My frustration

[commish]

I lost my temper last night. Here is a little history. My daughter has been pitching for 3 years. She has been going to a pitching coach for a year and a half. Did great last year in rec ball and all-stars. So time to go to travel ball. She has played 11 travel ball games. She has pitched in 8 of those games. She has 7 wins and 1 loss. All great right. Not in my opinion.

I am not like most people and think my daughter is the best. In fact I think my daughter is average at best in talent. She does well because she trains and puts her heart and soul into pitching. Here is the kicker. She will not swing the bat when she is at the plate.

Is this common for pitchers? She isn't going to ever hit it over the fence I understand but swing the bat and take your chances at singles and doubles.

By the way she is only 10. I don't know how to get her to swing the bat. We talk about it on the way to the game. We agree that if we are up by 4 or more she is going to strike out swinging before taking a walk, but it never happens.

What can I do?

 

[spleen1015]

I don't think it has anything to do with her being a pitcher.

She could be afraid to fail. In her 10 year old mind, swinging and missing is failing more than watching strike 3. With my DD, I had to get her to see that good thing happen when you swing the bat.

Have you had the talk about softball being a game of failure? She's going to fail more than she succeeds, but she can never succeed if she doesn't try.

EDIT - Here's how this happened with my DD. First year 10u, she got ahead 3-0 and hoped to walk and struck out looking at 3 straight strikes with 2 outs and the bases loaded. We talked about how she was hoping to walk and failed instead. Next game pretty much the same scenario but this time she hit the ball over the CF head for an inside the park HR and won the game for her team. She's been fine ever since.

 

[grcsftbll]

It's nothing to do with being a pitcher. It seems like a very common problem in 10U players. Mine definitely did that at first. We told her to always think swing, and check if it's a bad pitch. We told her we will never be upset at her for striking out if she goes down swinging. But that we are not super happy to see her watch strikes go by then go sit down. For her this worked; she started swinging. She missed a lot at first but her past few tournaments has been hitting well again (she hit fine in 8U coach pitch). My kid naturally wants to play, so she is not hoping for a walk (I have seen that a ton in the lower level tournaments, because the pitching is so inconsistent). She WANTS to hit the ball; we just had to give her permission to try and fail.

 

[quincy]

I think pitching helpped DD bat, she more or less knew the umps strike zone.

Ask her what they are and are not calling, swing at the ones they are calling.

Reminder her she is supposed to swing at every pitch. Hopefully Yes, yes, YES. Maybe Yes, Yes, no.

Push comes to shove tell her she needs to swing at the 2nd pitch no matter were it is.

 

[PEPPERS]

My DD likes to hit with 2 strikes, she will take the first 2 strikes, then foul off pitch after pitch until she gets the pitch she wants, drives me crazy.

IMO she needs to thinks every pitch is a strike and steps/prepares to swing at every pitch, until she realizes it is a ball.

I would play a game with my players I would line them up and they get one strike either they swing and hit or if they swing and miss or not swing they grab a glove and go to the field, if they hit the ball they go back to the end of the line. They take turns until one girl is left it teaches them to be aggressive at the plate IMO, we do this at the end of practice. We also play practice games using one strike your out and one ball you walk.

 

[maksoftball]

I agree that it's normal at 10U. Encourage her to swing at every pitch...and use the yes, yes, no strategy. She will come around.

 

[Me_and_my_big_mouth]

Is she seeing live pitching at practice? That was an issue when my dd went from rec to travel. She just wasn't used to the level of pitching and hadn't seen it enough. I would get her to the batting cages, have her practice seeing the ball.

And then there's the approach used by her 12u coach. When the girls went down looking, they had to wear a clown nose in the dugout. I don't know if it's an approach I would have taken, but those girls were swinging at anything even close by the end of the season.



Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk

 

[wjdempkowski]

Teach her how to bunt.
Then, teach her how to "sneaky" bunt(show late).

 

[Ken Krause]

I worked with a 10U player last summer who had this issue. Turned out she was afraid of being hit by the ball as well as lacking confidence in her ability to hit overall.

What I did was to take some whiffle balls and have her hit those off front toss. I also tossed a couple right at her so she could see they wouldn't hurt if one hit her. Once she started swinging the bat at the whiffles, I started mixing them up - maybe two or three whiffles then a real ball, rinse and repeat. We worked through that, reducing the number of whiffles, until she was swinging regularly at the real balls. At the end I made sure to tell her she sees she can hit, and can hit it hard when she tries, so just go ahead. If she strikes out that's ok for now, just get comfortable swinging.

By the next lesson she had started to swing regularly, and then she got a few hits. After that she was much more aggressive and confident at the plate. Don't know if your daughter has these issues but you may want to try it.

 

[jwrunner]

Agree with all that this is common for 10U and that it is not specific to pitchers. I believe it is part of the learning process when switching from 8U coach-pitch to 10U kid-pitch. The whole process of determining if it is a ball or a strike, deciding to swing, and then actually swinging is a difficult transition for most. I have found a couple things that helped greatly with my DDs in this transition. First, we worked a lot on the timing of when their load/stride initiated. I had to get them used to the idea that the load/stride happened every pitch and it had to happen BEFORE they knew whether or not the pitch was a strike. Too many kids seem to wait to initiate their swing sequence until after they determine it is a strike.

Second (and you need a coach that will buy into this one), I told them to STOP thinking about balls and strikes. I had noticed that both of them would consistently hammer the ball in practice, even when a coach was throwing a lot harder than game speed. When I talked to them about what they were thinking during BP, they both said it was only about trying to hit the ball - nothing at all about balls and strikes. That had them initiating their swings at the right time to hit the ball, and interestingly, they still didn't usually swing at the rally bad pitches in the dirt or way high or outside. Did this make them occasionally swing at pitches outside the strike zone? Absolutely. But they stopped watching pitches going right down the middle. To me, that is a much better scenario - give me a really agressive hitter anyday, especially at 10U. That is where you need your coach on board though. I told them to go to the plate and think the same as they did in BP - not about balls & strikes at all - just about trying to thit the ball. As they get older, you can gradually start to eliminate some of the bad pitch swings. But even then, I found it worked better if I talked to them about feel rather than balls/strikes. For instance, the first adjustment we made (after they were already swinging freely) was to not swing at anything above their hands. So if you FEEL that you have to go up for it, then stop your swing. That last bit of terminology was key for my girls. I never tell them "don't swing". Their swing initiates on every pitch. If it is a bad pitch, the thought is that you "stop your swing". Same as the "yes, yes, yes, no" philosophy that many have - this just worked better for my girls.