- Jan 1, 2023
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Maybe Midwest is skewed, but just hard to reconcile this with what we see regularly. Drop's team has several throwing much harder than that.
Earlier this Fall we played a local open tourney just for reps and ran into some 13B kid throwing 62-63 consistently (we also use Smart Coach). Softball is small world and never even heard her name before that. Not saying she was amazing, but was bringing it.
From PGF experience at my DD’s age, Midwest had harder throwers than West Coast. California team pitchers were lower 50s at Nationals, but they had better movement. Texas at USA AAG was mixed. From hard throwers to a girl that was like a junk ball pitcher. Southeast has some hard throwers. NE has
Okay, right around 60 is a little ambiguous. To some people, that could be 58.
I'm not saying they don't have three first-year girls throwing 60. I'm just saying they're not cruising there in games. I asked permission from every one of my daughter's teammates parent to put them on the PR. I also asked them what their daughter threw. Of the four I got, (one was away, and one was my daughter), three said 60, and one said upper 50s. The top speed I got from those four was 58 from one, 57 from another, and 56 from the other two. Mind you, these were in-game speeds, not lessons. When I informed them of the speeds, they were all in disbelief. They were shocked that their precious daughters weren't throwing over 60 because they had all done it in lessons. Well, games are a different animal. Maybe they need to conserve energy, so they are slower. Maybe it's the field conditions, the wind, the sun in their eyes, or the train going by. I really don't know why, but the radar opened their eyes.
Remember, this was a relatively small sample size, so take it with a grain of salt. I'm sure there are more throwing 60+ out there. But when only 18.75% of the pitchers we saw this weekend threw 60+, I'd say the more likely scenario is people like to exaggerate.
Our pitchers were clocked every pitch at PGF Nationals during the summer as were the opposing pitchers we faced. I can say based on that there tends to be a pretty wide speed variance at that age not only game to game, or inning to inning, but also pitch to pitch. I’d say generally a 5mph range. There didn’t seem to be much cruising from any pitcher.
Our pitchers in-game speeds are pretty consistent with their practice speeds when they pitch at team practices. I’d expect a lot of girls can throw harder when a PC is around optimizing mechanics.
If you go 30 seconds in of the vid at the end you can see my DD hitting 61mph practicing and then 60mph show up in game (takes a couple seconds). But that is top speed.
We didn’t do any in-game radaring in the fall. Some days she seems fast and others she might be slow.
We also have a 13-u girl in our area that throws low 60s, but she walks or hits like 3-4 girls an inning.