pitching vs hitting

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Sep 17, 2009
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I also think this is an excellent post. And I have been around here long enough to appreciate what RichK has to offer. He has a ton of great posts on DFP. However, this excerpt above is my concern. RichK can get the most out of this progression because he understands what he is trying to teach and is able to convey that to the students. I feel the same way about pitching. I agree with colin that the i/r thread is a classic and can be a great starting point for a new pitcher. However, any drill (even an i/r drill) can be done incorrectly. And if the person learning the drill doesn't learn it correctly, it can cause more harm than good, IMO. Our team practices at a facility with 6 inside cages. We typically use three of the cages with our team and there is usually someone else in the other cages. I see some very good hitters that are focused completely on their process. But I see plenty of others that are simply going through the motions or doing drills completely wrong without their coach or parent helping them along. These may be the best drills in the world, but if they are not applied correctly, I seriously doubt these hitters will improve very much.

100% agreed FP26. But most coaches/teams are going to have a hitting day that has drill stations, so I just wanted to share mine and what the drills in my mind try to instill.

The challenge with team work is that you seldom have enough coaches -- or enough coaches that "get it" or honestly even agree with you -- to get the instructional gains we'd all like to get.

So before going through the drill series I described, I'll take one or two FULL two-hour practices walking a team through each drill in detail and a lot of conversation with them about what we're trying to accomplish with each one. At this point I'm also trying to "coach the coaches" some of whom will be skeptical as well.

I'm actually doing exactly that now with our 18U team. We picked up quite a few new players in the fall due to graduations. We had to immediately jump into play our very important fall exposure schedule. So not a ton of time for instruction. We are now on Nov/Dec "break" ...I like to do one weekly "review" session during this time to really go into detail on the mechanics we teach for throwing, infield, outfield and finally hitting.

Then in Jan/Feb before they leave for high school we ramp up and really rep those skills three times a week and we can all reference back to the Nov./Dec. sessions for the goals and concepts we're working on.

That process is how we try to get mechanics instruction done within offseason team practices. I've come to believe that even if a few girls really take to it we've done our job. Not all will. And some will keep going to personal hitting coaches, some of which will be good and some of which will cause problems we'll have to try to work against.
 
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