Cassie's Pyramid of Hitting

Hi everybody, welcome into another edition. This is Crossfunctionality, the show connecting coaching baseball, softball, mail-in, b-mail hosted by former college baseball and softball players. It's a busy time a year, of course, with everybody getting ready in January, February for the season into March as well, although we probably should have been getting ready in October and November, but better late than never because my partner is currently

at her work facility and she's taking a break from giving lessons and coaching and teaching to do today's episode. Episode 28 Cassie's pyramid of hitting looking forward to talking about this. It's a really cool image and actually the show is better. This episode to follow along on the YouTube side softball strength academy because it is a 3D version of the pyramid and we're going to be

explaining and breaking it down here today. So let me bring in friend Gohost, softball national champion at the University of Alabama and renowned hitting instructor, coaching coach instructor, whatever. She's renowned in general. Cassie Riley Bosch. What's going on? Thanks, Jim. All is good. It is negative nine feels like negative 16 right now. So or negative six feels like negative 19. Something about you prior to the

day show that you are a Jeep gal. So for everybody out there now, we now know what Cassie's preference car preferences. She is a Jeep gal. And by the way, she drives stick right or you have in the past. Yes. Yes. So that has been I've had a couple different leases. My first car was a stick. My mom used to teach me stick. I'd be in

the passenger seat at like nine to maybe 10 years all the way. It was and she would be driving. I'd listen to the engine and I would shift for her. So. I knew stick before I even knew how to drive. And I prefer it and Jeep Wrangler's one of the few cars that it actually like the standard model is the stick shift. So it's cheaper to

actually get it with stick. So that was my justification for a car that does not hold. To a little expensive for what you get, I guess. I have a friend who used to drive me around his Jeep Wrangler. He loved this thing. It wasn't stick shift, but it was regular Jeep Wrangler. And he used to every time he would see somebody else in a Jeep Wrangler.

There's like this this brotherhood or this group. I didn't that I didn't know about that. I guess people who drive Jeep Wrangler's just point each other like, Hey, you drive a Jeep Wrangler. Yeah, it's like a little it's like a little wave. You just waved so there. Jeeps. And it was fine. Unfortunately, I was in a little accident last week. To a couple weeks go down

my cars total. And so I don't have my Jeep anymore. And I'm in a couple of different rentals. But my first rental, the only rental car this this place had that my insurance company sent me to which is a Ford expedition, which is a beautiful car. That is massive. And nothing like I've driven before. But the amount of Jeep's I accidentally waved to when my Ford

expedition driving around New York. It's a it's a it's have it. Oh, yeah. It comes to have it. I will say Ford expeditions are nice. They're very big. They're considered SUVs, which I don't really understand. They should be almost considered trucks because they're there. It feels like a pickup truck with a with the top on. And that's how far the backseat extends. Yeah, it's it's an

incredible car. I drive two hours a day though. So the gas tank didn't appreciate that as much. But yeah, it looks like I'll be finding a different car. We'll see we'll see what I end up in. And as we record this today on a Saturday, this episode coming out on a Wednesday, it is what 19 degree windshield. You mentioned. So yeah, it's negative negative six is

the actual temperature. And then with the windshield feels like negative 19, which reminds me when I lived in Iowa, the worst I experienced there was negative 36. And that was. Yeah, some my friends down south are like, what does that feel like? And you know, at first, it's like, it's not that bad. And then the wind blows and you realize like this hurts my skin. It

hurts my body hurts. It feels like your skin feels like your skin's going just peel off because yeah, it's you know, it is something to experience one time. But definitely not something you want for prolonged periods of time. And tomorrow, it'll be 42 degrees in New York, which is, which is incredible. And also to the disparity in the temperature change, but it's incredible to that you

step outside and you're in that cold weather. And then you look around and you see the the what do they call it? I don't forget what it's called. You know, the the snow type mist on the grass and you just look at the street and it's like frozen. It's just and there was no snow, but it's just frozen because it's so cold. It's so cold. Yes,

an overnight frost. It's the do that freezes. Yeah, we did have a like a dusting. No, no, we don't know much about frost. Yes. Yes. There was their frost on the ground. There had to be frost on the ground this morning. Frost on the ground. But we also had a little bit of a dusting and when it is that cold, the the snow is really, really

fine. There's not like much. I guess or maybe it's dry. I don't know. I just know that typically when it is that cold, you don't get thick packing snow. You get really, really fine snow. And in the worst case scenarios, you turn on your defrost and the snow comes into your car. So you had to use the, which we'll call it. So again, I don't scraper

for the window. Yeah. I don't have to do any of these things. I forget what they're called. That's that's the worst. I haven't used the scraper for the. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. When I used to live in the Northeast or even in the Mid-Atlantic at for a time and I had to use the scraper, I would just literally scrape out the part of the of my

windshield that I had to see out of and everything else just stayed the same. If I would do it. And then I just flare the defrost. Not, not I wouldn't recommend it, but that's what I did. And I was in my 20s. So I didn't get too off topic. But I remember my freshman year in college. We had an unusually cold day in at the in

Alabama. There was the windshield had frost on it. And the whole freshman class, all five of us jumped in the car and we had to go to wait to that day. And we were kind of kind of kind of a little close running late. And not a single one of my teammates knew what to do with this foreign substance. We had a coagul from Florida, Texas,

Georgia. They were like, what is this? How do we do this? And so I was out there with a credit card. Oh my god. A credit card. Well, I think it was probably like a library card. I don't know if we would have used an actual credit card. But we ended up driving to the wait room with a driver had our head out the window as

we were going. So I was so so Ace Ventura style with the head of the window. So maybe it was like your ID card or something. Probably. Yes. I don't know if any of us really truly have credit cards. Well, we're not. We could have been a debit card. We're not experts on weather. But Cassie is an expert on hitting. And we're going to discuss that

today. Episode 28, her pyramid of hitting again. It's a pretty cool illustration. It's a 3D triangular. I'm sorry. Yeah, 3D. Yeah. 3D. Yeah. Yeah. That you can watch and see because we're going to keep referencing that. So I'm going to talk about the left side. The left side is more mental. Right? And the right side is more mechanical. So let's talk first about the left side,

the more mental side. And just in general, the left side of your pyramid. Also to all what I want to talk about. And we'll get to it a little bit later, but it seems like this is the framework just in general, this pyramid for your coaching as a hitting instructor and just as a coach in general. And I think this gives a lesson that all coaches

out there, all young coaches to create a framework and you've done that with this pyramid. You know, it it basically started because I was talking to a parent talking to an athlete and they were asking like, you know, do you just kind of come up with it with their working on when they show up. And I really wanted to try to create a way to display.

No, this is there is a progression to it. And, you know, the so left side is, I mean, I guess it kind of coincides. It's really our timing progression. So how we progress timing, which, you know, obviously has what do I say mental. Yeah, I meant see timing. I'm sorry. It's okay. It's all good. So yeah, left side timing, right side is mechanical. And the idea

is that there is a level entry to both. There is a hierarchy to how you can progress both. There are certain things you should go over before jumping to trying to get that speed. And really, you know, the the main demonstration of this pyramid should show like, okay, but it kind of just sits on this platform of mental performance because as you get older, no matter

how good your timing gets, no matter how good your mechanics get, you're going to run into this mental game ceiling, which we've talked about a ton. So so much of this is just impacted by our mental game. And that can certainly allude to what we've talked about in the past and what we're going to continue talking about the future on this podcast. But yeah, so this

is this was why it came about. But we can start on the timing side. The first level of entry. So the base of this particular triangle is plain adaptation. Does the hitter actually have the understanding of where to hit each ball of space. And sometimes that comes very naturally for a hitter that they are, they naturally will wait on an outside pitch. They naturally will tack

the inside pitch earlier. And then they might not know why and that's okay. We have some hitters who don't even know how to train it don't even have never been introduced to the fact that, you know what your your high the reason you're not hitting a high pitch is not because you have a mechanical issue. It's because we're late. We're not recognizing it. Whatever it may

be. So we go over inside outside high and low. That's our first level of entry to timing. And before we could ever hit a speed increase, right. Every time we think of timing, we think like, okay, I got to catch up to fast pitching. We have to actually figure out can we control ourself on slow pitching. Can we actually can control when we want to hit.

We slow our bad speed down to try to hit a slow pitch. But once we can check that off and say, okay, no, I'm comfortable controlling my weight. We shift. Now we can progress to those more difficult speed increases. And then the last piece of this is live pitching. And that's certainly probably the hardest thing that I can replicate in the cages. Or I can't replicate

in the cages. And actually right now if you walked outside my office door, you'd see our turf space has been taken over by our baseball population today from 915 to 315 PM today. We have live a bees with pictures and hitters. And do you get as many reps? Do you get as are you working on something very specific through mechanics? Then no, but what we're working

on is our subconscious has this ability to predict where that ball is going to go before the picture releases it. You face a curveball picture enough times and you're start, you're going to start to understand, okay. Something about this is telling me it's a curveball, something about this is telling me it's a fastball, whatever that may be. And the more times you can see live pitching,

it's almost like creating positive cache in your brain. I didn't coach you to tell me that all the time when I was growing up. On the internet, when you get cache that builds up, it's the first time you go to an internet site, it might be a little slower. But the next time you go, because it's already been there, boom, it gets there faster. And so

when you see pitching live pitching over and over again, you're getting your sequencing in your rhythm intact, you're getting a used to seeing those spins, you're getting used to seeing that movement. Maybe you don't get there that quickly with your bathroom first time, maybe it doesn't register that quickly the first time, but the more times you see it that positive cache builds up, you get there

quicker and quicker every single time. Okay, so plain adaptation. Pitch speed, decrease, pitch speed increase, and then live pitching, that's the order. The base is plain adaptation. So do you start right there every time? Does it depend on the hitter? It can almost be like an evaluation, right? I'm going through different types of and every coach is going to have like certain things they do with

a hitter that says, okay, they, you know, we're like an alarm will go off and they're like, why aren't they getting this? Why am I throwing outside over and over again? They're just not hitting it, right? So as I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this. So I'm going through that first lesson. I'm almost using this as a little e-ball where I'm like, cool,

they completely understand how to adapt from playing to playing. I'm throwing slow, they're crushing that. I throw fast. Also, things start to break down. Maybe we start there. You know, I'm basically trying to see where am I going at. I'm not going to get them. It's very rare that I can get an accurate read off of where they're at if I just throw them at live

pitching because we can have a lot of things happen during live pitching that has sometimes nothing to do with their actual swing. And we've tried to start at the base and we work our way up and we start to see, okay, this is our sweet spot where we're going to live for. We can make the most effective changes out of this hitter. Okay, so how does

this apply the left side of the pyramid? All the things that we just mentioned, again, I'll say again, playing adaptation, pitch speed, decrease, pitch speed increase and then live pitching. How does that? This pyramid, this left side of the pyramid, how does that apply both to softball and baseball? What are the key similarities? But what are also some of the differences and how you apply this

timing progression? Sure. I think timing is, let's put it this way, you could have this beautiful swing that has zero holes in it. And then you can't time the ball but all. Maybe you're blind. Maybe you have 2D vision. Maybe you haven't, like, you don't, you don't have your contacts in that day. So our swing isn't helping us when we actually can't time that pitch up

for whatever reason. So this is, of course, you need them to work in tandem with each other. You could have really great timing. So I think we're going to have a ton of holes in your mechanics that hold you back. But especially when we get into season, especially when we get to the point of we're leaving off season timing becomes the most important aspect that I

think we need to focus on. And that is for both baseball and softball. I think where things really start to change a little bit and start to differ is just as, I mean, it's honestly, I don't even know if it's a baseball softball difference. It's asking yourself why are we looking at this in the first place. Typically softball in this area is not a baseball pitch.

I'm not seeing very good pitching. So I'm living with most of my high school hitters in the speed decrease area because they are hyped up. They're ready to swing and then they're seeing very non competitive softball pitching baseball pitching on the other hand. We have some of we just had 25 scouts in the building. I'm just looking at some local players. So we have some really

live arms. A lot of my baseball hitters. I'm ramping. I'm trying to get them through this pitch speed decrease phase in order to get them to the point where they can really see some fast pitching. They have to completely speed up their entire sequence because they never learned how to properly progress it. And that's what you get with speed decrease right you properly progress. My timing

my weight weight weight now my slow to fast. And then you're actually able to adjust that faster pitching or able to. We're cranking up the pitching machine a little bit more we're adding some constraints to make the pitch seem a little faster. So that's really honestly probably the difference that we're that I'm seeing where my softball girls I'll wait a little longer to get to that

phase. Right before they go into their travel. So what if people watching the show can see my my face I'm very in tune. I was very angry but I'm very in tune with what I'm looking at here. What and listening of course what if a hitter what if you can skip levels what if they're more advanced and you don't have to work on plane adaptation. You

can just go almost right to pitch speed increase. And then to live pitching. What if their advanced they could do that. Yeah and what I'll do is like okay so my advanced hitters were. I know for that day we are working on pitch speed increase. I might have one warm up drill from plane adaptation. One warm up drill from speed decrease. And then we're kind of

going to the bulk of our session is living in that speed increase phase let's say. But you know in the same breath who you're going to know you're going to get to know your hitter a ton you're going to know that there might be one or two things that they need to add to their warm up in order to get them feeling comfortable confident getting their

swing warmed up to where it needs to be. So I think you know and for coaches too so really jumping ahead but what I did to develop my library to this I was like all right I have all these drills now I have this structure. And I looked at plane adaptation and I said okay what's the very first drill I would do if I was trying

to teach someone inside outside highlight like how to hit balls in different planes and I kept doing that I kept doing I said okay what would the next drill be what would the next drill be and I essentially came up with four levels that have 16 drills in each level. So every single segment of this pyramid has four levels and that has those 16 drills within.

So it's not to say that we need every every hitter is not going to need all 512 drills. That's insane. The idea is that they're every hitter is going to be completely different whether that is within their given day whether that's post injury you have a level four hitter that needs to maybe go to some more basic level one and level two type swings. You have

a really young hitter who's not advanced yet and working in that level one range whatever that may be. It's trying to figure out what works best for each hitter. So 100% like plane adaptation we're going right into pitch speed increase but we're still operating in level one of pitch speed increase because this individual is having a tough time and all I care about is can we

get to that level four drill with confidence and with precision and really just the more advanced drills that exist within there. Yeah and this is the time of year I would think that you're seeing pitch speed increase and you're seeing live pitching. It's funny because I think what division two maybe or division three baseball they're starting up this weekend. Right. Right. Yeah. That's incredible. So they're

out of time but there's still a couple of weeks left in division one before they start their preseason. So I mean you got to really be at the top of this pyramid with pitch speed increase and the live pitching and really get a feeling and start to see those those types of scenarios and situations to get yourself ready for the season. Yeah absolutely and listen there's

going to be you know this isn't to be like oh someone shows up and we have to start a phase one and we can't advance until they advance you know we're trying to adapt to the seasonality of the athlete right we're we look at the person first the athlete second the demands of the season on that athlete so what sport they're playing and then finally the

position right so we're really having to focus in on the demand of the season of this athlete because I I have certain girls who in the middle of January will have indoor tournaments and what we'll do is we'll do like a mini ramp up where we're trying to expose them to as much stimulus as we can to get them comfortable. I have other hitters who if

I if I let them know I'm making them think about timing it really throws off their natural ability to time up a pitch. So like having very timing specific drills I kind of have to cloak them to look like something else because they just will overthink timing and then all of a sudden they're starting they're stepping through their swing so like I said this is a

this is an outline that hit that coaches can look at our hitters can look at me like okay I think I fit within here what type of drills do these look like and now they're adding to their own personal library to their own personal toolbox for what they can go reference whenever they feel something struggling whenever they feel themselves falling too far forward not getting on

plane whatever it may be. So do you so do then do you explain this to your students and and you give them you know I kind of a I guess yeah it's a very cliff noted version and and it's but hopefully you know they get it too and I you know it's funny the biggest eye opening things sometimes it's like oh other people have a hard

time hitting slow pitching too and I'm like yeah not a lot of people know how to just hold themselves back like know how to just adapt to slow versus fast pitching right because you know you could take drills from this and be like you know what I think there's one more face to this I think the ability to adapt to both back and forth back and

forth is another phase you know and then you take drills from that and and make that session your own. There's a lot of times you can combine like hey I'm going to take a live pitching drill and try to adapt it or or add it to like outside pitches only because we're you know we have a hitter who's really struggling with outside pitching. So again the

timing progression side of this 3d pyramid plane adaptation pitch speed decrease pitch speed increase and then live pitching in this all has to do with timing the left side of this pyramid and I think timing is something that is forgotten in 2022 among a lot of coaches out there on social media a lot of coaches that are just out there and they've they focus so hard

on mechanics and we're going to get to the right side which is the mechanical development but they forget about how important time I think timing is one of the most if not the most important thing to hitting a baseball or hitting a softball and this progression is great this timing progression because it really digs in for hitters needing timing and how to understand important the importance

of that timing whether you're playing softball or baseball. Right I mean there's probably 256 different drills relating to timing alone. Whether that's you know bouncing variation self toss variations bouncing off of a trampoline variations it's and people might look at it and be like why am I going to have an elite level hitter self tossing to themselves and it's more well if they can't that tells

us more about how their swing operates than if they can you know and sometimes that is a way more effective drill for athletes to be doing pregame and hitting off of a tee if they are hitting off a tee as like a all or nothing one speed and they're not actually separating their speed and separating their sequencing like they would if they had a toss of

a ball up to themselves so it's not always you know people think of timing having to be off of front toss or or live type stuff there are so many different variations we can we can operate to challenge that hitter and really push that hitter into a different level of growth. Alright so moving on now to the right side again our pyramid of hitting Cassie's pyramid

of hitting episode 28 here cross cross function I'm sorry I must give myself credit. Episode 28 Cassie's pyramid of hitting and against subscribe and follow us on social media at Jim Tara at coach underscore Cassie R.B. on Instagram at coach Cassie R.B. on Twitter the right side of the pyramid the 3d version of this pyramid again people watching on the cell phones or any of the

academy YouTube page can understand what I'm talking about better positional awareness this is the mechanical development side positional awareness movement capacity speed and power and whip so start first I guess I'm going to be honest with the positional awareness I think people can probably understand what that really means a hitter right being aware of what their position is in the box and where they need to

be at a certain time in their load correct I mean yes so this yeah this is self explanatory it is it's just breaking down like the elementary way right it is like proprioception right people talk about is it is athleticism truly defined as you know where your body is in space without actually having to look at your body right and it's it's wild to see even

some like high high level hitters hey I'm just do me for a close your eyes and go through your swing do me for a go through your swing and slow motion and it's like it's it's funny because they they move fast they know where it's at but when they move slow they don't and so now we're at this delicate phase where do you make a hitter

aware of what they're doing maybe not every single thing but is it positive that they understand how to coach themselves and how to make corrections on their own yes and that is what we are trying to do with this we we do not want the hitter having to overthink every single tiny phase of what their swing looks like but they should be able to be in

a position where they're coaching themselves they're getting into a position where they know hey when I'm when I'm doing this it's because my hands are in a different spot or my loads in a different spot and something really common I was just working on with this is a high level minor league baseball player he's a catcher and he's always mentioned how you know his hips get

really really tight throughout a game and sure enough his first two at bats he's sitting in his back leg really really well and then also an at bat three at bat four as he's catching more and more innings he front side of his body gets really tight as hip flexors get really tight his quads get really tight and he sits in his stance and he shoves

his knee forward and so he's sitting back back me back me yeah he shoves his back me forward instead of sitting into his hip so his swing starts to change just because we were lacking some position awareness so again minor league hitter I'm not we're not saying he's a low level hitter he's certainly a high level hitter but he just went through a few position awareness

drills and are like oh this is awesome I can feel this now he needed it maybe one time and now he's got it in his pocket so that's more okay so then that goes to the second level of the pyramid it sounds like any movement capacity yes yes like okay so now we understand our positions can we move from positionated position being right the I've talked

with a lot of worth we have hitter we have throwers who come back after surgery and there's a very specific return to throw protocol we have hitters that come back and they're like well just take five or 10 swings and then we'll build up to 20 swings and 30 swings when really you know there should be something a little bit more detail to it like hey

we're gonna you're not gonna go all out with these five or 10 swings we're gonna maybe go slow motion with these swings so we're only gonna focus on how you move through this portion of your swing we're gonna only focus on our extension phase we're gonna focus on our finish phase whatever we're gonna do is remember that may may be in what that might look like

so I really like position awareness and movement capacity for couple scenarios number one young hitter who is kind of just learning what's going on maybe they don't have the general athleticism to watch and then do so they learn a little bit of a different way they're like a kinesthetic learner that needs to put in those positions this is helpful an athlete coming back from injury an

athlete who has done something over and over again and kind of created an incorrect pathway that's really causing a deficiency in their swing to try to rewire that pathway pathway for them the main premise when I talk to these athletes is we we all want to go right to speed and power we want to swing hard we want to do these things but if we're training

incorrect movement patterns and we kind of talked about this when we talked about your four pillars of hitting you're essentially not creating enough safety nets for you to be successful later on so many times we talk about I want to stay on plane because that's my safety net when my time is off a little bit well how do we get on plane we have a deficiency

with the back arm I hedge search on my shoulder and now I don't even get to that position because I never correctly rehabbed how to get back in those those correct positions well and I've taken a lot of notes here but the example that you used with that professional hitter that you work with it sounds like his speed and power his whip that's going to be

compromised because he doesn't have the base of position awareness he doesn't have the base of the movement capacity because of the type hit flexors of the type quad whatever the case but he doesn't have that base so he's not going to have it's hampering his he may have it because he's a good athlete but it's hampering his ability to maximize his speed and power and maximize

that whip when he swings 100% and he feels it too he feels like he's having to compensate and athletes I think a misconception is that athletes are these great movers athletes are really great compensators athletes know what the end result needs to be and we are very good at figuring out a way to do that even if it's not the most efficient way even when we

have an injury even when we have something else going on so I think that's it's not a danger but it makes it even harder sometimes to work with these athletes who are self regulating and trying to figure out a way on their own and all of a sudden now we're in a less than optimal position for power but what I what I never wanted this mechanical

development to be is that there is a perfect swing or an ideal swing and everything has to fall into these exact things that's not human movement that's not how pitters flow through their swing but there are certain questions that you can be asking yourself as a coach hey does this athlete understand this position that can this athlete move to that position like how many times I've

had hitters come in almost in tears that they're like I just can't stop dropping my back shoulder and it's due to them just having an issue with like another phase of their swing that that is leading to them to dropping that shoulder right so how do we teach the hitter to coach themselves how do we give him a hierarchy of like all right I know what

I'm doing this I need to go back and check these two or three drills so on the on the mechanical development side where does each mechanic fall into the the four well we know we're getting so ready so in position awareness will be more than all that are there's pauses involved you might not be hitting a ball you're you're holding certain positions we're holding the load

position we're holding a coil position it's less hitting a ball and it's going through a lot of those swings slowly with your top hand and your bottom hand movement capacity is the isometric movement so like I'm going slow through my regular swing then I'm coming back fast to an extension hold I'm going slow through this particular move pattern then I'm coming back fast through a contact

hold whatever that may be and look like you have definitely more movement in the movement capacity but position awareness is very like okay I'm holding this position I'm holding isometrically in the middle of the position I'm holding the meantime I don't feel the pressure is getting this load and sometimes too as a as a coach especially because I got exposed to this on the strain the

condition again I have the hitter go ahead and hold the load or the launch position right peel down and I ask him where do you feel this and they're like well I feel us a ton right on the top of my knee I'm like okay so your hips not activate at all and so we put them barefoot we get them out of their shoes where do

we feel it now we're getting a little bit more in our posterior chain a little bit more on our backside I have hitters too who can't stay on play with the ball they come in the zone out in zone super quickly so I'm I'm going to hit the ball and then I'm holding the ball where I'm working at the ball and I'm going to hit the

ball out of my hip is so good that I'm holding the ball and I'm holding it here and I'm holding the ball out of my shoulder and trainer naway I'm holding the ball out of slow things down we get them into a contact position where they're connected it's causing them to lengthen their QL lengthen their Lat on their on their uh front side and I have

him hold there I say what do you feel they're like this hurts my back I'm actually getting some back pain and so we come out of it and it's no wonder again why the body didn't let them stay on plane the body's not allowing them to get in that position we need to actually take an even further step back now we have a pain trigger right

you know so it's it's really valuable I think sometimes to just get athletes very slowly into those positions positions and see okay your your warmup drills are probably not with a bat in your hand your warmup drills might look very different with some plank variations or or hip variations but whatever whatever the cause of that pain might be yeah sure sure and so speaking of like

warmup drills and just drills in general how do you go about choosing a drill that would fit that heater based off their mechanical development or the timing regression side yeah it's so the level certainly helped the levels are a little bit of a guide right so you're not going to look at 512 drills and be like uh where do I pick now you're going to be

like overwhelming right yeah my hitter I'm going to zoom in to play an adaptation now I have four levels and you would you would basically you might not know exactly what level but you're going to be able to say you know what they're either a level one or or two they're either a level three or four or they might be in the middle they're two or

three so you're really only looking at 32 drills and what you're saying is okay try this one out let's see how this feels feels good awesome let's try the next one out how does that feel even better cool and you kind of keep moving along you don't have to do every single one you could you could do one and skip four and see and and know

you're trying to find where that sweet spot is it's a hierarchy again it's my hierarchy so hopefully my hope with this is that coach's look at this and it's like this is great I'm actually going to move it around like this because this makes sense for my hitters you know what I mean this is my own you know basically creating something of their own the idea

of this is this is just the system this is the skeleton and coaches can then apply their own meet their own layers to this to make it make it their own yeah and I was wondering with that the the framework in the system how did you come up I mean it's a brilliant that you've come up with this but is that how did you come up

with this framework and it actually is this the framework and system that you work in to where I don't want to say you can almost plug and play that that point with your athletes and hitters because you have to still be very adaptable as a coach but this is a great system and a framework that you can use you're going forward with each athlete and help

them reach their maximum potential based off what you've created well thanks I appreciate but yeah it's you know it's funny we had a we had an Olympic weightlifting coach come in 2004 2015 so spring of 15 we had been open for less than a year and she had talked about when she works with athletes she had a single triangle and all she talked about was for

Olympic lifting for a safety protocol can they can they feel their positions can they move through their positions so like again holds right isometric holds and then eat like slow tempo movement was her next thing that she would do to teach a movement then she would make them go really lightweight and go fast and then she would add heavy weight so I had that as like

I always felt like that's really really cool for weightlifting and then I kept trying to ask myself how would I do that for hitting how would I do that for hitting and it kind of applied for a little bit but then I finally took a step back and I'm like all right hang on if we only focus on movement they're going to be a really good

swinger and if we only focus on movement and timing they're going to be a really good practice player and if we somehow able to combine the movement capacity or really their movement ability their timing ability and now their mental performance ability now we have a hitter and that was really the three prongs now I've tried over and over again to think of like okay is there

a third side of this pyramid that's mental game but I really don't think so I think mental game is the base or the foundation or the whatever it's just this infinite pool that this thing sits in because mental performance again is just it's going to be so different based on person to person it's going to blend with their own personal experiences coming into it but it

doesn't mean that's not important it's probably the most important thing especially when a hitter gets older so the progression's part and we'll tie up the tie the ball in the show today 28 of cross functionality Cassie's pyramid of hitting the progression part of the pyramid when you know exactly when a hitter is ready to move on to that next face right so for example move on

to movement capacity to speed power or on the other side the pitch speed increase to live pitching when you know or is there not just an inexact science where you just really don't know when the hitter is ready to go and it's kind of trial and error trial by fire. It's probably a little bit of both I so on this pyramid now I have these questions

that says okay can I can the hitter adapt to pitches based on a varying location. Yes awesome let's move up you know for the most part yes can I can the hitter control their wage shift in order to wait for a slow pitch ball. Let's move up you know so we have these questions in place now but it also doesn't mean that just because the hitters

main focus is playing at the rotation that doesn't mean that they're not getting minor exposures to other things where I'm really I might really try to challenge and be like okay I'm going to throw this one draw at them right now and see how they respond to it and that is that's just the part of being a coach right the reason there's not robots there's a

reason it's it's us we're in there with them we're we're you know I don't know if you're ready for this you have I'm gonna say I'm gonna say you are ready for it and sometimes you see hitters that you know they fail at first and then we we introduce that drill again a month later and they realize like shoot I'm doing much better at this now

and it's for them it's their own personal like cool I've grown at this so I get it doesn't have to be this exact science where these are the only two phases you work at but it's certainly honestly where it's helped me the most is when I'm in a team setting environment and I have eight to 12 weeks let's say to work with a team and I

say okay listen the first two weeks we're ready to go and I'm going to do it again we're working on this the next two weeks we're gonna progress to this and it's again I only get one time a week with those guys I'm trying to give them stuff so they can go home and literally linearly progress through this especially because I know I got eight weeks

with them how many times do I have a individual client come in and it's I don't know if they're gonna come back again I don't know how often they're gonna come back but when I get a team that's locked in or you know college coaches can relate to this you know you have your team for X amount of weeks X amount of months you can kind

of start to create hey I want to make sure we're focusing on speed and power at this time and hey I'm talking to the strength and the Ganesh and coach two we're also gonna be doing that in the weight room so it's in conjunction I think conversations like that become important and and progressions like that become important for our sport so is this the overall coaching

framework for softball strength academy the pyramid it is yes yes it's and you know it's neat because if you talk to I did a presentation two years ago at the World Softball Convention and I introduced the framework and the whole part the whole I think the title of the talk was creating a system for heading development right so and coaches I was like so excited to

introduce the system and I was like and with the system I've created this drill library and it was like this spreadsheet of my drills and I thought I was gonna get all these questions about my cool system and all they want it was just like how do I get access to the drill library I'm like but you don't want to create your own drill library you

don't want to do it you're right it's my stuff yeah thank you so it's really great and listen I'm in such a fortunate position where I get to focus on just hitting there's so many coaches who their job is to do hitting and pitching and fielding and defense oh and handle all the travel stuff like there's a lot that's placed on coaches so yeah sometimes they

want to just be handed this is the drill library and they can kind of pick and choose from there but like I said this is not supposed to be like a cemented thing this is really just supposed to be something hitting hit hitters and hitting coaches and then what can you do is just use for creating their own and working their way through their own toolbox

and what's gonna work for everybody. Very good well next week episode 29 if you missed any part of today's episode you can go back and of course in the archives and rewind or fast forward go back and listen to previous episodes watch on cell phones for the Academy YouTube page. Next week though as we alluded to last week the next few weeks we're going to be

talking about hitting as the season ramps up the college baseball season of course on the division one side is beginning very soon spring training is also going to be starting up here for big league guys and then of course minor league camp march but next week we are discussing the mental side more of the mental side of hitting I've talked a lot about the mental side

of hitting with Jake Epstein on the left Epstein hitting podcast numerous times in fact we probably taught at least touch on it once a week and next week Cassie and I hope you just think I was going to be talking about the mental side of hitting which cannot be overlooked by any means by any stretch of the imagination. Yes I would say when I was standing

at the World Series I say it is all the time there's the eight best teams in the country and I looked I'm like everyone here has a good swing everybody here has a good swing everyone here is really good at time I think everyone here is really good at mechanics why is this person batting 400 this person batting 200 why is this person sitting the best

bench and then this person playing and I you know you go back to like at and I think that's why playoffs are so fun to watch and at that elite level what actually separates us you know what actually makes one person beat the other person and at that point I do think it's your mental performance. Yeah so we'll be discussing that mental side of hitting next

week family questions email us dreamboat podcast 21 at gmail.com we appreciate you listening and watching. you