Ryan Freeman 🇨🇦⚾

Losing baseballs during a game might be the most underrated frustration in H.S. baseball. Not cheap. Adds up fast. Foul ball… gone. Warm-up ball… gone. Start with a bucket— finish half empty. Can anyone relate?

My son and I went to the gym late last night to work out some stuff after 3 HS games worth of not hitting the way that he wanted. The session had both a data component and a feel / cue component. As a 17 year old who now has high 60's / low to mid 70's bat speed he has struggled in the last week - specifically against low velocity pitching - to let the ball travel deep enough to get good flush contact. Point being that we had a specific thing to work on. So on the technology side we're using Blast to bat speed, attack angle and VBA, and we're using HitTrax to monitor contact depth in addition to the outcome stuff - exit velocity, launch angle, distance and direction. We also were using two different pitching machines - one offset to the left side, the other offset to the right side. In terms of cues what we ended up with was: - As deep as possible while still being on time - High pitch posture, flat bat path and adjust off if needed But along the way we tried all sorts of stuff - everything from trying to hit a ball to the hot dog cart in oppo foul territory off the left hand off-set machine to trying to find middle of the field ball flight from the right hand offset machine to just going pure let it eat anywhere ball flight off of either machine to score a runner on 2B. In my mind, the best instruction environment for hitting is just a conversation that revolves around: - What were we trying to do vs what did we actually do - What signal can we get about why we did what we did - What adjustments do we need to make to bring our results closer to the intended outcome on the next swing But if the instructor and the player don't even speak the same language...man that conversation is going to be pretty limited in its effectiveness. Because he's 17 we're now able to have these kinds of conversations - with all of these various layers. But the critically important part of the whole thing is that this is an actual two way conversation. Meaning that he's telling me how he feels, we're looking at the data to correlate the feeling to the outcome, we decide on how or if we need to adjust intention for the next swing and we just wash, rinse and repeat that same cycle over and over and over. I wouldn't - and I didn't - coach him this way when he was 12. We used the same tech stack, but the data we paid attention to was a lot more limited. Because that was the level of depth he was able to have a productive conversation about at that time. I'm also exceptionally fortunate that at 17 years old he's still playing and I still get to have these conversations with him.