Tweet
Rich, I wanted to drop you a note of sincere thanks.
We are just finishing up our very busy fall schedule with our 18U team (we are actually headed to St. Louis next weekend for one of the best fastpitch college exposure showcases in the country). This weekend, we won our first very top-level tournament, winning an ASA national bid, in the process beating some of the bigger "name" teams in our area. We started as a "town" team at 10U and built our group over time to compete with the very best. We have half a dozen girls committed to or being closely looked at by colleges ranging from local D3s (Elmhurst, Augustana, Wisconsin Whitewater, Lake Forest) to D2s (Florida Tech) to national D1s (I'll leave those names off, fingers crossed). We stress fundamentals and playing the right way. I've used HI concepts to drive all of our hitting.
My own daughter, who you worked a bit in the HI private forum, turned her hitting around this fall. We got rid of the momentum move she was making on the bottom half which helped her get back to using her big muscles (for a small girl) to power the swing and her always very good hands to find the ball. I teach your two engines, stretch and fire, oppo, out-from, hand pivot point and am trying to understand scap fusion and how to work the hands on top of it. I don't call everything by those names with our coaches and players, but that's what I use, and I use it in every hitting session. I probably don't implement it in "video-perfect" form but we use those fundamentals and work in the cage relentlessly to hit line drives to all fields at all times.
Work commitments and coaching a team and working with my own kid (who also played varsity volleyball this fall) didn't leave me time to do the video worked I hoped to do with you. But I can't tell you how much your ideas and constant explanations of them have helped us.
Yesterday, we beat a lot of teams that were 100% sure we didn't belong on the field with them. We are going to continue to work and help our kids reach their goals to get to the next level.
We are just finishing up our very busy fall schedule with our 18U team (we are actually headed to St. Louis next weekend for one of the best fastpitch college exposure showcases in the country). This weekend, we won our first very top-level tournament, winning an ASA national bid, in the process beating some of the bigger "name" teams in our area. We started as a "town" team at 10U and built our group over time to compete with the very best. We have half a dozen girls committed to or being closely looked at by colleges ranging from local D3s (Elmhurst, Augustana, Wisconsin Whitewater, Lake Forest) to D2s (Florida Tech) to national D1s (I'll leave those names off, fingers crossed). We stress fundamentals and playing the right way. I've used HI concepts to drive all of our hitting.
My own daughter, who you worked a bit in the HI private forum, turned her hitting around this fall. We got rid of the momentum move she was making on the bottom half which helped her get back to using her big muscles (for a small girl) to power the swing and her always very good hands to find the ball. I teach your two engines, stretch and fire, oppo, out-from, hand pivot point and am trying to understand scap fusion and how to work the hands on top of it. I don't call everything by those names with our coaches and players, but that's what I use, and I use it in every hitting session. I probably don't implement it in "video-perfect" form but we use those fundamentals and work in the cage relentlessly to hit line drives to all fields at all times.
Work commitments and coaching a team and working with my own kid (who also played varsity volleyball this fall) didn't leave me time to do the video worked I hoped to do with you. But I can't tell you how much your ideas and constant explanations of them have helped us.
Yesterday, we beat a lot of teams that were 100% sure we didn't belong on the field with them. We are going to continue to work and help our kids reach their goals to get to the next level.