12yo Maddie

Eric F said:

Maddie's comment to me after we watched her swing clips from last weekend's games..."You're the only person who talks about my back".

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LOL! I get this too from hitters. I take it as a complement

If you can learn to feel the lower back pull back and scap load yourself, and then start to get your hitters to feel it, I feel you've done a very good thing that most female hitters lack/never gain.

You really have to work past a lot of skepticism sometimes when introducing new ideas to hitters and coaches. The best "response" is your hitter starting to blast line drives!

RichK said:

LOL! I get this too from hitters. I take it as a complement

If you can learn to feel the lower back pull back and scap load yourself, and then start to get your hitters to feel it, I feel you've done a very good thing that most female hitters lack/never gain.

You really have to work past a lot of skepticism sometimes when introducing new ideas to hitters and coaches. The best "response" is your hitter starting to blast line drives!

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I can feel it myself. I haven't (yet) been able to translate it in way she can process in her head and incorporate in her swing. I have some new things to throw at her in that department when we get back to working on softball stuff next week.

EDIT: The skepticism increases when the hitter is already blasting line drives with her current mechanics. Add in a healthy dose of daddy-DD resistance, and progress can be really slow some days.

Eric F said:

I can feel it myself. I haven't (yet) been able to translate it in way she can process in her head and incorporate in her swing. I have some new things to throw at her in that department when we get back to working on softball stuff next week.

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I think coil, pull back, scap load (whatever you want to call what happens in the upper back) is really taught well within the stretch and fire drill, done correctly. I know you know the drill wondering if you'd tried working it with Maddie with a goal of feeling coil here, lower back pull back here, upper back load here, tighten all the links, torque the barrel to fire and.........swing!

I think her relative lack of an "active" load within her game swing also limits her ability to learn how to use her back better.....

All things she can learn to feel and use.

BB's comments were always about her back inner thigh. That came from throwing her back knee inward toward her front ankle and, naturally, the resistance to the hip action.

How about connected 'to long' to the rotation of the shoulders:


No reason showing Carlos getting hit but, more of my point on hands connected to shoulders.

Kind of like this:

Not to stir the pot or raise a beat horse from the dead, but I learned a lot about how connection could be overbaked from the old Andre Torres debates

Posey is resisting with his hip and back forcing his leg to drive.

Torres is rotating his hips.

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There's a lot to learn comparing/contrasting these pics I believe.

Eric F said:

EDIT: The skepticism increases when the hitter is already blasting line drives with her current mechanics. Add in a healthy dose of daddy-DD resistance, and progress can be really slow some days.

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Here's the path I'd take: swing looks great Maddie, NOW let's start really leveraging the bigger muscles in your body to get an extra 20 feet and start really putting the ball over the fence? Here's a few drills we're going to work through to get your there. Here's some pics of hitters, MLB and college, doing just that. Are you interested in becoming a true BEAST?

What kid would say no lol

Put the brake peddle foot on the swing...Point the front foot to pitcher, as a easily understood directive. (No feel)

Think of it as what is going to happen when she plays above her raising. She'll get herself into a position where no one wants to hear us...(you & DFP members) She'll need to survive all kinds of directives... good or bad. Like making adjustments to bad pitches... adjustments to wrong coaches is on all are DD's horizons. Her challenge is to Change.

I'm dead center of that w/ my DD. She can hit good in games, but once they getting them in the warm-up stations... before every game... the changes is constantly coming

I seen that with ULL... as it turns out the changing was improvement.... I can see him picking only Changers.

Out of curiosity, I went to a buddy's website where I could read about bat exit speeds. From that site was a link to a MLB site that has video of MLB Hitters and their bat exit speeds. I watched a video of Stanton hitting a ball 504' with a bat exit speed of 119.7. He'll never be any good. LOL

RichK said:

Here's the path I'd take: swing looks great Maddie, NOW let's start really leveraging the bigger muscles in your body to get an extra 20 feet and start really putting the ball over the fence? Here's a few drills we're going to work through to get your there. Here's some pics of hitters, MLB and college, doing just that. Are you interested in becoming a true BEAST?

What kid would say no lol

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My kid...who has heard/read/seen very similar things from me since shortly after I became a DFP member.

I'm not resisting the information. I just know my kid, our journey, and how our process works. We will get there.