OUR TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
Our approach to teaching baseball skills has changed dramatically since the advent of exciting new technology and the scientific research now dedicated to analyzing what makes professional players excel. We all had our pet "theories" about what makes a player successful. Even the best professional hitting instructors had a difficult time agreeing on what actually happened in those split seconds. We taught what we thought we saw or what we had heard by other coaches. We now know that terms like "keep your weight back", "squish the bug", "extend your arms", "swing down at the ball", "throw your hands" are all misleading and, though well meant, do not happen in a professional swing. We now have the ability to show our students successful major league players using high-speed computer analysis, frame-by-frame sequences of motion mechanics and how timing and rhythm are incorporated. We can then video our students and show them how their own mechanics and timing compare. We no longer need to teach players our own opinions or theories. As a baseball coach you know you have come full circle when the passion you had as a player, leaving it all on the field each day to achieve your dreams, has now become an intense desire to help young ballplayers reach their own goals, or at least know that they became the best that they could be. After all these years it seems that this quote from Jim Bouton especially rings true - "You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball; and in the end, it turns out that it was the other way around all the time" |