Suzy Willemssen: Hi! I'm Suzy Willemssen. I'm a Travel Ball in high school ball softball coach. Aaron is going to be helping me demonstrate some basic fastpitch softball skills. In this one, we're going to be talking about bunting and in particular, a sacrifice bunt. Bunting in fastpitch softball is huge, you get a dominating pitcher on the mount, you got to be able to get that ball, put it in play and you get your teammates on base, your job with the sacrifice bunt is to move her to the next base. You're giving yourself up to move your teammate; you got to be able to execute this skill. So again, whether you're the number four batter in your team or the number eighth batter in team, you've got to be able to get down the sacrifice bunt.
So, let's review some of the key principles elements to good sacrifice bunt. You want to make sure that you're up in the box and what will happen here is that when you make contact with the ball you have a greater chance of it being not fair. Often, personality types sacrifice bunt in the way back. They might put it down, but the ball is going to end-up being in fault territory. So again, you want to be up in the box. As you can see Aaron here, she's got the bat at the top of the strike zone. This will also help you because if anything is higher than your hand you know its not going to be a strike. In sacrifice bunt, we want to bunt strikes. We'll take a walk that'll move our teammate as well. So, top of the strike zone is where you want the bat. You'll also notice that the bat is pretty much horizontal. You can have a slight angle to it, that's not a problem; we certainly don't want this type of angle with the bat. So, pretty much horizontal, you'll notice that Aaron's bottom hand is down at the knob of the bat and she's got her top hand, her fingers are cupped and behind the bat. Again, this will ensure that her hands, her fingers won't get hit by the ball.
She has got a firm grip, she doesn't have a death grip on the bat, but she has a nice, firm handle grip with her hands. Her eyes are down, in a lot times are looking out, a lot of times I'll tell my players to pretend their smell in the bat. Again, we want to get the eyes as close to the level of the bat, again, that will help them to be able to read their pitch. We want the bat out in front. In addition, you can see with Aaron, we have her weight is on her front leg and her knees are nice and relaxed and flexed, but you want your weight on that front leg -- as we talked about we have the bat at the top of the strike zone, so pitches that are going to be lower and our strikes again, we're going to use our knees to go down and move the bat. We do not want to be dropping the bat head because if we drop the bat head then we're going to get a pop up. So, keep the bat horizontal, use your legs, use your knees to go down and get balls that are lower than the bat and that are still in the strike zone and also a good way to think about when you want to make contact with the ball is to pretend you're trying to catch the ball with the bat, so that'll give you just a little bit of give again, you have the bat out in front, but just a little bit of give the kind of deaden it a little bit, so it'll make it a much tougher a play for the defense.
Again, bunting is all about attitude. Your one job is I'm going to get this ball down on the ground and I'm going to move my teammate. So, these are just some essentials that you need to keep in mind when you're trying to execute a good sacrifice bunt.
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