Sometimes, You’re a Loser by Amanda Scarborough

[FP26]

If you really think that Amanda has joined our site, I have a bridge to sell you....

I'm here! Promise this is me. Wish I could verify myself somehow. Why I made an account was because I saw the amount of traffic that was being generated to my site by this website, so I wanted to see what it was all about. Think it's good to be in the fast pitch discussions and maybe give my opinion her for there! Promise this is me though!! Guess there is no way to REALLY prove it, but I am here!

If it is really you, I would like to thank you for your input. I know that I spend way too much time on this site and my DD rolls her eyes at me constantly because of it. But I showed her your comments last night and the look on her face was priceless!

 

[amandascarborough]

Amanda, if it is really you, then welcome. We have a lot of very good people here who have good intent and want to help their daughters achieve great things. Softball for many of us is a venue that enables those dreams to come true. Someone with your experience could benefit us all. I know many in the softball community who coach at a very high level. It would be neat to hear once in a while from someone who has played at that same level.

One thing about me - I love talking and learning about softball, and I always like to help. It's a huge reason that I started my new site and wanted to start blogging more on it. As well as sharing information on my Facebook page. I know I can help, and I know I have a way of being able to help get the best out of girls, so why not try to share that with others? It totally helps that I was once in their shoes at all different levels - rec, all stars, tournament ball, high school, college. And now coaching at all different levels. Thank you for the welcome! I have nightmares about these sites because I am not one to argue and not about disagreeing with others, but valuing everyone's opinion. So definitely not on here to get into any kind of forum fights, but just to talk about the game I love!

 

[amandascarborough]

If it is really you, I would like to thank you for your input. I know that I spend way too much time on this site and my DD rolls her eyes at me constantly because of it. But I showed her your comments last night and the look on her face was priceless!

So cute! Tell her hi!!!!!

 

[Indiana]

I'm very interested to hear more about college sports readiness. The college readiness problem on the academic side is very common; I hadn't heard about the troubles with athletes. I wonder if it is a similar issue? Teaching to the test but not to learn? (This is absolutely not the teacher's fault) Athletes learning to perfect their skills but not to get out there, get dirty and compete? When/how did the shift occur?

 

[Rocketech1]

I'm here! Promise this is me. Wish I could verify myself somehow. Why I made an account was because I saw the amount of traffic that was being generated to my site by this website, so I wanted to see what it was all about. Think it's good to be in the fast pitch discussions and maybe give my opinion her for there! Promise this is me though!! Guess there is no way to REALLY prove it, but I am here!

Ok.

Just have a couple of questions:

- tell us some words of wisdom from your college pitching experience at Texas A&M?

- your powerdrive slo-mo pitching video clip is one of the best examples I have seen of excellent pitching mechanics. How come your basic pitching videos teach the "hello elbow" mechanics when you don't actually pitch that way yourself?

Thanks in advance for your comments.

 

[amandascarborough]

I'm very interested to hear more about college sports readiness. The college readiness problem on the academic side is very common; I hadn't heard about the troubles with athletes. I wonder if it is a similar issue? Teaching to the test but not to learn? (This is absolutely not the teacher's fault) Athletes learning to perfect their skills but not to get out there, get dirty and compete? When/how did the shift occur?

There's so many different ways I think this could go. I think that early recruiting is having a BIG impact on competitiveness on the field. Being recruited by schools and working hard until you get offered a scholarship is a major motivator as a high school athlete. When I was in high school, it was rare to have a junior verbal commitment to go to a school. It was most common to wait until your senior year to actually verbal and commit to a school. NOW, its become very frequent for a freshman AND even 8th graders to verbal commit.

So think about if someone does not know where they are going to college until their junior year or senior year in high school. That means that every practice, lesson and tournament they are working their tails off, trying to be seen, trying to stick out, trying to COMPETE with other players their age to be seen by a school. VERSUS….a player who is in 9th grade and commits, MIGHT not work as hard through their last years in high school because she already knows where she is going to school. I am not saying at all this is always the case. I am just saying I believe could be a theory!

If your ultimate goal is to play in college, and you verbally commit at 14/15, then there might not be AS MUCH push to be as competitive on the playing field until you get to college. 8th grade, freshman year, sophomore year, junior year - those are prime years to be honing your schools but also honing your drive, preparing yourself to go and COMPETE for a national championship once you get to college or preparing yourself to compete for a starting position.

I also think that another perspective is::: I see in tournament teams, players leave teams quickly where they are not getting playing time. (I get there are other reasons to leave teams other than playing time, I am just saying this is one of the reasons people leave). So instead of pushing harder to COMPETE at a position, there are so many tournament teams now in people's towns and cities, it makes it easier for them to find playing time elsewhere, so they just up and leave to go find a starting spot.

There are many reasons to switch teams, but I think that it's more common for people's gut instinct to be to leave a team where they aren't getting good playing time, instead of teaching to put more effort into practice and hard work to EARN that spot back. You can become SUPER competitive by competing for your position and pushing each other on the field, making each other better. This is not always the case - I know a lot of people talk about favoritism, coach's kids, not getting chances, etc. I am just saying that in my opinion, it is becoming more common to leave a team quickly to find playing time because there are so many choices in teams out there. But to me, getting up and leaving a team, does not build as much on-field competitiveness.

Just a couple of thoughts about why as softball has changed over the past few years when it comes to college recruiting and also by the amount of teams you can find in a city/town near you.

 

[Scorekeeper]

I’m afraid my comment well not intended to be political, was taken that way, and its too bad.

You have to understand that being as old as I am, I’ve made many many mistakes during my life, and the one gave caused me as much grief as any of them, was making statements without carefully choosing my words. And this latest one about inheriting wealth proves it still happens.

In sports especially, many times people make statements like “everybody knows”, when what they really mean is, “a great many people know”. When someone who has a lot of notoriety says something like that, there are a lot of people who take it as being absolutly true, and what that does is closes minds to other possibilities, and there are always other possibilities. So all I’m really doing is trying to encourage people to be as precise as possible in what they say.

If you don’t know, I’m a baseball guy, not a softball guy, but there are a lot of similarities in the two sports. I hear a lot of people say much the same thing about how players at what are considered to be high levels, don’t know how to compete. You seem to have taken the tack that somehow its because they’ve not had enough expected out of them and been given too much with earning it. I certainly know that happens, but I don’t think its that our society has turned into a bunch of takers rather than earners. (Not meant to be political)

I happen to believe its more subtle than that. IMHO, its because of the low baseball “IQ” players have today compared to many years ago. Its not that they aren’t better players with superior baseball skills. Its that they don’t know the game from the ground up the way players did a couple generations back.

I’m a scorekeeper, so I’ll use an example I see all the time. I learned to keep score about the same time I learned how to use a pencil and paper. In order to do that very well, I was forced to read the rule book. Today I see well educated adults who spend literally tens of thousands of dollars on the game, and spend literally thousands of hours watching or otherwise involved, who couldn’t keep score on a bet, and have never even considered reading a rule book, and that causes a whole lot of misunderstanding.

Another huge difference is in how little players today know about things most of us used to do as kids. When’s the last time you saw a bunch of kids choose teams, figger out who should player where, and come up with a lineup? It used to be very common, but now its very rare. Why? Because adults, in trying to make things better, have taken over all the things we used to that gave us a great understanding of what everyone’s job was, not just what a player’s was when s/he got assigned to play center field.

I got in a big “hubbub” with the president of my son’s Little League some years back about this very thing. I finally told him I’d shut up and never say another word about it, if he’d try a simple experiment. The experiment was to have all the 11&12 YOS in our league dropped off at the field for what was called a special practice. There would be all the equipment they’d need, but other than that, nothing. No adults would be there to tell anyone what to do. I opined that the kids would do little more than play catch because they’d had adults doing so many things for them for so long.

He took me up on it, and needless to say it turned out that I was right. After an hour, I went in there and told the kids they needed to pick teams, make lineups, prep the field, do warm-ups, take infield practice, play a game, figger out would act as umpires, keep score, then prep the field again when they were done, then left again.

That 1st time things didn’t go too well, but it lit enough of a spark under quite a few of the kids, so that they asked for another chance to do it the next weekend. That was 1997, and as far as I know it still happens twice a year where the adults clear out and the kids take over. I’m not saying those kids end up being super-players, but they do have a much better understanding of the game, and in doing that have a better understanding of why the games are played.

Sorry to prattle on, but this is something I’ve thought about a whole lot over the years, and when someone tries to blame it on society, I take issue. It isn’t society’s problem, it’s a problem where adults have taken over a kid’s game.

 

[amandascarborough]

Ok.

Just have a couple of questions:

- tell us some words of wisdom from your college pitching experience at Texas A&M?

- your powerdrive slo-mo pitching video clip is one of the best examples I have seen of excellent pitching mechanics. How come your basic pitching videos teach the "hello elbow" mechanics when you don't actually pitch that way yourself?

Thanks in advance for your comments.

Hello!

Please fill me in on what "hello elbow" mechanics are - I don't believe I myself have ever used that terms and I'm wondering what it is, so I can comment to it. Thanks about the compliment of mechanics.

Wisdom from college pitching experience at A&M? -- The ability to mix pitches up. You're facing lineups that make adjustments quickly, and as pitcher you've got to be able to make adjustments quickly back to them. Set them up in different ways the second and third times through the lineup. You can't stick to the same side of the plate or the same pitch IF You want to be able to pitch a complete 7 inning game. In college, I really learned what it meant to pitch and not just throw, where I am thinking about hitting precise spots and giving hitters a different look as the game continues. This was something that may have happened in travel ball without me knowing it before I got to college. But I truly feel like I LEARNED and applied it when I got to college. ALSO --- the ability to throw a good drop ball is huge in college because it keeps the ball down and in the park. Hitters hit mistakes hit and hitters even hit good pitcher's pitches out of the park. SO, mentally you have to learn what was a good pitch that they just hit and what was a bad pitch that they took advantage of. In college - there are going to be both, and the ability to learn from your mistakes and recover quickly from them is so important.

 

[wichita]

I’ve been trying to picture any sports team where players were benched after one error, dropped ball, missed shot, or any other failure, and I just can’t do it. Did that coach also yank players for striking out or not getting a hit? After all, those are failures just like making an error. Sooner or later the entire team is gonna be on the bench, because if the players are allowed to reenter, why take them out in the 1st place other than to embarrass them.

Our HC is criticized by some parents because he’ll pull a player who’s made the same kind of error more than twice in a game, saying he’s not giving the player a chance to learn. I think its safe to say if he or any local coach yanked a player for making one error, there’d be some kind of uproar.

I just thought of a coach at the 12U rec level doing that, and I think there’d be times when as many as 5 players would be pulled in the same inning. On a team with only 12 players, that would mean a lot of forfeits.

No he didn't yank players for striking out or not getting a hit but he did make girls run after games for striking out looking.... if the ball is put into play he didn't. Also I should have added to my OP that when they made an error her would pull a girl and sit them down for an inning or 2 or possibly the whole game....talk to the girl about the error and usually put the girl back in the game depending how the girl responded to what he was talking about. It wasn't to embarass them it was to let them know that it wasnt acceptable to make that error(yes everyone makes errors) but not 2 or 3 in a row or shouldn't on a top travel team....

 

[CoogansBluff]

... but he did make girls run after games for striking out looking....

If he's had a positive impact on you and his teams, then I won't question that he's a good coach, but here are two pet peeves of mine - (1) Using running as punishment, and the use of punishment as a major part of coaching in general, and (2) considering it a punishable offense to strike out looking. How does a kid learn the strike zone and to make those hard but critical pitch-selection decisions if she's simply taught ''swing at anything close''? An advanced hitter learns to take balls that just miss the strike zone w/ 2 strikes. It's a valuable but hard skill to learn, and it's only made harder if the hitter is taught that you cannot risk a third strike under the threat of punishment.