| SOFTBALL TIPS |
|
|
|
| SITE STUFF |
|
|
|
|
ARCHIVES
|
| • |
June 26, 2005 |
| • |
July 03, 2005 |
| • |
July 10, 2005 |
| • |
July 17, 2005 |
| • |
July 24, 2005 |
| • |
July 31, 2005 |
| • |
August 07, 2005 |
| • |
August 14, 2005 |
| • |
August 21, 2005 |
| • |
August 28, 2005 |
| • |
September 11, 2005 |
| • |
October 02, 2005 |
| • |
October 09, 2005 |
| • |
October 23, 2005 |
| • |
October 30, 2005 |
| • |
November 06, 2005 |
| • |
November 13, 2005 |
| • |
December 04, 2005 |
| • |
December 18, 2005 |
| • |
December 25, 2005 |
| • |
January 08, 2006 |
| • |
January 15, 2006 |
| • |
January 29, 2006 |
| • |
February 05, 2006 |
| • |
February 12, 2006 |
| • |
February 19, 2006 |
| • |
February 26, 2006 |
| • |
March 05, 2006 |
| • |
March 12, 2006 |
| • |
March 19, 2006 |
| • |
March 26, 2006 |
| • |
April 02, 2006 |
| • |
April 09, 2006 |
| • |
April 16, 2006 |
| • |
April 23, 2006 |
| • |
April 30, 2006 |
| • |
May 07, 2006 |
| • |
May 14, 2006 |
| • |
May 21, 2006 |
| • |
May 28, 2006 |
| • |
June 04, 2006 |
| • |
June 11, 2006 |
| • |
June 18, 2006 |
| • |
June 25, 2006 |
| • |
July 09, 2006 |
| • |
July 16, 2006 |
| • |
July 23, 2006 |
| • |
July 30, 2006 |
| • |
August 13, 2006 |
| • |
August 20, 2006 |
| • |
September 03, 2006 |
| • |
September 10, 2006 |
| • |
September 17, 2006 |
| • |
September 24, 2006 |
| • |
October 01, 2006 |
| • |
October 08, 2006 |
| • |
October 15, 2006 |
| • |
October 22, 2006 |
| • |
November 12, 2006 |
| • |
November 26, 2006 |
| • |
December 31, 2006 |
| • |
January 14, 2007 |
| • |
January 21, 2007 |
| • |
January 28, 2007 |
| • |
February 04, 2007 |
| • |
February 11, 2007 |
| • |
February 18, 2007 |
| • |
February 25, 2007 |
| • |
March 04, 2007 |
| • |
March 11, 2007 |
| • |
March 18, 2007 |
| • |
April 01, 2007 |
| • |
April 08, 2007 |
| • |
April 15, 2007 |
| • |
April 22, 2007 |
| • |
April 29, 2007 |
| • |
May 06, 2007 |
| • |
May 13, 2007 |
| • |
May 20, 2007 |
| • |
May 27, 2007 |
| • |
June 03, 2007 |
| • |
June 10, 2007 |
| • |
June 17, 2007 |
| • |
June 24, 2007 |
| • |
July 01, 2007 |
| • |
July 22, 2007 |
| • |
July 29, 2007 |
| • |
August 12, 2007 |
| • |
August 19, 2007 |
| • |
September 02, 2007 |
| • |
September 16, 2007 |
| • |
September 30, 2007 |
| • |
October 07, 2007 |
| • |
October 14, 2007 |
| • |
October 21, 2007 |
| • |
November 04, 2007 |
| • |
November 18, 2007 |
| • |
November 25, 2007 |
| • |
December 02, 2007 |
| • |
December 09, 2007 |
| • |
December 16, 2007 |
| • |
January 13, 2008 |
| • |
February 17, 2008 |
| • |
February 24, 2008 |
| • |
March 02, 2008 |
| • |
March 09, 2008 |
| • |
March 30, 2008 |
| • |
April 06, 2008 |
| • |
April 13, 2008 |
| • |
April 20, 2008 |
| • |
April 27, 2008 |
| • |
May 04, 2008 |
| • |
May 11, 2008 |
| • |
May 18, 2008 |
| • |
May 25, 2008 |
| • |
June 01, 2008 |
| • |
June 15, 2008 |
| • |
June 22, 2008 |
| • |
June 29, 2008 |
| • |
July 06, 2008 |
| • |
July 13, 2008 |
| • |
July 20, 2008 |
| • |
August 03, 2008 |
| • |
August 10, 2008 |
| • |
August 17, 2008 |
| • |
August 24, 2008 |
| • |
August 31, 2008 |
| • |
September 07, 2008 |
| • |
September 14, 2008 |
| • |
September 21, 2008 |
| • |
September 28, 2008 |
| • |
October 05, 2008 |
| • |
October 12, 2008 |
| • |
October 19, 2008 |
| • |
October 26, 2008 |
| • |
November 02, 2008 |
| • |
November 09, 2008 |
| • |
November 16, 2008 |
| • |
November 30, 2008 |
| • |
December 07, 2008 |
| • |
December 21, 2008 |
| • |
December 28, 2008 |
| • |
February 15, 2009 |
| • |
February 22, 2009 |
| • |
April 12, 2009 |
| • |
April 19, 2009 |
| • |
April 26, 2009 |
| • |
May 03, 2009 |
| • |
May 10, 2009 |
| • |
May 17, 2009 |
| • |
May 24, 2009 |
| • |
May 31, 2009 |
| • |
June 07, 2009 |
| • |
June 14, 2009 |
| • |
June 21, 2009 |
| • |
July 05, 2009 |
| • |
July 12, 2009 |
| • |
July 19, 2009 |
| • |
August 02, 2009 |
| • |
August 30, 2009 |
| • |
September 06, 2009 |
| • |
September 20, 2009 |
| • |
October 04, 2009 |
| • |
October 11, 2009 |
| • |
October 18, 2009 |
| • |
November 08, 2009 |
| • |
November 15, 2009 |
| • |
November 22, 2009 |
| • |
November 29, 2009 |
| • |
December 27, 2009 |
| • |
January 03, 2010 |
| • |
January 10, 2010 |
| • |
January 17, 2010 |
| • |
January 24, 2010 |
| • |
January 31, 2010 |
|
|
| SOFTBALL LINKS |
|
|
|
Hare Of The Tortoise Who Nipped Me
by Dave
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Softball is life. Girls fastpitch softball is a long-duration sport. There's plenty of quick twitching and sprinting but, as my wife frequently reminds me, softball is a marathon, not a sprint.
Jeff wrote in for advice about how to bring his daughters up in the sport. He was asking about how to teach an 8 year-old and her 5 year-old sister the strike zone - how to swing at mostly strikes. His older daughter is currently in a slowpitch-coach-pitched league but next year she'll enter 10U fastpitch, mostly-kid-pitched ball. She swings the bat pretty well but his concerns involve the transition from arc ball to flatter, faster pitches.
He is also concerned because his older daughter is not very discerning at the plate. She "refuses to lay off pitches at all." As he said, "for the life of me, I cannot remember how I learned the strike zone (when to swing and when to take) when I was a kid. He thinks perhaps there is a way to teach her the strike zone and he wonders if putting her into a pitching machine will help her to adjust to the faster, flatter pitching.
I told Jeff to relax. I'm not saying that he is unusually tense right now. I'm not saying that he should "take a pill and chill." I am saying that if he thinks he has serious questions now, just wait. I am saying that he is going to get very tense before much longer! So relax now or prepare to get ever more tense!
The basic advice I have for anyone who has a child, or several of them, just now beginning to play baseball or softball, is to relax and have fun. Don't sprint to the point where your kid is some sort of 10U wunderkind. Sprinting leaves you short of breath and in no condition to think clearly.
If your child is starting into softball, just make sure it is fun, tons of fun. Practice with her all the time, all the time she wants to practice. She will eventually come to the point at which she wants to grab you anytime you are available to go out into the yard and play catch. In the purest sense, that is really what baseball and softball are all about. They are about a kid wanting to get their parents' attention for a half hour game of catch.
Let me put it this way. I am almost 50. My father passed away over 3 decades ago. Right now I can picture him in his grass-stained, cruddy shorts, with nobby knees, squatting down to catch my pitching in the cul-de-sac. That didn't happen often. My dad was always working. The number of times he caught me is probably something I can count on my fingers without resorting to my toes. But I can clearly picture it in my mind.
The other day my oldest, my wife and I were at some fields where my youngest's team was practicing. We brought our equipment and my wife hit grounders to my oldest while I took throws and gave instruction to her at all the infield positions. This was a very enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. And my wife and I will eventually recover from our injuries.
My fondest hope is that my daughters will grow up into the kind of parents who will want to spend great quality (as well as quantity) time with their kids. We will each pass the torch onto the next generation to really care about each other and have fun together.
I also hope my kids grow up to excel at the sport. But my reasons for wanting that have more to do with their development as people than they do anything to do with scholarships or getting their names in the paper during high school. I want them to look back at the time they spent in softball, the time they spent with us, and remember that they persevered and got better at a game they loved.
I completely get the line of thinking which Jeff exhibited via his questions. I just think that if you put fun first, the rest of it will fall into place. Yes, of course, there will be times when the lessons about hardwork and achieving your goals will be more important than "fun." But fun will never lose all its importance and before you can love something, you have to like it.
Right now, at 8, the like is more important than anything else.
As far as specific guidance for teaching the strike zone, I think I have some wisdom to share. First off, Jeff doesn't remember how he learned the strike zone. Neither do I. Do you?
My guess is none of us really remembers how we learned the strike zone because it didn't happen in a single moment of revelation. We learned the strike zone over a long period of experiences. We swung at a ball over our heads which we could not possibly hit. We were slightly embarrassed, more so when we heard the crowd laugh or act weird about our swing. Our parents complained to us. We failed, we learned, we got better.
To introduce the concept of a strike zone, I suggested to Jeff that he try to get his daughter out to watch some game involving older kids. Buy her an ice cream. Sit and watch at least a half hour of some game. Be by yourselves, together. Then when some kid takes an outside pitch, poke your daughter. Tickle her. Then say, "hey, why didn't that girl swing at that pitch?" See how she responds. Most likely, she'll giggle and say, "because it wasn't a strike." Ask her to explain what she means. "What do you mean not a strike? What's a strike?" Let her do the teaching.
All you are doing with this is having a great time and getting her to think about the existence of a strike zone and what area constitutes it. Later, like four years later, you can get into all those other concepts like umpires strike zone, the "black," etc. For now, all we want to do is make sure she knows there is a strike zone and that you don't have to swing at pitches you cannot possibly make contact with. You need teach nothing more than that. The rest will come via experiences she has in the game. If she has questions or seems confused about the exact dimensions of the strike zone at some later date, she'll ask you or you can ask her and then teach her.
But, if instead, you write down the rules of the sport on index (flash) cards and you make her memorize the precise dimensions of the zone and then pass daily quizzes on the subject, if you get out and throw her a bunch of pitches and demand that she, rather than swinging at the ball, yell out "ball" or "strike" for hours on end, each and every day, well, great. You will produce a very weird kid who thinks softball is approximately the same thing as piano lessons. That's just what we need in this world.
Jeff noted that he purchased a hit-n-stik which has helped her learn to make consistent contact but worries that he should be using some other tools, devices and drills to improve her hitting.
I would continue to use the hit-n-stik and also get yourself a tee and a net to hit into. I wouldn't worry very much about the trajectory of the ball, either now or in the future. If she loves the game and has fun doing it, those things will come on their own. Just hit the stick, off the tee, and soft toss.
I believe that if you give your daughter a good, short stroke with which to hit, you hold the stick for her, you have her hit off the tee and via short toss, everything else will fall into place. She'll learn the zone and eventually become a selective hitter, etc. If she has fun playing ball, she'll want to figure out all these things and then you can teach her what she already has the desire to learn.
If you want to, you certainly can take her to hit the machines. Heck, that's fun! Why not do that? I would start at the slowest speeds available (25-35) and then move up when she seems to have mastered it. Then, if she fails at the higher speed, go back to the slower one. We don't need to challenge her at this point. We need her to have fun swinging the stick.
You don;t become a great game hitter by hitting off machines. The speed has nothing to do with it. You become a good hitter by having a good swing, building the strength in your arms, torso, legs, etc., and by having lots of game pitch experience.
It fascinates me when people get worked up either because their town or team doesn't have a pitching machine or when it does, their kid takes loads of batting practice, and then can't hit. You do not learn to hit purely off a machine. You have to face real pitching in game situations in order to perfect your hitting. And before you are ready to do that, you have to take lots of swings - stick, tee, soft toss, etc. There is nothing magical about a machine just because it throws about the same speed as a pitcher or because it can throw drops, curves, rises. No matter how good your machine is, it does not have all the quirks that a real pitcher and her windup offer. There is no way to mimick hitting off a real pitcher even with all the elaborate video equipment some places use. If there were, major leagyue baseball players would not rehab in the minors, our Olympic team wouldn't have played all those games before the real games began.
So hit off the machine if you want but don't do it to prep your 8 year-old daughter for flatter, faster pitching. Do it because it is fun.
Too often I think we forget a basic fact. That fact is human beings are made by evolution or our creator, by birth in any event, to have difficulty vectoring slow moving objects. If an object were to enter your field of vision, way off in the distance while moving very slowly, initially we would have trouble following it. If the object were to enter our field of vision while moving quickly, we would have no trouble. That's because human beings are made for the hunt, to be able to follow the fast stuff we want for dinner.
Think of it this way - if I ball up a paper towel and throw it to you, at first you perceive an object moving towards you at, you presume, a certain speed. You reach up your hand to catch it. But the paper towel opens and encounters friction with the air. It slows down. You can't catch it. By contrast, if I whip a ping pong ball at you when you can just barely see it out of the corner of your eye, you turn, perceive it and make the catch cleanly. The ball started fast and continues fast but you made the catch easily.
In baseball and softball, kids have a ton of trouble hitting those first few years because the ball is so slow. They actually do better when it starts coming faster. Even really good hitters have trouble with the slow stuff, with movement or not.
Several years ago there was a study about this. I think I referenced it at the time. But the scientists determined that humans had an optimum speed at which they easily vectored moving objects. 25 mph was too slow. 50 was easier.
So to all you parents whose kids are playing 6U, 8U, 10U rec or travel ball, if they aren't hitting very well, it is not time to take drastic measures or quit the sport altogether. Instead, pick up the fun quotient. practice but have fun doing it. Take lots of swings but don't get stressed out. If a kid has lots of fun swinging at balls, she'll figure it out. She'll learn the zone because she wants something to hit, because she knows she can't succeed swinging at balls out of the zone, and because she doesn't want to end her at-bats with called strike threes.
I've said this many times before and I'll say it many times more in the future. The softball scrap heaps are full of kids who were fantastic at 10 but who didn't get it, didn't have fun at the game. Their parents were sure they would be the next Jennie Finch because they were just so gifted naturally and because they could really hit the ball at 8, 9, 10. But the kid didn't like the game and learn to love it enough to want to go out there and face the 60 mph pitchers. Just keep on keeping on. Just have fun and everything else will fall into place.Labels: hitting, parenting
 
|
|
|
