Opinions on Baseball-Style Swing in Softball

Coach great points, one of the hardest things to teach ladies is to land on a flexed front knee at toe touch. Most land on a flat foot. I believe this goes back to poor throwing mechanics, and not being taught how to throw correctly. I/we now spend alot of time trying to teach proper throwing and weight shift. I/we believe if the players can grasp this they will eventually understand it in the relationship of weighting the rear leg while coling and moving forward into toe tap. The other reason we focus on throwing is so many college coaches we have spoken with have stated they have to spend a great deal of time teaching players to throw.

 

I think the feet have a lot to do with the throwing issues. I teach that the feet when in the hitting stance is more or less the same as in the throwing and fielding stance. This helps align the shoulders. The shoulders are the most glaring fault to me when they start learning to throw, but I believe it's caused by the feet not being properly aligned.

 

Absolutely correct! The 3 power positions in softball - throwing, pitching and hitting are all exactly the same at 1 point in the movement (with the exception of where the arm is). That point is when the majority of the weight is on the back foot and the athlete is poised to drive forward. In that position, the weight should be primarily on the ball of the back foot with the knee and the rest of the body inside the back foot. If any part of the body is too far over the top of the back foot, the drive forward will be lost.

What's so funny is you would never teach a pitcher to land, open up her hips and then throw the ball....but that's exactly what many hitters are taught.