That is probably not a good question to ask a father whose daughter had only two formal pitching lessons in her life. That’s right, for all that Angela accomplished, we only had two hours of pitching lessons, and both of these were late in her high school career when we wanted a second opinion on some things. People are shocked that we did it on our own.

These days I just won’t agree to accept students for weekly lessons. True, we are so overwhelmed that we couldn’t accommodate that request, but we made this decision long before that occurred. Our main goal is to help the parent and the pitcher totally take ownership of her career. We are very serious about teaching parents to be the primary pitching instructor for the daughter. As you gain a thorough understanding of the form and the process, you will gain the courage to begin creating your own drills and finding ways of fixing things that have never occurred to anyone else. Why? Because you are custom-designing them for your daughter’s needs.

A second reason we don’t agree to see the same 40-50 students every week is that we wouldn’t learn nearly so much. Kids in different regions bring us unique problems. Different ages bring different challenges. By working with over 500 kids, we see it all…ways to overcome form problems we wouldn’t have seen otherwise, putting kids with chronic injuries back on the mound in healthy fashion, new ways to develop speed in 15-20 different body types, and by developing drills for the riseball that 200 completely unique kids can grasp, we have developed over 30 drills instead of the one or two with which we started.

But, those are still not the reasons we won’t do weekly lessons. When pitchers have a weekly lesson, it is too easy for them to put off fixing something since a lesson is approaching and they think it will be easier to just wait and let the pitching instructor fix it. In doing that, they blow a good chance to figure it out themselves and learn something that would have made her a better pitcher in many ways. Instead, the kid avoids the pitch that’s causing trouble, or builds a bad habit by pitching it wrong until the next lesson. They get in the habit of being spoon-fed, which inhibits the maturity we want a pitcher to develop.

Sometimes parents choose a weekly lesson because they just don’t want to have to get that involved in the kid’s dreams. “It’s just too much work to learn all of that stuff”. “Pitching is just too confusing”. “I’m too busy”.

As a coach of a travel team with lots of years behind me, I don’t want the type of pitcher who cannot adapt easily and cannot creatively overcome problems on her own. Nor am I excited about the kid and parent who feel no urgency to fix something. “That’s good enough” is an attitude that leads to mediocrity.

Yes, we do occasionally do consecutive lessons with a kid who is working on a special pitch, and for kids from the deep south or west coast, we do two or three consecutive days to help ingrain any new habits. Those are different situations.

So, are there parents out there who are willing to get as involved as we hope? Absolutely. Ninety-nine percent of them get as excited about learning and being a part of the process as I did with my daughter. I absolutely love them. And, when they bring their daughters back after 2-6 weeks, the kid is always greatly improved and they are full of new questions and ideas for me to consider. Those are the kids who soar. And, when parents get that involved, they tend to pass on their knowledge to neighborhood kids who want to learn to pitch. And, they do it with a passion that helps the kids fall in love with the great game of softball.

There are many ways to be successful, and weekly lessons can be one of them. We just choose to take a different approach. Parents ask me when they should return, and I tell them, “When you accomplish the goals we set today, or when she gets frustrated and needs a little help”. I feel my job is to empower parents and kids to dream together and work to help it become reality. The more time and energy both have invested in it, the more likely they will fight through it when facing difficult challenges. That is the real goal.