It’s Easy to Ask for Advice. It’s Harder to Take It.

When I first considered starting a pitching school 10 years ago (Yes! It’s our 10 year anniversary!), I had questions that now seem very obvious to me now, although at the time they certainly did not feel that way: Would pitchers actually want to train in groups instead of private lessons? Would this system produce great pitchers? Were my credentials good enough? Could I possibly make a living doing this? Would other coaches ever want to teach alongside me in this strange little system I was imagining, and, perhaps the most frightening question of all, what if my ideas simply didn't work? I didn’t  have ten years of results to reassure me; I had only an idea, some experience, and the uncomfortable knowledge that there were many people in the world who knew things I didn’t.

So I went looking for them.

I learned from my uncle John, my cousin Erica, my college coach Deb Pallozzi, other coaches, friends and family members who had spent their lives in softball, and experts I met through years of attending the NFCA Convention; I read books, asked questions, called people I barely knew, and tried to become less embarrassed about admitting when I did not know something. And one of the funny things about learning is that sometimes you travel very far in search of wisdom only to discover that something a person told you years ago was right all along; I have spent years studying pitching and developing my own style and philosophy, only to look back at so much of what my uncle John taught me and think, with considerably more humility than I possessed when I was younger, you know what, he really knew what he was talking about.

But finding good mentors was not the thing that changed Practice Pro - doing what they told me to do was.

Before I started Pitching School, I called two women who had already built versions of what I was trying to create in other states, Cheri Kempf and Myndie Berka, and I asked them how they had done it, what had worked, and what had caused them the greatest trouble. They generously told me what made their programs work. They told me, among other things, that they organized their programs into seasons, created a structure they believed in, and then required people to participate within that structure rather than constantly making exceptions—and this frightened me, because I already had private-lesson clients, and what if I told them that I was changing the way I taught and they simply left?

It is very easy to admire wisdom when it requires nothing from you, and considerably harder when following it might cost you something.

But I tried it. I told my private-lesson clients that this new program was how I was going to conduct lessons going forward, and thirty pitchers signed up immediately; from there, with the help of some extraordinary instructors, we kept changing things, questioning things, discarding things that didn't work and strengthening things that did. Ten years later, I can look backward and see pitchers who started with us as little girls and went on to play travel softball, high school softball and college softball, and some of them have even returned to stand on the other side of the rubber and coach the next generation of Practice Pro pitchers.

Yet strangely enough, those are not always the stories that mean the most to me.

There are girls we taught who did not play college softball, and some who did not even continue through high school, and ten years later I can see what remarkable young women many of them have become; and I sometimes wonder whether, buried somewhere inside the adults they are today, there remains one small thing they learned while standing in a school gym with us trying unsuccessfully for the hundredth time to make a softball do what they wanted it to do. Perhaps they learned that being frustrated does not mean you quit, that being corrected does not mean you are a failure, that asking for help is not weakness, or simply that sometimes you must be willing to be bad at something for a while before you can become good at it.

And so, pitchers, I would ask you: Who are your mentors?

You may think you don't have any, because when I was younger I imagined that a “mentor” was some important person you formally met with once in a while discussing profound subjects, and I wondered how anyone actually acquired such a person. But your mentors may already be standing all around you: your pitching coach, your travel coach, your high school coach, your hitting instructor, your parents, your teachers, your teammates, or perhaps even somebody you have never met whose book you read or whose story causes you to think differently.

The more important question is not whether you have people willing to teach you, but what you do when they teach you something you don't want to hear.

What happens when a coach changes your motion and suddenly you cannot throw a strike? What happens when she asks you to practice something boring, tells you that the pitch you desperately want to learn is not yet the pitch you need, points out a weakness you would rather pretend does not exist, or asks you to do something that feels so uncomfortable that every part of you wants to return immediately to the familiar thing you already know?

This is where coachability begins.

Coachability does not mean believing that every coach is always right, it means possessing enough humility to consider the possibility that someone else sees something you cannot yet see, enough courage to genuinely try what she is asking you to try, and enough resilience to know that even if it does not work, you are capable of recovering, adjusting, asking another question, and trying again.

There is risk in trusting another person enough to let her teach you, just as there was risk when I trusted mentors enough to change the way I ran my business, because the moment you allow yourself to be taught, you must admit something that pride desperately dislikes admitting: I may not know yet.

So as we begin this offseason, consider measuring your progress not only by your velocity, your strike percentage, the number of pitches you throw, or the team whose jersey you hope someday to wear. Ask yourself something harder: Am I becoming easier to teach?

Can you hear criticism without allowing it to destroy you? Can you try something before deciding it won't work? Can you ask a question without worrying that the question will make you look foolish? Can you fail at something today without immediately retreating to what you could already do yesterday?

And perhaps that sounds obvious, because of course everyone believes she is coachable; who among us would willingly announce, “I refuse to listen, I already know everything, and no one has anything left to teach me”? Yet true coachability is much more difficult than simply listening politely while a coach speaks, because eventually someone will ask you to do something that feels strange, something you don't understand, something you don't particularly like, or—perhaps most irritating of all—something that contradicts what you have already decided to be true.

I’m looking forward to this season!