Srob01
CoachRob
I've been a hitting instructor and club coach for many years and I've worked with hitters of all ages and abilities and have seen a lot of success. I've worked with very athletic kids that never saw success and not-so athletic kids that became very successful. Recently I began lessons for a set of 9 year old twins. These girls are both very athletic and have a high degree of potential but are very high energy and have deeply engrained bad muscle memory. All the classic swing killers are there, bat drag, bug-squishing, over striding, over loading, etc. I usually start lessons from the ground up and progress from there with isolation drills and slowly work towards putting a full swing together using vocal commands that go all the way from stance to follow-through. I can isolate the swing sequence in dry swings and Tee drills and have them moderately correct. They stay fairly consistent when going through the full swing sequence by vocal command but when they try to take full swings, regardless of the number of good step-by-step reps, they swing with their original bad mechanics. As I said, these girls are very high energy thus very short attention spans, so I have to be very careful not to over teach or get to monotonous. I get very personally invested in my hitters and these are good kids with good parents and, due to being blessed with natural athleticism, have a high degree of potential but I'm struggling with them. Anyone out there have similar experiences and if so, how did you work through it?