Why Change Something if it is Working?

A couple of years ago we received a question from a parent in another state. Her young daughter had been taught something harmful in her release that would be obvious to even the most novice observer. In spite of that, she was very accurate. The mother knew the movement was wrong before contacting us, but was hoping I would say it is okay since she was successful.

This pitcher was just 12.
The answer is simple. At a young age, and against lower level competition, you can get by with a lot of things that will cost you dearly as the competition matures and gets stronger. If the kid is just enjoying rec ball for a year or two and has no plans to play softball long-term, perhaps it wouldn’t concern me. However, if there is any chance this girl will develop a long-term passion for the game, changes are necessary. I used the following story to answer her question.
A couple of weeks before the lady called I was working in another city. Four of my instructors were there and we had four high school pitchers in one of the sessions. All four had become students with us in the previous ten months and each was from a different state.
Before the session, I asked them to introduce themselves and explain to the others why they were there. The first one explained that, six months earlier, she was throwing slowly, had poor endurance, and had several barriers which kept her from achieving speed and movement. As we removed the barriers, she increased speed very significantly and her moving pitches started baffling hitters. No colleges were interested six months before, but suddenly she was getting a ton of attention.
The next kid had a similar story. She had always been dominant at a young age, but slowly the hitters caught up with her until she was ready to give up on all of her dreams. She had been told that reaching a plateau is normal and she accepted it before stumbling onto us. That soon changed, and she became so powerful that we occasionally used a video of her for other pitchers to study.
The third one explained that her old form was causing constant back and shoulder injuries and she had decided to give up pitching but then someone told her about us. She was a sophomore. She explained that the changes we made eliminated the pain, increased the speed, and she fell in love with pitching again, eventually getting her scholarship.
Finally, the fourth one was a junior, and she told the group something she had never told me. She came to me the first time because she was scheduled for shoulder surgery. Not only were we able to increase her speed dramatically, increase her movement, but her shoulder is now perfectly healthy and the doctors were stunned that the surgery was avoided. She became a top college prospect.
All four kids had been with us for less than 10 months. I told the lady those stories to tell her this. If each of these kids had known about her form problems 5 years ago each could be much further along the path to her dreams. So, if her daughter has goals to play on a higher level, she needs to find the right coach and get her movements corrected immediately.
My goal, with every kid, is to remove the barriers and enhance the skills so that she can be dream big and continue to improve. If I see something in the beginning that will make that progression impossible, it would be very irresponsible for me to let it pass just because it is working for her now.
Yes, being able to hit spots can get you through for a year or two, but hitters on the higher levels train for hundreds of hours every year to hit every location hard. You have to have more… more speed to make them make quick decisions and enough movement to make them regret that quick decision. Because of the problems the lady at the start of this article described to me, her daughter would be totally unable to achieve those objectives, and the longer she waited to make changes the more the bad habits would be ingrained into her motion.
The best time to make sure she reaching her potential may be sooner than you think, way before you realize it may be too late, because if you wait until she becomes frustrated and thinking she “just doesn’t have it”, if it goes that far she is probably right.