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| SOFTBALL LINKS |
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Crossing The Tees
by Dave
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Forget about dotting the eyes. We'll have to get to that in another piece. Just don't get mixed up and cross the eyes while hitting.
The floors, corners, and closets at the local hitting academy are filled with busted batting tees. That's not necessarily a bad thing but it does tell you one thing - hitting off a tee is not quite as easy as it's supposed to be. The busted tees mostly result from the tee itself being hit by swung bats. Sometimes you want to do that but not when there's a ball atop the thing.
It is almost comical that we put 5 year olds out on the field in tee ball with the idea that hitting off a tee is easy enough for these beginners. That may be true - I've never evaluated it. And if you want real comedy, take your group of hard hitting 14 year olds and put a batting tee in front of them. Let each girl take a single shot at hitting the ball off the tee cleanly (without making contact between the bat and tee) and see how many can do it. Some will completely miss both ball and tee. Some will indeed hit it cleanly. And most will probably hit the tee or both the tee and ball simultaneously. My guess about the number who will hit ball off tee cleanly is about 20 - 25%!
Still, in practice, most coaches set up any number of hitting stations including a couple batting tees and then we go watch over another station. The during the course of drills, we throw a casual glance over at the tee and then avert our eyes because what is going on over there is too ugly to watch for any length of time. We would be better served by providing a lesson for the team in how to hit off a tee but we think this is somehow beneath us. We want to teach the real aspects of hitting real pitching.
All of sport involves development of motor memory. I used to say "muscle memory" but somebody pointed out to me that it was not just the muscles which were involved. Ligaments and tendons play just as crucial a role as muscles in "motor memory." In fact, drilling is probably more interested in training the rubber bands of the machine than it is concerned with the engine and widgets.
The motor memory involved in hitting is as complicated as any other athletic motion. Hitters need to have as many successful repetitions as pitchers and other players before they can settle in and perform a correct motion most of the time. Live batting practice is a wondrous thing but at most it provides the opportunity for about 100 swings in an hour. A pitching machine can do better but after 50 - 100 pitches, you've got to get into the cage and collect the balls. And pitching machine cause some hitting weaknesses which we'll discuss at a later time. The best device known to mankind for developing batting motor memory remains the batting tee.
As I said at the beginning, hitting off a tee ain't quite as simple as it's supposed to be. Doubt me? Try it yourself. I usually avoid doing very much demonstration of using the tee because I generally embarrass myself! But you have to do some sort of instruction so your girls can use the darned thing properly without learning bad habits.
I am fond of saying "let's start at the start." That's the biggest cliche for me. But this time I want you to start at the end. Start instruction of hitting off a tee by beginning with the end of the swing.
It doesn't much matter if your girls are front foot hitters or back foot. It doesn't matter whether they are linear, rotational or some other school of thought. It doesn't matter if they are top or bottom hand dominant. I don't much care if they are top hand release hitters or keep both hands on the bat until they have to slide into second (not suggested). I want you to start with the very end of their swing - right before they run to first - and then work backwards.
To accomplish the task, have a hitter get into her natural stance in front of you with the tee off to the side or in back of you. Now have her take her natural swing and pay attention to the movement of her feet. if you can, mark the floor or ground where she places her feet in her stance and after the swing. If you want to now examine swing mechanics, you are getting way ahead of yourself. Don't bother correcting anything now. All we're discussing is setting up the tee in the right place or, if you prefer, setting up the hitter in the right place relative to the tee.
Once you have the feet placement marked so the movement can be repeated, have the hitter stand in the position she would be in at the end of the swing with the bat resting on her left shoulder and held with the left hand only so she doesn't contort too much. My instruction on this is just for righties because I am naturally right handed. I'm sure you're quite capable of adapting this to lefties on your own.
Next, have the hitter take the bat off her shoulder and point it out towards left where she would be most of the way through her follow through. Now put the right hand on the bat too. Have the hitter bring the bat from this extended position back very slowly into her natural trigger position. Repeat the process until you determine the sweet point of her swing - the point at which she generates the most power. That's where you want to place the tee - right at the sweet point of the swing in terms of all planes.
As an aside, if you've got a true slap hitter, this process can be more complicated. You'll probably have a devil of a time marking the ground properly but with slap hitters this part of the process is even more important. You don't want a slap hitter to develop bad or unusable habits because the tee is in the wrong place. Take your time and exercise as much patience as you possibly can muster. And make sure you put the tee at the right contact point.
So, you might say something along the lines of we don't want our girls to get used to hitting only perfect pitches or this is unrealistic or we want the girls to adjust to the ball not vice versa. Relax. We're just talking about the fundamentals of tee hitting right now. There will be time later, though not today, to discuss how to creatively use the tee to teach hitting balls pitched in different locations.
So you've got your hitter in front of you. You've marked the ground for her stance and the place her feet move to as she swings. You've examined the actual swing to determine the best point of contact. And now you've set the tee in the position where she makes the best contact. Presumably she is hitting into a net or against some kind of fence or object so as to stop the ball without risking it coming back into her face or body. You're pretty much done and you can let her rip now. And that's about all I wanted to cover in this piece. But I will add just a few more words on the subject of tee hitting.
If you don't take this approach of teaching girls how to hit off a tee, what happens is they set themselves up without any reference to the right contact point and their natural stance, stride and swing. The results of this are they get frustrated, or worse, they adjust their swing to make the best contact they can while unlearning everything they learned under the tutelage of a qualified batting coach during those three years of private lessons.
Hitters may change the position of their heads so they can see the ball on the tee after missing it a few times. They may draw the bat back too far as an adjustment of their swing to make contact at a better point. They don't swing naturally or develop a hitch in order to do the drill better. There are any number of adjustments a girl might make to be successful at the tee and these are almost always bad adjustments which will ruin their swings. That's why you adjust the tee to a proper location. And like anything else, once your girls learn how to adjust the location of the tee rather than making adjustments to their swings, everyone will be better off.
Muscle memory is a touchy thing. mess around with it and you're asking for trouble. I once worked with a pretty good hitter on my team and we did a lot of soft toss. After a few iterations, I would instruct team members to take over the toss duty and I would move to another station in the practice. Well, the girls didn't always get the idea of how to do the toss. They threw the balls all over the place and left it up to the hitters to adapt. It got so that hitting soft toss was like hitting live pitching - you never knew what the next pitch was going to look like. So my pretty good hitter knew that if she wanted to make contact, she was going to have to get a good look at the pitch. That meant she would have to get her eyes facing right in front of her instead of where a real pitcher would be. She would line up in her natural stance, facing the pitcher, and then when she pulled her hands back into trigger position, she would pull back further than she normally would because that gave her a better view of the soft tosser! She did this unbeknownst to me for quite some time. Then, during a game, she struck out and somebody said, "why does she cock her hands so far back - that can't be helpful." And they were right. This girl was pulling her hands back a full six inches further than she used to because she had learned to do that in soft toss batting practice! That was a travesty which took months to unlearn. The moral of the story is you need to always be aware of what is going on in your drills and when you do drills involving motor memory, you just cannot be lax about it.
Along the same lines as my example of what can happen when you don't properly supervise motor memory drills, the eye position is also a concern when hitting off the tee. When hitting off the tee, girls want to have a look at what they are swinging at. The tee, unlike a real pitcher, is placed in front of them rather than over the left shoulder. So you need to accommodate this natural tendency. The way to approach the tee is to imagine a pitcher out there in the circle. Assume the stance. Now imagine a slow motion pitch (not a slow pitch but one which has bent time and is coming in at slow-motion) and watch it as it approaches the launch point. You follow it all the way until it reaches the position where the tee is. And you swing. So a girl hitting off the tee starts facing the pitcher and then slowly watches as the ball comes in until her eyes meet up with the ball placed on the top of the tee and then swings away. What you cannot tolerate is a hitter changing their stance during tee drills.
Finally, as I said, I understand your concerns about girls getting used to hitting pitches only right down the center of the plate right at their best hitting location. You;re going to want to move the tee position around and get your hitters used to hitting low pitches and high ones, inside and out. Fine. But please remember that the purpose of the tee is NOT to mimic live pitching. It doesn't replace live batting practice any more than a pitching machine does. The object of hitting off a tee is perfecting swing mechanics and enhancing muscle memory for the purpose of developing a better, consistent swing. You can move the tee around but you need to realize that it's principal benefit is the number of repetitions it provides in a very short period of time. Don't constantly adjust the thing. If you want to work on inside pitches, do it. If you want your team to hit low pitches, go ahead. Just do one thing at a time and get the benefits of a lot of repetition for ONE thing. I'll even go so far as to suggest that you stick with a single position for each day in which you use it. There isn't much point to working 10 swings on the outside, 10 on the inside, 10 high, 10 low. Instead, work 50 or 100 at each position on different days.
I do suggest you use the hitting tee. It's maybe the best motor memory device in this sport. But use it wisely and make sure it isn't the cause of bad habits. Take the time to try this method for adjusting the hitter to the tee yourself and then teach your team to use it. Then make sure they are doing it properly every time.Labels: batting practice
 
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