Everything Fastpitch - The Podcast

This week's Lineup

• Catchers must back up first base (@0:39)
• More games are lost than won (@13:49)
• Quit saying "My Bad" (@26:39)

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 Players need to advance their skills by practicing skills that are out of their comfort zone but not into their panic zone. In this episode we discuss the three zones that people fall into when performing tasks. The comfort zone where we are totally comfortable. The stretch zone where we are being pushed beyond what we are comfortable with. And finally the panic zone where we are asked to perform a task that we are incapable of performing. The coaches give you advice on how to use this knowledge to make it easier to develop your players.

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A listener asks for some advice for bullying on a team whether this be physical, mental or isolating some players. This is a topic that all coaches should be on the watch for,

Training hitters for fast pitchers. Hitting is reaction time and there are some drills that we can do to help them.

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Hitting through the ball is a concept that a lot of players have trouble grasping. The coaches discuss what it means and some tips on how to improve your players hitting.

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This weeks lineup:

• Coaches who yell. Some advice to coaches and parents who scream and yell during games and practices.  
• Too many travel teams. There are more players than ever and that is great, but we don't have enough pitchers to support the number of teams. Changes need to be made and the people putting these teams together need to be more realistic of how far up the food chain they can go. 
• Look Good, Play Good

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This week we help coaches whose primary experience is in the baseball world understand the difference between communication required in softball as opposed to baseball.

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This week's lineup:

• Warmup Segment
• Listener Question: Strengths of batting the entire lineup or nine hitters (@12:09)
• Paige's Power Play: Mental work helps confidence (@22:36)
• Moving players around at a young age (@25:28)
• College Softball observations (@33:17)
• Slumps (@44:54)

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We have all seen it, players cannot execute the very basics of playing catch but they are practicing run downs, relays, etc. No matter what level you coach at, but especially those with inexperienced players, you have to be able to throw and catch. It may be boring, you might have to divide your players into groups but you have to work on throwing and catching until the players are competent, before moving onto anything else involving throwing and catching.

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This week's Lineup

• Warmup Segment
• Listener Question: What are ways to set up hitting stations for practices? (@12:00)
• Paige's Power Play: Getting Past Perfection (@15:58)
• Why do organizations advertise having  national, premier or gold level teams.(@18:51)
• Lack of respect for stars in women's sports? (@27:34)

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We see this too often. In a game we are hitting with 100% effort, but in our training we don't practice at 100%. It doesn't make since to practice at a different level of effort than how we want to perform in a game. Make adjustments.

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