Suzy Willemssen: Hi! I'm Suzy Willemssen. I'm a Travel Ball and high school softball coach. I've Aaron here helping me. We're going over some basic fastpitch softball skills. In particular, we're going to be discussing some key parts to hitting and we're going to review the stance and how we want to get rhythm and movement and why that's an essential to proper hitting mechanics. Also, I want to say that all great hitters have common elements to their swing. So, it doesn't matter if you're Lisa Fernandez, if you are Derek Jeter, if you're Arod, if you're Crystl Bustos all of them actually swings the bat the same way. So, I know there's controversy that there is a softball swing, there's a baseball swing. Now, there is a just one great swing and that doesn't matter if you play baseball or softball, these swings all have the some common characteristics.
One of them, we'll talk right now about is the stance. You could either be start out with an open stance. In the open stance your front foot is going to be back a little bit, so we call this is an open stance. You can have your feet squared, so this is you know square and or you can have start off with a closed stance. In that case, how your front foot is going to be closer to the plate. It doesn't matter really how you want to start, but what you want to do is make sure before you start swinging the bat that you have your feet in pretty much straight alignment and that your body is square to the plate. So, whatever you would do you have to get into this position. It's also crucial in key that you have both your eyes looking straight at the pitcher and that their level. Often, players will have their head tilted and they'll have one eye looking. We don't walk around this way, I don't see girls, I mean each other like this, so you got to have both eyes leveled, imagine you had a laser coming off your nose and it should be going straight towards the pitcher.
As you know, its here Aaron. She's got a nice flexing in her knees and both of her knees are inside of her feet. She has a slight bend that her waist and she has her hands up around her armpit, a little about shoulder level. Again, nice and relaxed and she has her bat at a 45-degree angle. So, this is where we want to be before we start initiating our swing and you can see that her elbows are nice and relaxed. They're nice and down, it's easy. She's got her front elbow down, all the way a little bit and her back elbow is down, but we've got still a little bit of separation here from her back. So, this is going to be a position again that she wants to get to before she starts to initiate her swing.
As we talked about earlier, hitting is all about timing and what you want to do is make sure you get the bat to the ball in contact consistently and hitting the ball square every single time. If you start late, you can't get that time back. In fact, if one-one hundredth of a second is ten inches. So, lot of times people will be like a little statue and they'll just be rigid, they don't have any movement, they don't have rhythm in their swing and then they are like wait, wait, wait, wait and then they try to go, that's often difficult. So, what Aaron would be doing here in her stance that she is kind of nice and relaxed, she's got a little movement. You'll see some of the major leaguers and some of the, in fact, fastpitch softball players you know, they might have a high leg kick. Kelly Kretschman starts open and then it gets here, but they all do some kind of movement to get themselves going to have a little dance in their stance, so to speak, so they can make sure they get everything ready, so when its time to initiate the actual swing part of the swing mechanics that they're ready to go and that'll help make sure that they're going to be on time, consistently, and have the bat hitting the ball hard, that's what we want. Hitting the ball hard consistently, hitting the ball square.
So, let's just review again a little bit here with Aaron. Again, she's got the bat about 45-degree angle. She's got both the eyes are going to be looking towards the pitcher lever, nice and soft, she's going to create in her way whatever she wants to do for a little bit of rhythm, a little bit fluidness right now in her stance. In next segment, we'll talk a little bit our negative and positive moves, then the actual swing part itself.
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