particularly related to any sort of sensation. It is difficult to explain precuisely what I mean by quirks. Let's just say that during the winter, she would complain about the cold and then start removing clothing. During the hot summer months, she wouold complain about the heart and start putting clothing on! In any event, we used to refer to her as the "princess and the pea." If she felt any soreness at all, she would complain as if being attacked by a hord of stinging bees. But as she aged, this changed. When, several months ago, she complained about some sort of pain, we ignored her. When the pain got worse and worse, we took her to the doctor and learned she had a very real injury which kept her out of action nearly two months.

So pain can be a little tricky. But regardless of any complaints or lack thereof, athletes need regular rest and extended periods of rest every so often. If they do not get it, their bodies do not stay as fit as they should and the chance of injury becomes greater, particularly in a sport in which tendonitis and related kinds of repetitive motion disorders are so common. Every athlete needs an off-season for their bodies to heal.

Our world has become very competitive. You do not need me to tell you that. You know it to be true just by comparing your own experiences with those of your children. When I went to school, I put out little effort, pulled Bs pretty easily, and was content with my results. My kids don't get off that easily and with good reason. My grades today wouldn't get me into the colleges I was accepted to then.

When I took the scholastic aptitude test, I basically behaved myself for several months and got a good night of sleep the night before sitting. It is rare for kids today not to have some sort of tutoring, a fdormal class, or at least performing test preparation drills regularly before taking a college prep test. Academics are absolutely critical these days.

Sports are even worse. When I was in high school, I knew some kids who played 3 sports. They did football only from August to early November, played basketball during the winter, and then picked up their mitts and bats from March through early summer. There were some sports which involved year-round training but very few of them. Nowadays, the football player is expected to remain in the weight room and agility clinics during just about the entire off-season. Travel soccer, field hockey, basketball, softball, etc. players typically are involved in something team related for at least 10 months of the year. I know of one girl, just a middle schooler, who plays travel softball, soccer and basketball, each requiring practice and competition for about 8-10 months of the year, and the combined three providing absolutely no extended break from sport at any time.

Often kids today find out that such travel or club play is about the bare minimum required to eventually make the HS varsity team, let alone be a starter. Not every school is the same but some pack their entire starting teams with travel players. The kid who tries to play 3 sports at the rec level, maybe one at travel, is often disappointed by her inability to crack into the starting rotation in one of her lesser sports. So, on the one hand, you can't blame the kid trying to play travel in 3 sports. But on the other hand, you know she cannot possibly be getting the kind of rest she needs.

Physical rest is critical but what about mental rest? I think this gets the least attention due to our society's priorities of hyper-competitiveness. I recently learned of some kid playing travel ball on a team which played something like 120 games. 120 games? How do you fit that in? And this team was 12U!

When we teach and train athletes, one of the elements we want to instill in them is a sense of being able to turn on and off the element of focus - extreme mental attention. We want the third baseman to remain hyper-vigilant on every pitch. We want her reactions to be on high alert. It is not acceptable for any player on the field to allow her mind to drift. When I was a kid, that was easy because I longed to be out on the field for each and every one of our 20-35 games including all-stars. It was no effort at all to conjure up adrenaline. But even professional athletes have difficulty remaining up for 120 games. The only comparable experience is that of the major league baseball player. And those guys have great difficulty maintaining focus for the entire season even when paid millions of dollars for precisely that.

No matter how you slice it, 120 games is a bit much for 11 and 12 year olds. You have to figure in the amount of practices on top of that. The team must have conducted 20, 40, perhaps 80 practices in addition to its 120 games. You think the coach was tolerant of any lack of focus the team might exhibit during those? What about the countless private lessons and practice sessions the pitchers most certainly went through. Do you think those were good times for rest and lack of focus? So the pitchewrs on this team must have been doing games, practices, or lessons maybe 300 times a year? Perhaps they did more than that? This is most certainly a formula for only one thing, mental burnout.

I think coaches and parents forget about just how much of a mental burden sport can really be. Personal sessions require focus. Formal practices require more. And games are a whole different level onto themselves. players and teams which do this kind of program probably play really amazingly, at least for some of those games. But at some point, they are going to collapse.

I know a team that was very good at a young age. They played a bunch. After a few years of having a real off-season, players, parents and coaches found they were getting itchy in the off period. As they aged and competing at a high level became more and more important and more and more difficult, they all decided to find someplace to play during the historically off months. They found an indoor league where they could play double headers once a week. the kids did pretty well in this winter league. When they came outdoors for the early tournament season, they were well primed and played very well. As spring turned into summer, however, several instances of tendonitis popped up. If you've ever had tendonitis caused by throwing too much, you know what that does to your swing. The kids stopped hitting. Next, the historically reliable defense began to sputter as the whiole team became flat. They began to lose games against inferior teams.

The lesson is that there is nothing wrong with being itchy in the off-season.
In fact, that's what you are supposed to be. If you turn this positive into a negative and then try to resolve it, you are going to end up flat, men tally shot and injured. Instead, embrace the itch.

Think of it this way, pick something that you are very fond of. I'll make it easy. Let's say you love chocolate (please feel free to replace chocolate with whatever you want but remember, this is a family show). Think of the most chocolate you have ever eaten in a single sitting. Now, get yourself primed because you are going to have to eat that much chocolate every day for the next year.

Let's ignore what will happen to your body. Just think of the mental side of it. It is going to be Halloween every single day for the next year. In the last couple of days leading up to the end of that year, how do you think you'll feel about chocolate? Will you have uncontrollable cravings for the stuff as the hour of your daily "meal" approaches? Or will the thought of anything even slightly chocolatey make you wretch and gag? At the end of the year, will you want to follow it up with another one? That is burnout!

Lest I forget, I'm not here to pretend to be a physical trainer or to evaluate the practices of certain teams. What I do want to say is that rest is an absolute necessity for physical training, to avoid injury, and perhaps more importantly, to provide the level of focus required to be successful in this sport for an extended period. A softball player must have rest. She must have regular rest during extended periods of play. And she must have extended rest for a period of off-season. If she does not, she will not be at top physical condition, she may get hurt, and, worse, she will probably burnout sooner rather than later.

The extended periods of rest can be problematic. What should one do? Should you sit around and do absolutely nothing but watch TV, play video games and eat bon-bons? No, by no means. Some of that is probably advisable but anything done to excess is bad. You don't want to put on 15-20 pountds in the off-seaon, allow your muscles to weaken significantly, or develop back problems from becoming a couch-potato. If you allow yourself to become a complete non-athlete in the off-season, you are going to pay during the season and that's not much fun.

What I do suggest you do during an extended period of rest is 1) first make sure you get rest, probably 4-6 weeks worth of relative inactivity; 2) work on muscles that generally don't get worked on during the stress of the season but which are required for successful play like core muscles, quads, etc.; and 3) work on mechanical issues with professional trainers/instructors in the rarified atmosphere of the off-season when you have few worries about in-game performance.

When I say 4-6 weeks worth of relative inactivity, the emphasis is on the word relative. If your regular regimen consists of 4 one hour pitching sessions plus an hour of lessons, 2-4 hours at the tee and during batting practice, 4 hours worth of defensive practices, a couple hours of speed, agility, baserunning, etc., plus 6-10 games per week, you do not have to be placed inside a comfort chamber to get relative rest. You can go out and play whiffle ball games. You can engage in a neighborhood soccer or football match. You can even perform some sort of regular exercise program. But you just must do a lower volume and intensity of heavy exercise.

For catchers, I think doing anything that builds up the quads or hand strength is a good idea. You can purchase a special squeeze ball or device, or just use a tennis ball to build hand strength. You can do all sorts of free exercise to build up the strength and endurance of quad muscles.

Pitchers know which muscles are important to them. I suggest the ones that the parts of the body most forgotten are the forearm, wrist and fingers. A pitcher can dramatically improve her in-season performance by strengthening her pitching wrist in the off-season via exercises performed as little as a half an hour per day, four times per week. She does not need to throw and throw a lot during the entire off-season. Core muscle strength and overall flexibility are very important for pitchers. The off-season would be a great time to enter a core muscle exercise program or sign up for that yoga class offered at the school or community center.

Everybody on a softball field understands that there are certain skills and muscles which if strong, will improve performance. I can't go through all of this. The off-season is the time to work on those things. I think you can handle this yourself.

As the season approaches and presumably your 6 week period of relative inactivity has ended, you can begin to prep for the coming season. Get out and throw but start slowly. Pitchers should pitch and catchers should catch them. Batting lessons should start up now, before the first practices. Running should become proogrammed and gradually increase in intensity. 60 foot sprints and running all bases is a good way to prepare for practice. Otfielders want to get out and run in fields, track down flyballs if you have someone to hit them. Infielders need to begin doing intense side to side short sprints. It is time once again to really prep the body for the stresses of the season.

By the end of this off-season period, I hope that you will experience a few manifestations of this period of rest. For one thing, your mind should be refreshed and should actually be a little impatient about getting back onto a real softball field to play a real softball game. The muscles you begin working when you start throwing a ball, taking swings, etc. every day, should be completely rested. The muscles you need but which get little real workout during the season should be stronger. Your core muscles should be in better shape from correct use rather than abuse. Your body, mind and soul should be ready to go. You should be itching both physically and mentally to play ball.

You can decide for yourself what to do and how much, of course, but I suggest to you that if you decide that the offseason is going to be a time when you play all out or pitch twice as much as usual, or engage in some sort of extreme physical conditioning while not taking any down time, you may be sorry. It may not be this season. It may not be for quite a while. But if you get in the habit of eating chocolate every single day in large amounts, you most certainly will get sick of the stuff.

Hearing Voices

2009-11-10T09:24:00.000-08:00

Lollipop, lollipop, oh Lollylollypop!

A Philadelphia Phillies fan who had long ago relocated to the New York area for his employment was up very late watching the baseball World Series recently. He was rather depressed because his team was down three games to one. The next morning he made his way to the primary care physician for his annual physical. The doctor, not at all a sports fan but aware that his patient had a family history of certain mental disorders asked his patient the question he always did on these visits.

The doctor inquired, "How are you? Have you been feeling down at all lately?"

The patient replied, "Actually I'm very depressed today."

The doctor inquired further, "Are you experiencing any confusion?"

The groggy patient answered, "I'm a bit confused this morning but nothing out of the ordinary."

The now concerned doctor continued, "How would you characterize this confusion? How deeply are you depressed? Have you thought about killing yourself? Have you had any other violent thoughts?"

The patient, irritated, joked with a somewhat wicked smirk, "Suicide? No, but I can think of a few people I'd like to punch in the face like Ryan Howard or Brad Lidge, maybe ARod."

The doctor, now extremely concerned, dug in, "Who are these guys, co-workers? What did they do to get you so angry, particularly this Rodney fellow? You made such a face when you said his name. Would you ever actually engage in violence against one of your co-workers?"

The patient, now rather amused with the doctor, exclaimed, "Look doctor, it doesn't matter, OK? Let's get to something more serious. I don't have cancer or anything, do I? I'd like to get this visit over before much longer so I can go home and take a nap. I took the day off from work today. I called in sick this morning so I don't have to deal with the NY fellows."

The doctor, now extremely concerned and strongly considering institutionalization for his obviously deeply depressed patient, made a final inquiry before pulling the trigger, "Have you been hearing any voices?"

The patient, now fully awake and finally realizing what was going on, said, "Doctor, I'm depressed because the Phillies are going to lose the World Series. Lidge and Howard are on the team. ARod is a Yankee. Don't you watch baseball at all? I'd like to ring the necks of all three but I'm not violent and, you no-sport-idiot, I am not hearing any voices other than perhaps Tim McCarver's - that's the TV announcer calling the games. So can we please move on if I promise to tell you when I am actually suffering from depression?"

The doctor, now a little more in step with his patient, replied, "OK, you scared me for a moment. You need to lose weight, take your cholestrol drugs more regularly and stop staying up so late watching baseball."

Do you hear voices? I do. I think we all do. If I am not listening to someone; if I am not speaking; if there is no talking going on around me, I generally hear that little voice inside my head, my voice. It says, "don't forget to go to the bank," "put out the trash tonight," I have to catch one of the kids after dinner tonight, I hope I can make it," or some such. Most of us hear our own little voice in our own little head telling us whatever it is that our brain wants us to focus on. Or, am I alone in this? Maybe I should be institutionalized!

All kidding aside, there is a very important, difficult to discuss, point in all this.

When I am learning something, I generally "hear" the voice of the person who has been instructing me. When I played sports seriously, I "heard" the voice of my coaches inside my head. After a while, I suppose the voice of the teacher, instructor or coach is converted into my own voice but my experience is one of hearing the voice, not merely thinking about something they said or I am saying in their stead.

If you are of my generation, you can think of an example of this being portrayed in comedy. There is the Little Rascals episode in which one of the characters must memorize a poem and he is procrastinating about it. &n bsp; As he drifts off to a daydream, he hears, "learn that poem, learn that poem, learn that poem."

The problem that arises in this hearing of the coach, teacher, mentor, etc. is I can be interrupted by others speaking. If I am attempting to do a difficult activity, I am listening to something my mentor has told me and if there is too much talking around me, I lose focus and the voice goes silent. When folks interrupt me, I lose the voice, I lose focus, I cannot continue.

Obviously a ball player can never be very good unless he or she learns to tune out other voices or push them into the white noise background. With pitchers, this is particularly true. You throw a ball and the other teams starts in immediately with "too low to make it go" or "too high to make it fly." If you can't get past that, you do not have a future in pitching. If you are batting and hear anything that the catcher or other fielders has to say, well then, somebody is going to recognize your rabbit ears and really start giving you the business. Ball players must learn to tune out irrelevant voices.

Too bad umps aren't accomplished at this skill!

The typical softball player has a lot of voices going on in her head. There is the hitting or pitching instructor, perhaps somebody who has given her pointers on fielding. Her speed and agility guy or gal is also trying to speak inside her head. Then, of course, there are the team coaches. If a team has 4 coaches and each has something to say, well, in this case, there are 6 or more voices competing to be heard whilst she pushes the other team's and their parents' cheers out of her head.

You think this is easy? Try it at your workplace or at some social gathering. It is nearly impossible to push 30 people's voices out of your head while listening intently to a half dozen others and keep your sanity in the process. Yet ball players do it all the time. It is a matter of survival. But it takes a tremendous effort and a huge volume of psychic energy.

If on top of all the coaches and myriad instructors, your kid must also listen to you, she is being set up for failure. And if she has rightly concluded that she must block you out while continuing to focus upon the words and voices of the good instructors you paid money for, her job is much tougher than it ought to be. If "you" means both parents, that's worse. If "you" means both parents, estranged from each other, plus their new significant others, look out!

There is little which amuses me quite as much as parents attending to their kids at some clinic or private instruction. The instructor is telling them what they need to focus on. After a few months of instruction, maybe a year or more, the parent becomes steeped in what the private, paid coach generally emphasizes to her. Do this, do that. Your not ... You are ... The coach knows his or her trade because they have spent 40 years working this scene. The parent knows what they know from a handful of hours spent observing the coach work with their kid. Why on Earth would you take up a single millisecond with your own opinion during time which might cost you $50 to $100 per hour?

And yet, I have observed private pitching sessions in which a parent who is there merely to be the practice catcher because nobody else, nobody better could be found in which the parent instructs the kid to do this or that or not to do this or that. I understand the urge to speak when your kid is not doing things right. Heck, she did things right yesterday. The coach is going to think she is an idiot. The coach is going to think I'm an idiot. And he may think you're an idiot whether you open your mouth or not. But, remember it is better to keep one's mouth shut and have everyone think you a fool than it is to open it and remove all doubt.

Seriously folks, I am speaking from experience. A player benefits quite a bit when her parents remain along the sideline completely silent. I am teaching what I have learned through many of my own mistakes. I have learned this from many others. Go to all the games. Cheer for the good stuff and when everyone else is cheering. Don't correct. Don't stand in as a surrogate coach along the sidelines in an attempt to make your kid perform better. It does not work.

Some time ago, I noticed the father of a top level pitcher almost constantly had a tootsie pop in his mouth. I figured the guy had quit smoking. That is a demon with which I have struggled. And if you are addicted to tobacco, there is nothing worse than a ball game to bring on the urge to smoke. I imagine that even if the father of a pitcher were to quit tobacco for a good two years, he might be overcome with the desire to smoke while watching his kid pitch.

Yet, there was something else at work here. I do not believe the guy had the tootsie pops in the place of tobacco. If he had been using them as a pacifier in leu of tobacco, I believe I would have heard some crunches. Smokers don't do well with lollipops. They are more like the owl in the old commercial. How many licks does it take to get to the middle of a tootsie pop? One ... two ... three ... crunch, it takes three licks!

At a fairly recent game, I was patrolling the sideline, watching competition in which my daughter was not involved. I noticed that everybody on one side of the field had these little white sticks protruding from between their lips. I watched as one guy chucked a stick into the garbage, turned towards the other parents and asked where the pops were. One women turned towards him with a bag in her hand and said, "that's my job this tournament," reached into it and inquired as to which color the father wanted. She had a very large bag of the pops. It was a little peculiar.

More recently, my daughter guested with a team of very well experienced players. Their parents sat quietly on the sidelines with those same darn sticks poking out of their mouths. I was a newbie to the group so there were not a lot of conversation with which I was a part. But before the first game got going, I saw somebody handing out tootsie pops just like I had seen at that other game. The woman who had them joked that this was her week. And after she had handed out a bunch of them, she turned to me and said, "I'm sorry I don't know your name but would you like a pop?" I declined because those things pull out my fillings - I cannot lick or suck on them, I have to chomp.

The woman looked at me with some sympathy and concern, and inquired again, "are you sure?" I declined again and she said, "If you change your mind, please feel free. They are right here." It did not occur to me then how strange it was that she had such a large bag of tootsie pops just like the lady at that other game. But this time, something clicked. The coincidence was just a bit too strange.

Who, when given a choice of a snack to eat while watching a ball game, would choose tootsie pops? Personally, I would go with nuts of some variety, likely pistachioes. I wouldn't choose to eat candy when I know I'm not going to be able to brush my teeth for hours. And I wouldn't generally choose any sort of hard candy, let alone lollie pops.

I finally came to understand what was going on with my wife's help. She pointed out to me that all these softball people were sucking on tootsie pops for only one reason that had little to do with a sweet tooth, smoking, or any kind of hunger. She said they are sucking on these in order to remember to keep their mouths shut! And I knew instantly that she was right.

If one were to metaphysically walk through the entire world of softball, one would instantly recognize the value of the tootsie pop. As one strolled through 8U rec ball, one would take note of the loud voices imploring children to do this or that. As one progressed to 10U and 12U, the voices would become fewer but far more adamant and serious. Enter 14U and 16U and there are still those annoying parents providing essential advice to their sires as the sires made all manner of mocking faces (outside their parents view) towards their friends whose parents were also providing useful advice. But as one got closer and closer to the highest levels of the game, the sounds from the sidelines would diminish to nary a whimper and be replaced by the girls themselves talking more and more frequently to each other, offering encouragement rather than advice, cheering on their teammates, etc.

If you were to take a close look at the parents of the highest level players, they are merely whispering amongst themselves. They almost never talk to their kids, the coaches, and especially the umpires. Sure some do. But the most well seasoned among them do not. The most well seasoned are almost totally silent and devoid of emotion. The newbies continue to offer encouraging words of advice. The in-betweeners are sucking on tootsie pops.

As I said, I am not a huge fan of the tootsie pop. It wrecks my teeth. But when I think hard about it, having wrecked teeth is better than having wrecked children who no longer play softball. Players need to hear voices in their heads. Don't compete with them. You paid lots of money to install those voices. Save your money for the dentist. Let your kids hear those voices. Get your fillings replaced. Better yet, have your dentist fuse your mouth shut!

Flip A Coin

2009-11-10T07:42:00.000-08:00

The following bit of minutiae is not posted merely for entertainment value nor because your intrepid author has nothing of value to say this fine day. The issue concerns a matter of huge importance in somewhat limited circumstances. A question regarding it was posed at a very important coaches seminar recently and answered by a Hall of Fame college coach. It may be a trivial point but I believe that, like many fastpitch softball issues, it is worthy of your concern and careful consideration. You should not merely flip a coin and determine your choice based on chance. The question concerns the choice of "home or away."

Recently, at a coaching seminar, a travel ball coach asked a college coach for his opinion regarding the choice of home or away when a team wins the pre-game conference coin toss. The college coach replied that he would always, absotively, posalutely, always, always always choose home. I suppose it is relatively easy to guess at what his motivation might be. It is also easy to follow suit. But I'm going to have to disagree with this coach despite his being far more well seasoned than I.

In football, the winner of the coin toss almost always chooses to receive the kickoff. I say almost always because under certain weather conditions, it is more advantageous to be able to choose the side of the field you have to defend in which quarter of the game. Each team gets basically the same number of posessions. Each team gets basically the same number of quarters defending each side of the field. But given strong winds in a certain direction, sometimes teams want to be pointed away from the wind in the final quarter. So, when they win the toss, they choose to trade the privilege of receiving the opening kickoff and being on offense for the ability to have the wind at their backs in the final quarter of the game. Those are rare circumstances but they do happen enough to take note of them. The rest of the time, the "winner" says, "I'll take my chances to score first."

In baseball and softball, the most frequent choice in the home vs. away debate is home. We won the toss and we would like to bat last so that if the game is tied in the final inning, we at least have the opportunity to walk off with the win. I do not recall many instances in either baseball or softball in which the winner of the toss has chosen to be "visitor." But think about this, when comparing football and softball, why does the football coin toss winner always elect to go on offense first while the softball winner chooses to play defense?

Of course, this issue does not show itself in all types of play. In rec league, it is customary for the schedule to show home and away teams except, possibly, in the playoffs. In high school, with limited exceptions, the home team is always, well, the home team. In high school playoff tournaments, generally there is a seeding and the better seed is the home team or has the choice of being home or away - and I do not recall any teams choosing away although it probably has merely escaped my notice. A similar situation occurs with college ball. The home team is the home team except for those early season tournaments in warm climates or, presumably the post-season tourneys. Even in travel ball, elimination play is generally conducted in accordance with seedings. Preliminary rounds are a different story, of course. So I offer up this analysis for anyone who must make a choice after winning a coin toss, be they rec contenders, high school or college teams in some sort of tourney, or travel ball teams on the first day of play.

The first consideration of batting or fielding first involves the football analogy. Footballers almost always choose to go on offense first because the first team to strike is in a better position than its opponent and because playing ahead opens opportunities while playing from behind limits your game plan. It is my belief that while the two games are decidedly different, this aspect, for the most part, holds true in both.

If you are about to decide whether to have your runner at first base steal, the decision will be different if you are ahead by 4 runs than if you are trailing by the same amount. The fact is, when you are winning, you can and should be more aggressive, particularly on the bases. You get to force the play and put pressure on the defense to get you out. Most errors occur under pressure, ergo, you force errors more when you lead than when you are behind. When you are up first and score, you have opportunies to steal or try to advance runners on hits. When you are behind, you may not have that runner steal. You may not try to score from second on a basehit to right. &nb sp; You are playing more conservatively.

Secondly, when a team gets out in front of another, the objective percentage of winning vs. losing tells us that the team which scores first wins more often than not. I can say nothing to convince you of my "fact" on this so please check it out for yourself. If I am wrong, I suppose you can chuck the rest of this. But I'm almost positive I have it right. The friend who wrote me with the issue pointed out to the coach who answered it that his team won at a ratio of 4:1 when leading after 1 inning and lost at a rate of 1:3 when losing after one inning. Of course, "after one inning" assumes both the home and away team have batted. But the inference is clear. Getting off the schnied helps a team to win.

To me, the getting-off-the-schnied argument is fairly powerful but I can see how it can be refuted by what I noted about both teams getting up by the "end of the first inning." That's OK with me - I have other arguments.

In games in which there is a "drop dead" time limit, being the first to bat has other advantages. For example, a team which is up first generally uses its pitchers less than the home team. If they are batting when the ump's alarm goes off, their pitcher has seen about one less inning. If they are in the field, she has again seen about one less inning. In the tournament game in which a team may play as many as 5 games in a day, this has huge advantages. You could theoretically require 5 less inning to be pitched in one day!

Also, if a team loses a full-length game not ending with a home team walkoff, it usually doesn't have to play the bottom of the 7th, ergo, one less inning pitched. The home team has to pitch to seven sides, 21 outs, regardless. And the visiting team gets 3 more at bats for its hitters which is usually a good thing in a game where no amount of batting practice can replace facing real, live pitching.

In addition to the benefits of batting more and pitching less, I don't know about you but there are two realities of tournament ball which often irritate me. The first one is that every team I have ever been associated with carries the same curse - the first game of the day curse. That does not mean we play poorly our first game of the day. It means we always play the very first game of the day. Typically, that is scheduled for something like 8, 8:30, or 9:00. We almost always have our kids show up one hour to one and a half hours before our first game. Many of our tournaments are about one hour's drive from most kid's homes. So on the typical prelim day, that means everybody has to roll out of bed by about 5:00 am or earlier, before my pet rooster or his friend the sun awaken!

When it is finally time for the umpire to exclaim, "play ball," sometimes more than half our team has fallen back to sleep. I'd rather that we be woken up by some absurd cheer, the ump exclaiming "strike" or some other such happening while we are in the dugout rather than by a screaming grounder going through our SS', CF's, or both's legs. I'd rather get in the mood to play a long day of defensive softball while watching somebody else make errors rather than my team.

Many tournaments give teams travelling from far a one game hiatus, allowing for an additional hour or so of beauty sleep. But most everybody has to play at 8:00 am from time to time. Maybe this is a weak argument for batting first but the second reality is indisputable. In tournaments, teams often play back to back games with little time in between.

We always warm up at least two pitchers, usually all of our pitchers, before the first game of the day. But by the end of that game, the kid who is starting game 2 has generally gotten cold and needs to throw at least a bit before heading into the circle. We often counteract this problem by having the starter for game 2 relieve at the end of game 1 but sometimes that is just not possible. And, if given about 5 minutes for the top half of the first, we can usually have our starter good to go by the bottom half of the inning.

The final reason to choose to bat first after winning the coin toss is much more subtle. For this item, I need to use anecdotal evidence. I realized the importance of the issue one game as I sat in the dugout with the rest of the team and our game "captains" came back with hunched shoulders and downtrodden expressions. The girl who had called the toss for this game as well as the previous two games said sadly, "I lost again. I guess I'm no good at this. We're up first."

For whatever reason, the girl actually felt like their were winners and losers on the coin toss. Sure, there are in absloute terms but it should not make such an impact on a kid. Who really cares? Does the winning team start jumping about and cheering that they actually won something after winning the coin toss and chose to be home? No, they just yell to their teammates that "we're in the field first!" Everybody seems to choose to be home team. If you choose always to bat first, your team will become accustomed to it and never consider themselves to be "losers" of any kind merely because they lost the coin toss. Instead, they'll probably be amused about the fact that when they win the toss, they bat first and when they lose it, they bat first. Yes, some teams, especially those that see things the same way as I do, will choose to hit first. But most of the time, your team will be up to bat at the beginning of its games. And if that doesn't work for ya, you can shoot me.

California Dreamin

2009-11-09T10:37:00.000-08:00

I'm not really sure what I expected when we recently made our way across the country so that my daughter could guest pitch with a Gold team at a showcase in California. For my daughter, I wanted her to dip her toes into the vast ocean of high level softball as well as the relatively icy Pacific. For myself, I wanted to compare the OC Batbusters Early Thanksgiving college showcase tournament with others I have seen. In the end, I suppose we could have been anywhere in the country doing the same thing. She would have experienced about the same level of play. I most likely would have learned the same lessons. Yet, it was somehow better that this was in California, the epicenter of fastpitch softball on planet Earth.

For my daughter, the experience was invaluable. She is a high school freshman and the team for which she played was a couple sophomores, mostly juniors and one or two seniors. She knew one of the girls on the team and had played in years past against a few of the others. But she felt really alone for the most part. That is an experience in itself but she's been on enough teams made up of strangers to overcome any anxiety caused by the situation.

My daughter has pitched against high schoolers here and there for several years, since she was 12. So the idea of pitching against high schoolers was not particularly intimidating per se. But these hitters, these teams were some of the best in the country. There were serious college coaches coming to keep tabs on many of these kids. Some will undoubtedly play for some of the top 50 D-1 teams in the country. Now that should intimidate anyone heading into the circle. But she survived despite making a bad pitch or two. Her very first pitch was met with a determined swing that drove the ball sharply into left center for a clean single. Her second pitch was swatted to the left side of the infield and played smartly into a 6- (or 5-) 4-3 double play by a teammate at 2B whose college scholarship is signed and sealed. The next batter popped out or grounded one back to her. Inhale deeply!

In my daughter's second inning of work, she was much more relaxed. She walked a kid after recording one out and then got the next two without much happening. Her first GOLD outing was over with no runs allowed. She was a much more confident kid. I won't bore you with the details of her entire showcase pitching experience but I do want to share one little piece of it with you before getting to the heart of what I really have to say today. In her second outing, she retired the first 3 batters she faced and then got up 0-2 on the next hitter. She threw a pitch that was fouled off and then tried to get the kid on a drop curve. That was her first mistake pitch! I do not believe they have yet found the ball. The last I saw of it, it was going over the fence about a millisecond after it came out of my daughter's hand and caught the fat part of the plate about 6 inches above where it should have been.

That's what happens at these kinds of tournaments. A pitcher who has never given up a homerun before (my daughter has - that is not a new experience for her), can make one mistake and only watch helplessly as it clears the fence. There are often 9 good hitters arrayed against you at this level. I have heard the various pitching coaches talk about working lineups and throwing certain pitches to the 3, 4, and 5 hitters while going right after the 7 and 8, etc. You cannot do that when you are a rookie playing showcase ball against Gold teams. The guy with the book might just as well say "this is their number 4 hitter" before each and every kid comes to the plate.

I don't think my kid was mentally prepared for the speed of the players at this level. That is a difficult adjustment to make. I did tell her that this would be the case but it is difficult for anyone to expect speed to that degree. You have to experience it for yourself. When a ball was hit back to my kid and it bounced off her shin, she hustled to pick it up and make a throw to first but I think the kid beat it, though the ump exclaimed "out." She did not have the same degree of sense of urgency which the other kids who have previously played this level had. My hope is that she now knows what I meant when I said the kids are faster.

But enough of my daughter's experience. I can't speak for her. What I can tell you is my experiences were many and varied.

First of all, the reason to play showcase ball is not really to compete at the highest level. This is the business side of the equation and the business is college recruiting. There is competition to be sure but there is no tournament winner or loser. There was no bracket play, just pool games. And a team's result and record do not count nearly as much for anything as do the individual players' exposure to college coaches. The results of game play are more about team pride and, I suppose, about who does and does not get to play on premier fields in future events.

As I said earlier, my kid is but a freshman and we weren't very much concerned that she get tremendous college exposure. We understand how the process works. But all we were after was an opportunity to dip her feet into this level of play and see how she likes it. Not everybody who gets involved with Gold or showcase ball gets such an opportunity to test the waters. We were very fortunate to have the chance.

As we were planning to fly out to CA, we decided that we should fake it until we make it - go ahead and contact college coaches to see if any would come to watch her play. I expect that not everyone understands this so I'll go ahead and explain. When one seeks out college exposure, it is not enough to merely play or play well at some recruiting venue. College coaches do not roam these things looking to cold prospect. They don't watch a game, pick out the one or two or three best players in it and then contact them to offer full rides plus meals, dry cleaning and a car, if those players will deign to come to their institutions. Generally the way it works is a kid will 1) register with the NCAA clearing house, join a team that plays important showcases, sign up for NFCA recru8itment camps or some such, pick out a number of schools to target, fill out prospective athlete recruit questionnaires, make some sort of contact with the softball coach, and keep them apprised of any big tournaments they are playing. This is done with an eye towards getting the coaches' attention, making a favorable impression and hopefully being "followed" by that coach for a while afterwards. I've been told that many coaches will follow a kid for a year or two before making up their minds.

I have also been told that coaches will take a look at any unsigned seniors briefly, are really interested in any juniors they have been following, and will pay a good deal of attention to sophomores from whom they may find the new talent to follow over the next year. They are not particularly interested in freshman unless those freshman happen to be six feet two 70 mph throwers with great movement and impeccable command. They would also be interested in freshman who hit numerous homeruns or demonstrate gold glove level defensive skills. But I have overheard a college coach complain about some 8th or 9th grader being too good for her program because everyone else at bigger programs is likely to grab her too.

So we sent out e-mails to about 4 coaches expecting about a normal response rate - 0%. Typically, you need to send out dozens of contacts to get a few responses. And we went to our first game looking to see where coaches were from and never expecting to see anyone we had contacted. We were shocked speechless when at our first true game, there was one of the coaches we had contacted and he was asking about our daughter by name.

There are a couple lessons in this experience. You need to contact coaches if you are heading down this path. If you didn't know that before, now you do. You should target schools in which you are really interested - those that offer the sort of academic programs you want. And you should not be completely amazed when they show up to watch you / your kid play. If you are paying thousands of dollars for your kid to play showcases, you should not place all your chips on the remote possibility that some coach from UCLA or Arizona will just happen to walk up to the field as your kid rounds the bases after going yard.

One other thing almost slipped my mind. Our team played a couple "practice games" on the day before the tournament officially opened. Most big showcases afford the opportunity for teams to sign up to request such practice games for a charge which is about what umpires fees would be. If you are in a position to consider going to such a tournament a day early and playing "practice games," do it. Maybe not all the college coaches have arrived by the time you take the field but I can guarantee you some have. We saw as many coaches at our "practice games" as we did the regularly scheduled, official ones. Basically, so-called practice games are actually additional showcase games. If you're gonna throw a couple hundred bucks down for flights plus a hotel room, you would be well advised to go for an extra day just to get a little more exposure.

The most important lessons I took home from the left coast are more general in nature. I have watched elite, Gold level CA teams on numerous occassions before. But I have never seen so many all in one place at one time as I did at the Batbusters showcase. In years past I have had the opportunity to watch the Batbusters, San Diego Renegades, and several other top flight CA teams play showcases. This time I saw countless teams I had never heard of before. That was worth the price of admission (and flights, food, housing, etc.).

The teams we played and those I watched were not the absolute best ones in all of softball in general or CA in particular. They were merely good teams, with tons of experience, and with many bona fide college prospects filling a good portion of their ranks. The level of individuals' play was not anything new to me. I have watched the Shamrocks, great Texas teams, Gold Coast Hurricanes, and many top 10, 20, or 64 ASA Gold teams play in person before. The teams we saw at Batbusters were more of the run-of-the-mill CA showcase teams (if that's not too much of a contradiction in terms for you). They had good players and somewhat weaker ones. They made good plays and bad ones. They all shared certain characteristics which any team at this level shares. It was very interesting and worth going over in some detail.

The pitching was of particular interest to me going in. I was not overly impressed with it. CA pitchers are not mechanically superior to pitchers I have seen from Ohio, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, or anywhere else. They do not throw harder. Their pitches do not have more movement on them. But what was evident was pitchers with apparently more experience, better command, and the ability to grind through when they did not seem to have their best stuff. I saw one kid who threw no more than 50. I saw a few harder throwing types but nothing I have not seen elsewhere. I did not see many very good rise ballers. Most pitchers threw a lot of drops and curves. As I said, they had good command of almost eveyrthing they threw, aside from the rises which frequently struck the backstop. Most of all, and I want to give this as much emphasis as possible, almost every CA pitcher I saw had an above average change-up she was not afraid to throw and was able to throw for strikes.

I know I have tried to impress you with this before but I'll say it again at this juncture because I do not believe enough have heard me. The best pitch in softball is the change. I do not believe enough pitchers give it enough of a working in their throwing sessions. The most effective windmill pitchers have good, effective change-ups. If you do not spend as much time working on this pitch as you do on trying to break the 60 mph barrier, you're making a critical mistake. And, finally, if you want to be a successful pitcher, the correct pathway is via command.

You have to throw hard. You have to have good movement. You have to have a good change. And you have to be able to hit spots - spots, not approximate areas.

I have been told that CA pitchers are good because they face CA hitters all the time. I am sure that the pitchers from CA face good hitters a lot. As I said, these pitchers seemed to be more experienced than their age would predict. But I remain unconvinced that they benefit from facing all those great CA hitters because, quite honestly, I did not see many of those.

The hitting was fine but it was not anything which stood out to me. We saw perhaps the same percentage of well hit balls as we have seen in many other venues. There was not a single team which had a monstrous lineup of powerful hitters. A few teams had a couple very good hitters. But the average hitter was an average gold hitter, good but nothing to write home about.

What I did notice was, of the non-slappers, most of the kids hit rotationally. What I mean by "rotationally" is via the Ted Williams style. I d0o not merely mean girls who use their hips by "rotating" them. Almost every decent hitter does that. Ted Williams allowed his hips to fly open early in his swing. So-called "rotational hitters" open their hips before their hands come forwards. They also tend to drop the head of the bat as well as making a couple of other characteristic movements which can be fairly easily traced to Williams. The CA hitters I saw at Batbusters almost all used this technique.

I have to admit a bit of surprise at seeing so many rotationally trained hitters. When, in the past, I have watched top level CA teams play, I certainly have seen some rotational hitters but not a high percentage. There are certain weaknesses to the swing and top level hitters employ parts of it but are not easily characterized as "rotational." At Batbusters, I saw only two kinds of swings, rotational and slapping.

One major difference between the typical rotational hitter I saw in CA was all these girls crowded the plate tightly. I suppose the biggest weakness a rotational hitter has that can be exploiited is down and moving away - like a drop curve or outside drop. The CA hitters cover this weakness by going toes to the line and beyond. This allows them to see an outside, dropping pitch like one over the heart of the plate or even inside. One thing you do not want to do is pitch a rotational hitter inside and low or over the middle of the plate and down. Ofxcourse, this leaves them vulnerable to an inside and up screw but I did not see many, if any, girls who could do this. I have heard Gold coaches speak at length about going high and tight. Now I understand why. If you are going to be effective against these hitters, you must go up and in.

I think I also understand why pitching coaches continue to emphasize the riseball despite the movement down of the strike zone to the solar plexus from its historical upper location at the armpits. It is very difficult to develop a good riseball. Many lay claim to it but few can actually execute on the claim. Among the few who have a legitmate rise, even fewer can throw the thing for a strike under the old strike zone, let alone the new one. But umps at large do not seem to have altered their perceptions to conform with the rule change. Pitches above the plexus and at or slightly above the armpits continue to be called for strikes. If rotational hitters are taking away the down and out, coming up is the next best way to get them out. It is nearly impossible to hit even an average rise ball above the belly button with the bat head held beneath the hands as rotational hitters generally try to do. Rise balls can be dangerous as a bad one travels a great distance. But pitching coaches still consider the pitch to be the Cadillac because it gets rotational hitters out.

Now as a final commentary on CA hitters, oh the slappers, oh the slappers! I saw more well-schooled slappers in CA than I have ever seen in a single place before. In order to discuss this, I mus first define what I mean by a good slapper.

I have seen a high number of kids who hit with a style I would call "tapping" or "tap hitting." &nbsop; This is a technique where a kid who is fast but struggling at the plate, moves to the left side and tries to just tap the ball into play. I see this a lot in high school ball and at the younger ages of travel where the kids are just learning to slap hit. A girl takes up position deep in the box, runs forward as the pitch is delivered and sticks the bat out to make contact as she exits the batter's box. To me, this is not slap hitting. That is why I call it "tap hitting."

Good slappers strike the ball after just a few steps which are taken to build momentum in their run to first. The best ones are quite capable of hitting the ball beyond the infielders. The very best are able to hit the ball to the wall or over it. When good slappers come to the plate, the infield is usually shifted around with one or both middle infielders coming forwards to about the same distance from the plate as the pitcher. There are a variety of other changed fielder alignments so I won;t go into detail. But suffice it to say that if the outfield is pulled in too far, good slappers can take advantage of that but putting the ball over their heads.

The vast majority of CA slappers I saw were very good. In fact, most runs scored as a result of the efforts of the teams' slappers. There were only a handful of well hit balls, hit by non-slap hitters in several games. There were easily double that number in slap-hits of all varieties. What was worse was each team had more than two girls who could slap hit effectively. Some teams had as many as four kids in the lineup who were well-schooled slappers. That's a nightmare for most teams to defense against.

One result of so many teams having so many slappers was that the CA teams seemed much more capable of defending against the slap. Infielders, particularly middle ones, were Kobata quick. They fielded slaps on the ground or bounced and made quick throws to the bases. I'm a huge fan of defensive softball. These infielders played it flawlessly on the slap. My guess is that there are so many slappers in CA that players and teams simply must learn to defense against it. The result is the kind of defensive infield play I saw. And that is the major difference between teams from CA and those from outside the state.

To wrap up, going to CA was a great experience for my kid and for my entire family of softball crazies. We saw some pretty good play and learned a bit about the college recruitment process. We saw some average players including pitchers. We did not see the "great hitters" we expected but the slappers were well above what you see elsewhere. Pitchers had command but were otherwise indistinguishable from their counterparts around the country. Oufielding skills were also about what you see anywhere at this level. The catchers were no more impressive than those from other places. But the rest of the infield was very good. My guess is that when you see slappers all the time, you either learn to deal with them or take up soccer.

As an additional comment, going into CA, we were told that the umpires there favored teams from the state over those from outside it. I saw some pretty bad umpiring. My kid did not experience any sort of negative calls made against her. Actually, to be quite honest, I think she benefitted from most of the bad calls when she was pitching. Some pitches that were clearly out of the zone were called strikes. But I watched a lot of games and I have to say that the theory I heard going in held true. There were bad calls made for and against all teams but the worst ones I witnessed and those which made a difference in the outcome of games were those made against out of state teams. I never saw any game changing calls made against CA teams.

What's worse is there are certain bad calls you have to live with. There is no point to arguing balls and strikes, ever. The ump is not going to change the call and he or she is not going to change the zone. But it is hard to watch one pitch to an area be called a ball and another to the identical place called a strike. There was no strike zone to speak of with most of the CA umps.

Further, while certain plays require a call whether the ump sees it or not, certain others require a call only when the ump sees something affirmatively. For example, if a plate ump blinks on a pitch and does not see it, he still must make a call. He will call ball or strike based on what his gut tells him. Similarly, if there is a play at first, the field ump will call safe or out regardless of whether he is actually convinced one way or the other. He has to make a call. But umps should never make a call on other types of plays unless they see something absolutely. For example, if a runner tags up on a flyball and the ump is not sure he saw her leave the base early, he should not call her out on appeal. That is a seeing sort of call, not a required call where the gut will do. Similarly, an ump should not call a baserunner out for leaving too early unless he actually sees this occur. Also, an ump should not call a base runner out because the base coach touched her unless he actually sees the contact. He cannot think that very possibly these things happened so "I'll go ahead and make the call." He has to actually see the thing happen. In CA, we saw umps make many phantom calls. I say "phantom" because the acts called did not happen. That is rather unforgiveable.

Well that's it. I advocate showcase ball but planes, trains, automobiles, and hotel rooms are expensive. I suppose there are a few other ways to skin the cat of college recruiting but showcases are the best way to make contact and gain a following. CA showcases draw a high number of college coaches as do the NFCA recruitment camps, the Rising Stars stuff in Florida, the tourneys in Colorado, Texas etc. On the other hand, I suppose one's softball experience cannot be complete without hitting CA at this level at least once.