Backyard Hitting Lessons - Introduction

Introduction

It's time for your son to develop a short, quick, smooth and powerful swing!

Parents

We all want our kids to be successful in everything that they attempt and baseball is no exception, as a matter of fact it may be the most difficult sport to watch a player struggle because everytime they are involved in a play or at bat, everyone is watching! These backyard hitting lessons are designed to be done at home and for short periods of time. 5-10 minutes a day can provide drastic improvement in a player's swing. Certainly spending more time can be beneficial but the important part is that the kids are interested in improving and interested in practicing the correct way. 500 swings with poor mechanics will do more harm than good. Watch the videos with your kids and watch them for a few minutes as they work on the skill. Many times kids feel like they are doing a skill one way when they are not. They will quickly fall back into old habits and not even realize that they have gone back to their old hitting style. With your help they can get it corrected and get on the path to success at the plate!

Players

I hope you are looking forward to becoming a better hitter and having fun doing it. I'm going to mention "having fun" quite a bit in these lessons because I believe that to really get the most out these lessons, it's important that you enjoy them. That doesn't mean that I'm going to try to entertain you during the lessons, it means that you need to make the practice and what you're working on enjoyable. Think about what it will feel like when you step up to the plate this coming season and you're able to drive the ball into the gap for a standup double! Think what it will feel like to be a good hitter and have success at the plate. I can tell you that it feels great! As you work through the lessons, enjoy the progress that you're making and keep your future in mind. We're practicing to improve this season, so we need to build new habits along with a new swing.

Coaches

Having coached soccer, basketball, and youth football in addtion to baseball, I know how difficult it can be to coach a sport that you don't feel like you have expertise in. QCBaseball.com was created to help youth coaches gain knowledge and hopefully improve their ability to coach the sport of baseball well. The "Backyard Hitting Lessons" were developed to help a player build a new swing from the ground up over time. It takes time to build new habits and a new swing. So as a coach, you wouldn't want to try to mold every player into what you learn here in a two week time span before the beginning of the season. Drastic changes in a short period of time are a recipe for frustration for players, parents, and coaches!

What I'm hoping is that you can share these lessons with players and parents to use in the off-season and that they will be able to build a new swing and mental toughness at the plate to improve their success at the plate. As a coach I hope you can pick up something from the lessons that you can use as you coach. Sometimes a small change in a hitter can make a big difference! I believe you'll get some ideas of where small changes can be made by going through the lessons. The lessons are designed for players to follow the lessons but will also help show coaches the basic aspects of hitting. The lessons focus in on providing the player with a balanced swing that I think gives a young hitter the best opportunity for success. You may not agree with everything in here and that's fine. Every player has things that work and don't work for them, as a coach I hope you recognize that and don't try to force or mold a successful hitter into every aspect of these lessons or any other hitting method. I had a coach who use to tell us "if you can hit .400 standing on your head, I won't change you." With that said, these lessons focus on what I feel are solid fundamentals that will apply to most hitters.

Please Provide Feedback

I hope you enjoy the lessons and please drop me a note with any suggestions or questions. This is the beta version of the lessons, so I will be changing and updating them in the future. Please also signup for the QCBaseball Blog through Feedburner (top right of every page on QCBaseball.com). This is were I announce updates to the website along with posting other articles.

Key Point: Approach each practice with enthusiasm and a desire to improve. If you can do that you're going to see big improvements.

Next: Saftey & Equipment