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Fundamentals Revisited
by Dave
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Earlier today, I was asked by someone to diagnose some problems with hitting. I can't do that. I'm not a great hitting instructor. I know a few things but I am hardly an expert. I'll leave that to the many guys and gals out there who are bona fide professional hitting instructors. My role in all this is really just to provide a little fastpitch entertainment - something to read when you have nothing better to do with your time. More importantly, I view my role as making you really think about some things I believe are important. So that is what I tried to do via e-mail with the fellow asking for help with his daughter's hitting.
The one issue which immediately came to mind in trying to formulate an e-mail to assist this fellow was the issue of fundamentals. I mean fundamentals in general, not the fundamentals of linear, rotational or hybrid hitting mechanics.
I don't want to get any deeper into the hitting style debate. The only thing I have to say now in that debate is rotational is, at its core, Ted Williams hitting. Williams had vision so keen that it has been called mythological - though it was tested at a mere 20/10. He also had long arms, long enough to cover outside pitches which many trained in rotational mechanics struggle with. That's all I have to say.
The general issue of fundamentals is, well, fundamental to participation in any sport. Initially I believe we think of fundamentals in terms of taking some sleepy 8 year old and turning her into someone who can play the game at its most rudimentary levels. But fundamentals are far more important than that.
In most aspects of life, we have true respect for fundamentals. We know that a kid cannot be expected to perform calculus if they don't know algebra or their multiplication tables. We spend loads of time and resources teaching kids to read because we know they cannot understand "War and Peace" without first being able to read and read well. We teach kids so many fundamentals concerning everything they might encounter in life because we know there are steps to learning and living and without the fundamentals, nobody can accomplish anything. We do not look at some 6, 7 or 10 year old and say to ourselves, they are smart kids so we don't need to continue educating them. Yet, often, in athletics, that is exactly what we do.
Think hard for a moment about some kid you knew at some point who was a tremendous 10U or recreational softball hitter, fielder, or pitcher. Maybe her mechanics were a little off. But, gosh darn it, she was successful. She was a natural. I'm not gonna change anything about her approach because she gets the job done. Don't mess with success. I don't want to be the one who changes her and makes her into a worse player.
Coaches and parents are equally guilty of this mistake in thinking. We work with mechanics but when we encounter someone who succeeds despite poor mechanics, we leave them alone because we figure they'll be alright, they'll figure it out, they'll learn the right way eventually. But the softball, baseball, and other sports scrap heaps are filled with once great superstars who did something flawed and were not corrected.
As time wears on, the uncorrected behavior becomes more deeply engrained with each flawed reiteration. At some point it becomes virtually impossible to correct. At some point, the kid herself thinks I'm not gonna do it YOUR way because I already had success doing it MY way, or the behavior becomes so permanently etched into motor memory that it is incorrectable without truly Herculean effort.
Eventually, the lifetime .800 batting average kid achieves the ripe old age of 15 or 16 and she fails. She seeks correction from coaches and they do their best to provide guidance. But it is all to no avail because she has performed the same flawed action several tens of thousands of times.
My most important observation this year involved watching kids I have seen play the game since they were 10U or 12U and who have now made the varsity roster on a number of high school teams. It is astounding to me that I often can recognize a kid from several hundred feet away despite the fact that her body has changed so drastically and she is wearing a batting helmet. My vision is not good - I should make time to go to the eye doctor. But I have this impression of mechanical motion etched in my brain and that kid, two fields over, appears to be so and so. I decide to walk over and check and, almost invariably, it is so and so. Each kid that I recognize from afar still carries the same mechanical flaw from 10U into high school.
You look out over any complex and if there are kids there who threw with a funky hitch, had some affectation when they pitched, or swung the bat with too much of this or that ineffective motion, you can recognize them even if they are way too far away to actually see. Most kids who make any sort of mistake with some sort of mechanical motion will continue to make that mistake for the rest of their lives.
A long time ago, there was a young man, playing 14U baseball, whose swing was none too great. But when he got to the plate, the game stopped. The coach from the defensive team would call time, walk out onto the field, remove the second baseman in order to place him behind the left fielder at a point behind about twenty feet worth of tall trees and the picnic tables which lined the outfield. That fourth otufielder would be placed about 40 feet behind the trees and tables. Then the coach would move the left and center fielders back about twenty paces. The RF would be moved deep and a little towards center. The 2B, 3B and SS would be backed up to the point where they could not make a play on any grounder but that didn't matter since the first baseman was moved back to guard the line should this kid try to put one down the 1B foul line which he often did.
That was one opponent's approach to stopping this kid. It rarely worked. The kid still often hit homeruns between the fielders which would roll out into the parking lot, across the street and into the next lot. He sometimes hit balls between the trees which would elude the fourth outfielder. Sometimes the fourth outfielder would track down a ball and turn to try to throw it in before the kid made it to home, only to have it bounce back off the trees in the wrong direction. Eventually they just gave up with this approach and tried to get him out other ways.
As I said, the kid's swing was deeply flawed. But he had so much success from the age of about 9 that nobody ever corrected him. He received no constructive criticism from any coach until about 14. He was not receptive to it and continued to do it his own way despite numerous attepts to correct him. Perhaps once or twice he tried to do it THEIR way but when he struggled with the correction, it was immediately abandoned.
When this young hitter reached the ripe old age of fifteen, he began to struggle. The pitching was faster and better. The speed made little difference but the movement began to give this kid fits. More importantly, the pitchers began to find the holes in his swing. He adjusted and still hit for a high average but he never again had the power everyone once feared. And then, at 16 and 17, he had more trouble. Eventually, he quit the game. His swing had become unmanageable and he just couldn't cut it because his fundamentals were poor. He might have been something if only somebody had corrected him early on.
Now, that's a story from my youth and concerns baseball but I see the same thing all the time many decades later in softball. I see so many girls making exactly the same mistake in high school that they made in tee ball, 10U travel, or whatever. It is too late for them. You cannot correct a mechanical flaw after playing a game for 6, 8 or more years. The time to correct is when a girl is 8 or 9.
By the way, this is not limited to swings. It is undoubtedly true of throwing, of fielding grounders, of doing almost anything on the diamond. The kid who fields everything one-handed at 10 will be fielding less of them at 16 but use the same flawed technique. The kid who always takes two steps forward on every flyball but is fast enough at 12U to get back to the deep ones will continue to step forward throughout high school but reach fewer deep shots as girls begin hitting the ball harder. The girl who gets to everything from her position at SS and winds up before making the throw but has a strong enough arm to get 12U runners will continue to do that and learn to hear "safe" a couple times each high school game on routine plays she used to make. The catcher who turns her head but somehow scoops everything on the short hop at 14U will struggle to keep balls in front of her when she makes the high school team and catches the D-1-bound drop ball pitcher.
Fundamentals are the key to better fastpitch play. If a kid is schooled in sound fundamentals at an early age, that is no guarantee she'll be an impact player for her high school or ASA Gold team but she does have the opportunity. Conversely, no matter how good she is in little league, she will not be able to cut it later if her fundamentals are unsound. Oh, she may be a very good player at certain levels but when push comes to shove, in the 14th inning of the state quarterfinals, at some point, her fundamental flaws will come back to haunt her and she will fail. Then her confidence will sputter and fall. She will not be able to progress to the next level, whatever that is.
The payback for fundamentals is not always immediate. Sure, when you take a bunch of 8s or 9s who have never played the game, not really, and teach them how to field a grounder or make a throw, you may get immediate feedback. You may experience success by teaching a group of girls the real basic fundamentals. But this steep learning curve will quickly fall flat. It will stop producing immediately discernible results. In fact, coaches will find that if they don't "waste" time on fundamentals in practice, they can get better payback for effort on other aspects of the game like situational play.
This is often the case at young recreational levels. The typical coach sees that if he focuses on fundamentals, his girls will improve and by the time they are at the next level, they'll be solid players ... for somebody else. But here and now, if I ignore the fundamentals and instead teach a more nuanced approach while keeping my best "natural athletes" in the key positions, my team will win today. If I "waste" time on fundamentals now, I can't prep the girls for game play. And my team will lose.
A little while ago I suggested that we, as a society, do not take this approach with other sorts of learning. But my private fear is that we are moving in that direction. We want teachers "accountable" for the results of learning. If a teacher produces a class of poor readers or mathematicians, we want that teacher better trained, more focused on outcome, or removed altogether. That is entirely reasonable. But the best we have been able to come up with in terms of a system is an outcome based approach, No Child Left Behind.
Many educators are unhappy with NCLB. They may not want to be judged by any system. They complain it is an unfunded mandate. More to the point, they feel the system forces them to teach a certain way, it forces them to teach so as to achieve game outcome rather than fundamental skills. They know this results in the 16 year old hitter who no longer can hit a pitch. They know it results in a high school shortstop who can no longer get kids out because her throwing motion is too elongated. They know that before a kid can read, assimilate and fully understand War and Peace, that kid must be able to read. They know that before one can calculate derivatives, one must be able to perform algebra and before that multiplication, division, factors, etc. without thinking very hard about it.
Fundamentals are fundamental. The solution to a complicated problem is to simplify it, deconstruct, and repair the smallest elements. That's true of swinging troubles, other softball related problems, reading, math, everything. If you want to step up your game, go back to the basics and move forward from there. If you want an outcome tomorrow, don't worry quite as much about today's game, the outcome of your next at-bat. Fix your mechanics. Fix your fundamentals. Revisit them.Labels: batting, coaching, hitting mechanics, parenting, pre-season preparation
Permanent Link: Fundamentals Revisited
 
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