She Just Peaked at an Early Age

If you have followed softball for long, you know the familiar story. Many of the pitchers who were burning it up in 12-U have fallen by the wayside. We often hear people talk about a pitcher who seemed to have all of the gifts early in her career, but came to realize she didn’t have the skills to take it to college.

Sadly, many of these kids worked harder than any of those around them.

The vast majority of students who come to us for the first time fall into that category. They have done the drills, pitched a hundred pitches a day, lifted weights, and worked on spins obsessively. Time is running out and hopes for achieving their dreams are fading quickly.
When they walk into the cage for their first lesson we can’t help but feel badly for them. It only takes a few pitches to see what is holding them back. Most of the time their barriers jump right out at us. How can you get your hips involved if your glove side is out of control? Don’t you see how your glove side is so out of sync it causes you to drive your elbow into your ribs before release, locks that arm and forces the shoulder down, or creates a glove slap that leaves you bruised? The sad thing is that many have actually been taught drills that automatically cause the glove hand and throwing hand to be out of sync. People with good intentions put limits on them.

We often see the crow-hop. Nobody noticed it, or they were only worried about the illegal part, not the fact that the vast majority of kids who do it actually have to stop the arm at the top of the circle to wait for the re-plant. Or the hips get thrown backward, the replanting foot sticks in the ground so that the quad on that leg actually points backward, and our research shows that the majority of these kids suffer stress injuries in the shoulder and elbow because those two weak parts have to compensate for hips that were removed from the equation. We see other terrible habits with the back leg. Did nobody ever try to fix that drag foot which is laying over on the inside and plowing ground?

Those are just a few of the barriers we see. When we ask the kid why her biggest issue was never addressed we get one of two answers. Either somebody pointed it out but couldn’t find a way to fix it, or nobody ever mentioned it and they were totally unaware of its negative effects.

We often see kids whose first move is to tighten the traps, lifting the shoulder during the circle, which causes that shoulder to rotate to the rear as the ball comes down and the arm gets stuck behind the hip. Because she to pitch around the hip a great deal of speed is lost, ball spin is poor, and if she tries to push through it more quickly the likely result is injury.

Amazingly we still see kids who were taught to square the shoulders back to face the catcher. The list of issues this causes is could not be addressed in one article. We see shoulders turn heavily at backswing, gloves coming back too far to either side on backswing, well-meaning people who eliminate the backswing to try to fix issues they don’t understand, or kids who bend the waist incorrectly in an effort to try to fire off the mound. These are great kids who want to succeed, but someone has them putting way too much energy in the wrong places.

Each barrier robs the kid of a speed, makes it difficult to get the body in correct position for certain pitches, and hurts her accuracy. We realize that there are kids who can pitch well despite certain barriers, but there are people who can run faster with a 50-pound backpack than most of us can run in a t-shirt. We want to look for methods that give most kids the greatest chance for success.

I believe it was Albert Einstein who said the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing in the same way and expecting a different result”. I heard a speaker once say, “If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always gotten”. Too many people are practicing the same old ideas that have dominated pitching for the past 25-years and then wondering why nothing new or exciting is happening to them.

Pitchers should not peak. They should develop new skills every week. Make every day an opportunity to identify and remove little barriers, enhance performance, or allow new positive movements to become habit. If she is losing confidence or enthusiasm, something needs to change. If she is doing well but senses there is something left, follow her instincts. Do not let her give up on herself.

She only gets one chance to achieve her dreams. The best thing you can do is to help her find an environment where that can happen.