How common is it for a 12 year old to pitch well from her first time

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JAD

Feb 20, 2012
8,231
38
Georgia
My daughter is 12U. You are referring to "long toss". I've seen it done. I actually watched a profession pitcher long toss. My daughter does not do it. We follow what her pitching coach tells us to do, and long toss is not part of that. I could be b/c her age, not sure. Next lesson I will have to ask the coach about it. He has some (as in multiple) of the best kids in the country so I figure he knows what he is doing.

Long toss is a great way for a pitcher to learn to use her legs and maximize her arm whip. You may want to ask your DD's pitching coach about including it during bucket time, even if she never does it during lessons.
 
Apr 28, 2014
2,316
113
Give her all the support that you can.
If she wants to pitch spend the time with her and let her decide how much she wants to work. As stated above pitching takes a ton of work.. hundreds of hours of dedication. Blood, sweat, tears and sleepless nights. If your DD wants to go for that then hats off to her. Do it.
If you kid has other skills ie" SS or can play CF and can hit my advice would be to steer her in that direction. 12 is a little late to the game but in no way too late. Just need to know the work involved to make it.
One bit of advice.. have hear lean a good change up. That will help her more than any other pitch.
 

Strike2

Allergic to BS
Nov 14, 2014
2,044
113
There are some that are born to pitch, and then there's my kid. We've tried the pitching thing twice with two different pitching coaches. She looks fabulous in a fielding drill, but tell her to pitch one, and you'd think that she never before picked up a softball.

I do know a kid who is a born pitcher...as a 14U, she can throw strikes with velocity with little to no warmup. She was dominate as a 10U, solid as a 12U, but refused to do the work necessary to develop, and now plays 3B exclusively (too slow for OF).
 
May 15, 2016
926
18
Give her all the support that you can.
If she wants to pitch spend the time with her and let her decide how much she wants to work. As stated above pitching takes a ton of work.. hundreds of hours of dedication. Blood, sweat, tears and sleepless nights. If your DD wants to go for that then hats off to her. Do it.
If you kid has other skills ie" SS or can play CF and can hit my advice would be to steer her in that direction. 12 is a little late to the game but in no way too late. Just need to know the work involved to make it.
One bit of advice.. have hear lean a good change up. That will help her more than any other pitch.

Thanks, I am giving as much as I can, and I am letting her set the pace of her practice. I strongly believe motivation to practice has to come from within the athlete, if it doesn't it will never be part of their soul. She dragged me out to practice today, as it was beginning to rain. She kept on saying the rain was going to let up. Luckily, it didn't get too heavy.

She can play third and is the best left fielder on her team, which isn't saying much, but she is not a good hitter. She just does not track the ball to the catcher's mitt, and doesn't keep her head down at contact. But that is a discussion for another time.

DD pitching instructor said she is going teacher her a change up by the end of this month. I didn't expect that to happen so fast.
 

ez_softball

Life at the diamond...
Apr 14, 2017
158
28
Thanks for the video. :cool: To me she looks like a very "green" pitcher but does have some good things going on. The beautiful thing is that I don't see any signs of a "leap" or a "crow-hop" so, to me she's legal. Not sure if you want advice on how to proceed but I'll give you my unsolicited $.02...

I always start from the ground up with my pitchers... so, if I was coaching her you would hear me talking a lot about improving her initial drive drive. From the video it's clear she's trying but she has some work to do to get her lower half optimized. She has what I call sideways drive which causes her to be open too soon and limits her from really getting out and up. I think she'll see significant gains in velocity if you help her improve her initial drive mechanics. Finishing up with the lower half, her backside finish drive is weak and it appears to me to be an anchor.

Upper half looks decent. She has decent lower arm whip at release but there's also a little HE happening. Right now I think she's a hybrid HE/IR pitcher. Try and nudge her towards more IR.

All in all she looks great for someone just starting out... I'm sure others will chime in with more advice... lot's of knowledge on this board.
 
Last edited:
May 15, 2016
926
18
All in all she looks great for someone just starting out.

Thanks!

I am even more green than she is. IR stands for internal rotation, if I have that right, but I don't know what internal rotation is. I don't know what HE stands for, or is. As for drive mechanics, like everything else, I am leaving that to her pitching coach.

I appreciate the encouragement and the advice. I will do some digging on this board to learn more.
 
Sep 29, 2014
2,421
113
Go to the IR in the classroom sticky thread in the pitching forum and take a week or so to digest that and maybe throw in some HillHouse YouTube videos and it should open your eyes a lot on thing you can work on.

Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk
 

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