Total Reading Time: 4 minutes

Happy Monday! Recruiting has begun and you’re trying to watch travelball now and convince yourself these players will grow up and help you. Let’s look at a checklist to help make finding that next pitcher easier.

So Let’s Go!

(Edited every week by Liz Bristow - my Mom and English Major)

Table of Contents

• Keys to Finding that Next Pitcher

• UPCOMING ZOOM!!

Keys to Finding that Next Pitcher

These first couple of recruiting weekends are the worst!!

You’ve spent the last 3 months staring at your team and now you’re watching travelball wondering how any of these players can possibly be the future of your program…

Sitting out there watching average pitcher after pitcher seems like searching for a needle in a haystack.

It’s easy to find the really good ones - they’re obvious, but there’s just a handful of those. Most of us have to find the bulk of our staff on what seems like the mass of averageness somewhere on all these travelball fields.

Going into your summer recruiting season with a plan and a checklist will help go a long way to ensure you’re finding the best pitchers for your staff. Here’s the list of questions I checkoff and grade as I’m watching young pitchers and trying to project if they’ll ever help our team:

1. SWINGS & MISSES - Swings & misses determine the movement the pitcher has, particularly for Riseball pitchers. Just keep in mind that even really good Dropball pitchers don’t have near the swings & misses that Riseballers do. Still, swings & misses are helpful when you see them.

2. ARE THEY AROUND THE COLLEGE ZONE? - Adjusting to the dinky college strike zone is hard enough without making it almost impossible for a pitcher who misses the travelball zone by a mile. If their control is so weak that they can’t hit the edges of their travelball zone then you know they’ll struggle on our level.

3. CAN THEY ADJUST? - All a college pitcher does is adjust, so if they can’t do it in travelball then you know it’ll be a long road in college. When the zone shifts, or the coach changes pitchers or their defense suddenly falls apart, do they pout & get emotional or do they just keep trying to compete? Look close for this as it shows you who they’ll be when things don’t go their way on your level.

4. NUMBER OF HARD HITS? - If travelball kids are hitting her hard then she’ll really struggle in college. Limiting hard hits, no matter what type of pitcher they are is a definite window into their future with you.

5. HOW’S THEIR CHANGEUP? - This one probably needs to be moved up on the list because if they don’t have a pretty good changeup in travelball you’ll probably spend their whole career trying to teach them one. The faster a pitcher throws the less likely she is to have a changeup, but as we all know, it’s vital in college.

6. MAIN PITCH RESULTS IN APPROPRIATE OUT? - Does her Riseball result in flyball outs, or her Dropball result in groundballs? If her pitches are really spinning in the right direction they’ll result in an appropriate out. Watch for it, count it and be concerned if the outs aren’t what they should be.

7. HER IMPROVEMENT ZONE NEEDS TO BE IN YOUR STRENGTH - We often sit in the stands and think “she just needs to add a couple miles per hour -or - she needs to get a little more movement on her drop”… those are valid thoughts but unless that area of improvement is your strength those changes probably won’t happen.

8. DOES SHE COMPLIMENT YOUR EXISTING/INCOMING STAFF? - The more diversity of movement, speed and handedness on your staff the harder it’ll be for your opponents to square anyone up. We all want fireballing riseballers until we have 7 of them and the other team knows exactly what to expect and can time everyone up. Recruit for variety of movement and speed.

9. DOES SHE LOVE PITCHING ENOUGH TO HANDLE THE RIGORS OF COLLEGE? - And finally, the demands of being a college softball player far exceed anything a travelball player has experienced to date, and not every player loves pitching enough to really work at it. No matter how good they seem, if they don’t like the work they’ll never get any better. Find the ones that do and your journey together will be much more successful.

In addition to having a checklist like the one above, it’ll also help if you assign importance to each element. The ones that matter most to you - assign them more points, and the ones that are less important will have fewer points.

This will result in each pitcher having a total score and allow you to create a way to compare pitchers by comparing their scores.

I’m sure you have your own checklist - I’d love to hear about it.

UPCOMING ZOOM!!

Good news for all you ZOOM MEMBERS! I’ll be starting up our Zooms again soon.

Up first will be Paige Parker (recent Director of Player Development at Oregon) who’ll take us through the details of HOW TO CREATE A PITCHING DEVELOPMENT PLAN. 

Details will follow - You don’t want to miss it!

If you’re not a Zoom Member, it’s not too late - JOIN NOW!

Thanks for reading this week’s Curveball Chronicles. I hope it helped give you some insight to help your pitchers, and to give yourself some encouragement, knowledge and grace.

Go make this a Great Week!

Missed some previous issues? Don’t worry, I’ve got them all on my website: https://pitchingcoachcentral.com/curveball-newsletter/