Thread: Sometimes they just miss the point

I was at a lesson tonight (as usual) and got to talking to the parents of one of my students. They have been excited to see the progress their daughter has made, especially since we started back up in late September, and then they told me an amusing story.

There are four pitchers on their daughter's 12U team (including her). My student actually could be playing 10U but moved up.

Anyway, at a recent practice the pitchers were all warming up, and one of the coaches pointed out that my student was the only one not doing wrist snap drills. Her mom and dad said, "Yes, that's right" and smiled. (For me, wrist snaps as warm ups are a total waste of time, as I've written in previous blog posts.)

Her parents told me the other pitchers go through this elaborate warm-up sequence before pitching. Their daughter is often pitching for 25 minutes (or at least seems like it) before the others get started.

So then I asked the big question: how is she doing compared to the others? Because if she's not doing what they're doing, you'd hope she's doing better.

She is. And that's the funny thing to me. Despite being younger and smaller than the others, apparently she throws harder and more accurately. If that's the case, and she's doing something different from the others, maybe it's time to question what the others are doing instead?

Just sayin'.

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I was at a coaches clinic several years ago, Cindy Bristow was one of the presenters. Someone asked about pitching warmups and wrist flips in particular. She said, wrist flips are drills, not for warming up. You don't see other positions using drills as a warm up. She said she likes to see pitchers do full rotation warm ups starting slow and closer to the catcher and moving back as the pitcher speeds up. My dd has been doing this ever since. However to keep other coaches and players from questioning her, she does a couple of wrist flips and a few Ks, just to avoid having to explain everytime why she isn't warming up "properly". She is usually onto full speed pitches and actually pitching much faster then others.