Side Crunching/Leaning Sideways while Pitching (Posture)

[Lreeve]

My 11year old tends to crunch to one side when she pitches. We have been working on keeping her shoulders from over rotating, but wondering if this is maybe an issue with a different cause besides just over rotating her shoulders. Is something else causing her to lean in too much. She does lean into her shoulder pretty hard overall, but clearly too much in some of these pitches resulting in a bad pitch. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Note: Pitching with a soft training ball, we were short on catchers so a pitcher is standing in. Excuse the noise wrestling and baseball were also practicing in the gym.

 

[Northball]

One thing I teach my beginning pitchers is the importance of moving in a balanced manner. I use a flying bird as an analogy. Both wings go up together, both wings go down together. If they don't work together, it is out of balance and cannot fly. Just in your clip I see glove hand pulling down while throwing arm is in that 11:00-9:00 range. May not be the only thing, but it is contributing to favoring to one side.
I would also recommend if you have a full length/really good sized mirror at home, have her pitch a balled up sock directly into it so she can see her lean in real time.

 

[mmeece]

Clearly there is a mechanical issue, but I've seen these types of posture issues before and it is often due to their mindset. Younger girls are often too focused on throwing the ball forwards rather than pulling the ball down. There seems to be a bit of a "syncing" issue with her arms. She needs to focus on pulling both arms into her body at the same time. They should really be just about a mirror image of each other.

Another good visualization I was given is to imagine that her body from the hips up is comprised of 3 boxes stacked on top of each other and that they should stay that way throughout the delivery. If she leans, a box falls off.

 

[ArmWhip]

Does she do any sling shot/K-position as a warmup? It might be easier to address the issue there rather than in her full motion. It almost looks like she's throwing a rollover curve ball. So another idea is to have try to put top spin on the ball by keeping her hand behind the ball going into release and having the ball roll off her finger tips.

 

[tomorrow]

From the way the drag leg slides to the plant leg it looks like the hips are still open. She gets heel-to-heel at the end of the pitch. The drag knee does not seem to help rotate the hips toward the catcher during her front-side resistance.

Hard to tell from the video.

 

[jdint]

My DD did this also (or something similar). It took quite awhile to fix, and honestly she still keeps her throwing side shoulder higher than most.

As ArmWhip suggested we did a lot of work from the K position and focused on not leaning and keeping her throwing shoulder down. We also played a lot of underhand catch with her focusing on the same things and staying loose and relaxed.

Like I said, this was a slow fix for us, but hang in there. I used to show DD videos of Lisa Fernandez pitching when she was getting discouraged.