I’m coaching a 13-14 year old team, i’m an assistant because I’m still playing myself…
and i swear so many kids complain about their arm hurting its ridiculous, if they pitch bad it’s because they’re arm hurt…I remember when i was 12 and we had the all star tournament I had bronchitis and could barely breathe, i was coughing horribly and my parents wanted me to stay home but there was no way i was missing a game.
I’ve sprained my ankle during the week playing basketball where it still hurt pretty bad to run on it and pitch on it but that wasn’t going to make me miss a game.
I had two kids throwing 20 pitches had them rest for about 5 minutes and throw 20 more then sent them out to do long toss. I was working with the infielders and I look out to see their “long toss” was 20 ft apart from each other. They’re arms were “hurt”…so anyway I tell them they’re arm is supposed to be sore when you haven’t been throwing regularly in the offseason.
One of the kids fathers second guessed me in front of the team, I’m still pretty irritated by it but I had a talk with him about it. When I had them throwing the 20 pitches on the mound it was nothing but fastballs and I had them throwing about 75% velocity. We start playing in a couple weeks and this parent expects his kid to be out there throwing 60-70 pitches at 100% strength with virtually no conditioning on the arm.
I just don’t get it, and of course the person’s father is one of those dad’s whose never played a day of baseball in his life but he thinks he knows everything there is to know.
Kids just don’t throw as hard as they did 8 years ago where I’m at, it’s like most of him have lost that gamer spirit. Every team I’ve worked with has had 2 or 3 kids with that killer instinct, you can tell they really wanna be out there, improve, and learn but others wanna take it so slow and if they gotta bruise they don’t wanna do anything.
:x