Pitchers being overused

Rocketech1 said:

In general, I see more overuse with travel ball teams as some teams will pitch their #1, two or even three games in a row in bracket play on Sunday. Most HS games are 1 or 2 games a week. All the HS varsity teams in our league pitch their #1 every game. Most travel ball pitchers should be able to handle that light HS work load pretty easily. With that said, if a pitcher thinks she might be injured, she and her parents should shut her down immediately and see a doctor.

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I agree 100 Percent. Problem is, our school actually talks down travel ball, saying that it is bad for school sports and that our rec program is better then travel. My DD1 is the only one on the team out of both JV and V that has travel experience, she's not a pitcher. She is on the JV team. DD2 is one of two TB players on the JH V team, but the other one is a SS.

Crystal Brown said:

I can say that DD high school is a rarity where they have 6 pitchers on varsity and 3 on jv. Normally dd would start against the non conference teams and the bottom ranked team in their conference with #4 #5 and #6 coming in to finish the games. The other 2 pitchers take turns starting and finishing against the higher rank teams in our conference.

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Must be nice, LOL

After reading this thread, I came to appreciate the way the HS coaches make sure they DON'T wear out their pitchers. I even sent the JV coach an email thanking her for that. I have no idea if the JV coach read the email or not.

Anyway, on Saturday DD 3 was upset. There are now 3 pitchers on Varsity, and 1 on JV. They had a double header on Saturday, so they brought down one of the Varsity pitchers to pitch the second game for JV. JV lost by 1 run with DD 3 pitching, by 15 runs with the Varsity girl pitching. DD 3 was on the bench the whole second game, because the coach wanted her to rest. DD 3 wanted to pitch! Or at least play infield! She came to PLAY! And that morning DD 3 was threatening not to go to the games because she was feeling bad, then she complains because the coach doesn't want to wear her arm out.

Go figure.

What do they say, the pitcher always wants to pitch, even if her arm is falling off.

I see it way too often in 10U travel. Recently, one kid threw 229 pitches (assuming GT is accurate) over three games in one day. I wish Dr. Andrews would offer some guidelines to softball that people would take as seriously as they do in baseball.