Young Fire for Learning

There was one time that I very distinctly remember where I was so excited to learn something new, and that does not happen very often so this had to have been very very exciting for me.  The thing that I was so interested in learning about was pitching. One day at practice my coach was making every single girl get up there and try to get the ball over the plate. Mind you I was only nine and one of the youngest on the team that year and me being as shy as I was back then this was a very scary experience that made me just want to cry.  But I got up there anyways and did it and surprisingly I was not to bad. After that day I continued to pitch during practices and at home trying and trying to get better. After a few practices my coach had started limiting the amount of pitchers we had on our team and I was one of the few he had choose to keep going. For the next year or two my mom and I continued to look up different types of pitching drills on youtube and getting advice from people we knew who pitched, my dad also brought me to a lot of different clinics, A LOT.  

A few years pass and I’ve had this pitching coach that one of my friends had found.  She taught me so much that had to do with all of the different fundamentals that had to do with not only pitching but with the game in general.  I stayed with her for a few years but then we both realized she had brought me as far as she could so we moved on to someone new because there was still more to learn.  After we stopped going to her for lessons I had a new pitching coach for about two months. She did not really teach me very much but it was nice to get in the extra practice a few times a week.  After seeing her for a few weeks my dad had found a pitching coach who happened to be the Bowdoin College pitching coach. She taught me three more pitches and variations on how to throw them. She also taught me many tricks to make sure I keep my mechanics the same.  She coached me for about a year and a half to two years but then we just kind of lost touch because we were both so busy.

These three pitching coaches that I had during my childhood taught me pretty much all that I know but since I’ve been a sophomore in high school I’ve been self taught well with the help of my dad of course, with the little things like practice.  Having the privilege to be able to have these experiences and different pitching coaches really inspired my fire to learn as much as I can. This is because there are always so many different perspectives on softball and how things should be taught and I have always found that all very interesting.

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