You need to put your body in a position that allows you to be explosive. You also need to harness that explosiveness. Here's a question. When you hit are you standing with your legs bent, weight slightly back? Or is your weight on your front leg? They are bent with your weight back!

You have a choice: make practicing painfully boring and unproductive, or make it fun. One of our values at Practice Pro is “hard work.” In saying that, we don’t mean you must suffer through doing things you don’t want to do. We also don’t mean to push yourself to your physical and mental limit every single practice. It’s necessary to do that sometimes, of course, but when we say to do “hard work” we mean two things.

Here are six games we play at pitching school. I encourage you to incorporate them into your personal pitching practices. If you are taking our lessons, we send you recaps weekly of games, drills and tools of what we did during class. You’ll have tons of resources to make practice fun.

We need to teach pitchers what words mean - especially those we adults take for granted. At the 2019 National Fastpitch Coaches Association national convention, I heard Kai Correa talk about infield defense. He's the infield/baserunning instructor of the San Francisco Giants. He  explained to us what the word “athletic” means. When we see someone who is “athletic” she has a penchant for being 1) bent at the knees, 2) bent at the waist, and 3) light on her feet. That got me thinking.

 My story starts at just eleven years old. At this point, I had been pitching for a year or two.

By no means was I the best in my rec ball program but I was not the worst at this point either. My team and I were playing in a playoff game. I came in to relieve our ace pitcher. As I threw my first few pitches I heard the other team’s coach tell his team, “Wait on it! She is as slow as tee ball.” Thinking back on that now, that comment does not even make sense. Surely my ball was moving a little faster than one just sitting still on a tee, but at that point, it was the end of the world to my young mind. I finished out the inning but afterward, I was devastated.

I told my parents and my private coach about what I had heard with tears streaming down my face. From that point on I was more motivated than ever to prove that coach wrong. That one comment, some random coach made, to motivate his team drove me to work harder than ever and to truly want to prove him and anyone else who doubted me wrong.

Your team coach and pitching coaches always come prepared with a plan to your practices and lessons. So, why not do the same for yourself? As we learned last week in pitching school, the equation for luck is:

Luck = Preparation + Opportunity.

Without proper preparation, you won't be able to capitalize on the opportunities that come your way during games.

By pre-planning your solo pitching practices, you can turn them into a more engaging experience. You'll be more likely to follow through, feel a sense of accomplishment upon completion, improve your time-management skills, and most importantly, expedite your progress. The more organized you are, the fewer wasted pitches there will be, the less time wasted on distractions, and the less monotonous your practices will become.

At Practice Pro we put a huge emphasis on awareness of improvement. Every lesson we use an app called CoachNow which allows players to record notes, game results, and game accomplishments. We analyze their motion over time and track their skill level.  We offer charts to help record game performance and mental toughness. Parents need these tools to help point to real evidence of their daughter’s accomplishments.

If your daughter dreams up big goals for the season, why can’t you make some too? After all, you do almost as much work as she does! You drive her to practice, coach, help at lessons, raise money, offer emotional support, give her pep talks, and teach her life skills. How about creating some parent-softball goals? Softball not only teaches your daughter physical and life skills, but it teaches you those things too.