What Worked Last Night

[lclifton]

MTS, just wanted to say thanks for your posts.

I was trying to say the same thing in another thread regarding Coach Dan's daughter.

You said it better here.

I thought Wellphyt had an excellent point when he said he likes to try and work with a player's current handset but with "close elbows" it's just a lost cause. I agree.

Especially I liked the comment of "Yeah, I had to keep reminding her, Wide A..."
Ingrained stuff is harder to change than we care to admit.

Anyway, nice work.

 

[RayR]

Thanks LC,

Glad you found some value in my posts - your posts always get me thinking about things either differently or more in depth.

MTS, just wanted to say thanks for your posts.

I was trying to say the same thing in another thread regarding Coach Dan's daughter.

You said it better here.

I thought Wellphyt had an excellent point when he said he likes to try and work with a player's current handset but with "close elbows" it's just a lost cause. I agree.

Especially I liked the comment of "Yeah, I had to keep reminding her, Wide A..."
Ingrained stuff is harder to change than we care to admit.

Anyway, nice work.

 

[RayR]

OK - thought I would continue the theme of the thread with thoughts from tonight's lesson.

And I promise I will start adding video when Santa comes and hopefully brings me a present

This girl is 12. Very strong for her age and tries to kill the ball. Bodies the barrel around and the swing results in a chop swing - hits almost everything on the ground.

We, of course, have worked on swing plane drills. Getting the front elbow on plane - all the basic pre lim drills I do with the hitters. Elvis move to get the swing started, etc. No matter what - in front toss action everything regardless of location was hit on the ground or popped if the pitch was too up in the zone.

Fortunately, the owner of the facility was around and offered to front toss so I could work with this hitter close up.

She was flattening the barrel with a high hand set and driving the hands as she was pulling off. To try and fix this I made her get better barrel angle and to make sure she was doing it every pitch I had her tap her helmet with her bat in a specific location before every pitch - this forced her to drop her hands a bit to get the correct angle. This also forced the front wrist to be cocked more.

The other thing I did was grab the barrel and had her pull it out of my hands using her arms only. I would do this between pitches if I saw the barrel flatten before launch - I would make her do it 3 times and would hold the bat tighter after each pull. The action is similar to the old Manny clip that shows him pulling a weight stack behind him. I told her to think fast hands to pull the bat out of my hands

She started hitting almost every ball either on a line or in the air (outfield shots - back of the cage type hits). I ended the lesson by jotting down the swing thoughts (tap the helmet and pull the barrel out of my hands) so she can hopefully self correct if she starts hitting too many ground balls. I also printed out some pictures I have of college hitters at contact showing the bat angle and alignment of the front elbow, hands and bat - like the two below - and telling her how she starts dictates the finish.

So, tonight instead of saying "make a wide A" a thousand times - I said, "fast hands, pull the bat out of my hands and tap the helmet."

Maybe this will help someone - it definitely helps me flesh out what worked and didn't work...