Michelle Granger Olympic pitcher and Coach talks pitching.

[RADcatcher]

Michelle sharing specifics on the journey to becoming a pitcher.
What she values as important and what she found helped her along the way. Enjoy

 

[PharmerBrown]

70 in junior high. Come on...
For those that say 70 is the new 60, nope, 60 is the old 70.

 

[RADcatcher]

For those that say 70 is the new 60, nope, 60 is the old 70.

That's an interesting comment can you add detail? not sure I'm getting the full gist of that?

 

[PharmerBrown]

That's an interesting comment can you add detail? not sure I'm getting the full gist of that?

That was "tongue in cheek". She said she probably hit 70 in junior high, which is unheard of today.
A lot of people make the comment "70 is the new 60". With the increased training, more friendly pitching rules, and how big these kids get, it makes sense.

 

[RADcatcher]

That was "tongue in cheek". She said she probably hit 70 in junior high, which is unheard of today.
A lot of people make the comment "70 is the new 60". With the increased training, more friendly pitching rules, and how big these kids get, it makes sense.

Thought it was tongue and cheek but thought to ask .

I didn't meet her until she started High School. But she was already playing in the oldest tb division befor then and her phenomenal'ness was already making its presents known.

At a scheduled presentation of her pitching they had several timing devices on her. While catching her, highest speed (and I saw the radar gun) was 72 miles an hour. She was still in high school.
( played against her before I met her though. Teams that were unaware of what was going to fly at them in the box, there were some players that would literally be shaking. Definitely a standout player when travel softball as we know it was still within its first 10 years.)
Oh yeah... we didn't wear batting helmets back then. So there's that.

 

[Shawn]

Is there any video of Granger pitching?

I have a part of her pitching. To me it looked like a stepping style. Just hearing her explain the pitching like rotating the back foot, tells me she is teaching the stepping style and it looks like her student was doing a version with the gate opening/closing. Not finished with the video yet, just the start already tells me what I needed to know.

It’s information like that where people try to apply to a more driving style, It can be very destructive, unless you reset the back foot.

 

[Shawn]

I searched and searched the vault for Granger. Couldn’t find her. I have it just not sure where.

 

[Hillhouse]

The first time I saw Michelle pitch was at the 1993 Olympic Festival in San Antonio. That tournament had all the top players and pitchers: Lisa Fernandez, 2 Time Olympic Gold Medalist Michele Smith, etc. were all there. Remember, this is when they started the run up to the 1996 Olympics, so it was a "who's who" of players on the women's side. All of that said, the men's and women's games were played at the same complex and I'd get to see some of the games before or after my own games. From what I saw, Granger was a notch above the rest. She appeared to have more velocity and movement than anyone else that I saw. Now, I am the world's worst at seeing a pitcher and being able to tell how fast they're throwing, I truly have no clue without a radar gun. But, I'm skeptical of the 70mph claim too. It seems unlikely to me that someone was throwing 70 with the more strict pitching rules vs. today's liberal pitching rules where there's still only a handful touching 70. HOWEVER, what I don't know is when did the women's rubber get moved back to 43' from 40? Granger may have thrown a majority of her career from 40' instead of 43'. That may have had an impact on her velocity. Even if college ball had already moved back to 43', that doesn't mean the International rules were the same. They Olympic Festivals were played under the International rules, not NCAA. All I know is she seemed like the best pitcher in that tournament.

History lesson:
*****The US Olympic Committee used to have "Olympic Festivals" which is how many sports would select their National teams for Pan Am games and ISF/WBSC World championships. In Men's softball, obviously not an Olympic sport, up until 1995 they would take the top 4 teams from the previous year's National championship. So teams 1-4 from the 1992 Nationals would be invited to the '93 Festival wherever it was. Eventually this had to change because so many National championships were influenced by foreign players, that this system became unsustainable. All players had to have a US Passport. This changed in 1994 when they made the Festival into invite only for the top 60 players in the country, divided into 4 teams, 15 per team, then play a double round robin followed by the Gold medal game and the bronze medal game. The USOC funded all of this, for every athlete in all the sports paying flights, food, hotels, local transportation, etc. It was very odd that men's softball was a part of the Festivals because of the non-Olympic status. I don't know how many other sports were in the Festival that were not in the Olympics. I think 1995 was the last Olympic Festival, it was in Denver which is brutal because Colorado is the most unfair place to play softball ever. Thankfully, I was injured that year so I didn't attend. Personally, I got to play in 2 Olympic Festivals winning the Bronze in '93 and then Gold in '94 where I was teammates with Mike White for the first time. Anyway, that's everyone's softball history lesson for today.

 

[Rolling Hard]

Can somebody tell me what her favorite drill was. C'drill? She said it was the best drill because it got her timing right.

 

[RADcatcher]

https://vault.si.com/vault/1993/04/12/michele-granger