Weight Back and Balanced Pitching Drill by Hal Skinner
As a pitcher, it's important to understand how important it is to start your pitch off in a balanced pitching stance. For the smoothest motions, you must also maintain that same balance through the entire course of your motions when you pitch.
Here is a pitching drill that gives you a feeling of balance during your pitching motions, the feeling of a slight lean forward at the start and of having the weight back at the end of the motions.
How to do the drill
Part One
Stand on the rubber and bend your stride knee to 90 degrees, like a flamingo.
Throw three pitches like that balancing on your pivot foot only while keeping your balance.
Don't let your foot come down until the catcher catches the ball.
Part Two
Now, take an empty coffee can and set it upside down about 1 foot directly in front of your stride foot. Place your foot against the top edge of the can, lean SLIGHTLY forward, and throw three pitches from that position while keeping your balance.
Here's a philosophy on being a successful pitcher as shared by legendary pitcher and instructor Coach Hal Skinner in his bookSneaky Softball Pitching.
The best and most widely respected pitchers are those who pitch the smartest games.
They don’t have to throw the quickest fastball, or have a large number of different pitches to choose from, or even have great ball movement on those pitches. The best pitchers are the unpredictable pitchers. The unpredictable pitchers are the smart pitchers!
Years ago, my goal was to become a smart pitcher; to outsmart the batters, the teams I faced. Every good pitcher needs a bit of an ego when it comes to their pitching. I am no exception to this rule.
My pitching philosophy is different from any other I’ve encountered in the sport. Most do not even agree with me. But my philosophy is simple: a pitcher must be smarter at pitching than the batter is at hitting…
One of the most powerful traits a softball player can have is the ability to bounce back from mistakes, overcome obstacles, and keep pushing through adversity. Of course, this is often easier said than done. How do you bounce back when you just cost your team a run on defense or stranded the tying run in scoring position after you struck out looking with two outs?
While there are various sports psychology tips and tricks for improving your mental game, here are 3 simple tips you can start using today to help you bounce back from your softball mistakes:
Accept: Accept that you made a mistake and that you're upset about it. If you feel mad, frustrated, embarrassed, sad, upset or any other negative emotion because you messed up, that's OK! It just means your human and means you care about what happens on the field. Don't fight that or beat yourself up for feeling that way. Allow it for a moment, accept and acknowledge that you felt it, then side it aside for the rest of the game. There will be lots of time to evaluate it further later. Right now, you need to reset your mind and body for the next play!
My 4-year-old grand-daughter put her arms around me, kissed me goodnight and then said, “Your hair smells like beach house.”
One sniff of my newly washed hair took her mind to memories of our family vacation.
Her train of thought is one that can take you to greatness in sports, with a technique called anchoring.
It’s based on a principle so simple that even a 4-year-old noticed it. As mammals, we are wired to associate physical sensations with emotions. For instance, you probably have a song that reminds you of some person, place or thing. Tasting a certain food may bring to mind some memory, like grandma’s kitchen. To this day, the smell of the sun hitting a telephone pole on a warm day takes me back to my childhood, when we spent our summers sitting around a big wooden picnic table.
You can use this principle to lock in all the good things you do in sports. All you must do is perform some action every time you do something you would like to repeat.
There is an old parenting saying that goes "The days are long but the years are short." With the high school and travel seasons coming up in many areas right now, fastpitch parents would do well to heed that advice.
It wasn't long ago that some of us were in your shoes. We were madly rushing from practice to game, or game to game, or lessons to practice or some other combination, wondering how we were ever going to do it all and keep up our houses and lawns and all that too.
Rest assured, however, that one day it will end. There won't be anymore lessons, or practices, or games to get to. There won't be any injuries to nurse or feelings to massage. And you may just find yourself wishing you had one more day of hot, sweaty tournament play to enjoy.
The time goes fast. It really does. And between running from here to there like a crazy person and being disappointed by an unexpected loss, sometimes it gets easy to lose your perspective. Don't let that happen.
Most softball players and coaches dedicate quite of bit of time to softball each week. In fact, you may even fall into the category of spending a "ton" of time on softball when you're in season. However, it's surprising how often players or coaches train, compete, and spend hours of their time on this game with only the vague purpose of having fun or wanting to "get better." It almost boggles my mind how much time and energy some commit to softball without really giving much thought to exactly what they want to accomplish this season or even over the course of the next 2-3 seasons.
Are you one of those people? Think about it. If I asked you right now to tell me where you want to be softball-wise at the end of this season, what would you tell me? How specific would your answer be? Do you even know what your first and biggest goal would be? If you only accomplished ONE thing, what would you want it to be? Is it a hitting goal or a defensive goal? Is it a speed and agility goal or softball skills goal? Is it more of a personal goal or one for the team you're on?
Last year just for fun I downloaded a book onto my old smartphone that had nothing to do with fastpitch softball. While I quickly discovered that reading a book on a smartphone is not an easy task for someone of my age, the book itself was quite interesting.
It was called "What's the Worst That Could Happen?" and its purpose was to give people the tools they need to decide if global warming is real and what (if anything) should be done about it. What the author, a fifth grade science teacher, was trying to do was give readers the tools to make their own decisions.
In the very lengthy discussion leading into the tools, the author talked about something called "confirmation bias." The basic principle of confirmation bias is that when you are trying to prove a point, you will look for evidence that proves your point and ignore evidence that goes against it.
Sound familiar? It's something most of us do naturally and sub-consciously. We have certain beliefs about the game of fastpitch softball and the skills required to play it, and we don't want anyone telling us different. So if someone challenges us, we immediately look for "evidence" to support our position, usually in the form of video.
Anyone who has played Pictionary, Charades or other games where one person gives clues to others knows how frustrating it can be. (Particularly if your partner is your significant other, but that's a story for another day.)
You draw what you think is an accurate and brilliant representation of the concept you're trying to get across. And then all you get are blank stares and confused looks from your partners.
As time ticks away you frantically gesture and point at your drawing, which elicits no more recognition from your partners than it did originally. Finally the buzzer sounds and you're spent, with nothing to show for your efforts.
Sound familiar? That's the experience fastpitch softball coaches often have when working with their players. You explain a concept the way you always have, in a way that makes perfect sense to you and that has worked before. Yet it's met with blank stares, and more importantly it doesn't make the change you want to make in the player.
This is one of the great challenges in coaching. Because it doesn't matter how much you know, only how much you can convey to your players.
Hard to believe that it wasn’t so long ago that fastpitch softball was a game played by kids for the – wait for it – fun of it. Sure, there were a few adults around regularly in the form of coaches and umpires, and parents would regularly come out to see them play if they weren’t working. But it wasn’t life-and-death, with every player’s future prospects for a good education apparently hanging on the result of every pitch.
All that seems like some sort of pastoral dream, like a Norman Rockwell painting of America as we always imagined it should be. Today parents seem to be way too wrapped up in their children’s athletic endeavors.
Some are unabashed boosters/braggarts for their kids. You never want to be cornered by them lest they start to regale you with tales of Lindsay’s might line drive, or the diving catch Erin made in center field, or the 13 Ks Alice racked up in her last appearance in the circle. Still, they’re relatively harmless.
How to do the drill
