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My Baseball Story
Greg and Rick Hart (All Stars 1988)
I was a Manager and coach in Little League baseball for 13 years. As many fathers I was recruited as a coach because the league was short on people with baseball experience willing to help in the younger divisions. My experience was playing baseball from the time I was 11 years old throughout High School and some College. Little did I know by offering to help out I would be coaching Little League for 13 years. It was the beginning of some of the most wonderful and treasured times of my life.
My oldest son Jeff was about 9 years old at the time. I helped another father that was recruited to be the manager of my oldest son Jeff's team. I fell in love with coaching kids that year and the next year I managed a Minor A team with a couple fathers I recruited. We did pretty well that first year and we won the league the following year. When Jeff graduated to the Little League Major Division it was hard to get a team to manage so I help coach the first year. The following year I was able to manage the Major team. When my son Jeff graduated to the Senior Jr. League I started over in the minor B division with my 8 year old son Greg. A friend from church offered to help me with the Minor B team. He managed and coached in Little League when his twin boys played a few years earlier. We won the Minor B Division that year and came in second place in the Little League District 29 Tournament of Champions. The next year I was asked to manage Jeff's Senior League team. You cannot manage two teams in Little League so I gave the managing job of my Minor B team to my friend and helped him as a coach. That’s right, I managed and coached on two different teams in two different divisions. I don’t recommend that unless you have a lot of time. We won the Minor B Division again the second year and repeated coming in second place in the District 29 Tournament of Champions. I moved up to the Little League Major Division with my friend the next year as his assistant and managed the Big League team Jeff's final year. I helped my friend four years in the Major Division and we won the Major Division 3 out of the 4 years. I finished my Little League coaching career after coaching Greg two more years in the Senior League and he started playing high school baseball.
After a year as a Little League Major Division coach, while pitching batting practice I began to concentrate on why some kids were better hitters than others. Some had a natural ability to hit, making contact without much help. I would have the players hit 10 balls and some would hit 10 quickly and others would take twice as long. After they would hit their 10 balls I would say, “now you can keep hitting as long as you make contact with the ball”. The good hitters would immediately start to hit every ball I pitched. I could bounce the ball before the plate or it could be over their heads and they would still make contact with the ball. I realized the good hitters would hit even better because they would concentrate more on just trying to make contact so they could keep hitting. The good hitters would hit 25 or more pitches in a row till I would say that was enough. They wore me out pitching to them. As I worked with the players that weren’t good hitters I noticed they would get frustrated because they never could hit many more after their 10. When I told them like the good hitters they could keep hitting till they missed the ball, they would usually miss quickly. When I told them to keep their eyes on the ball in frustration they would say “I am watching the ball coach”. From my pitching position I could see that they were not really looking at the ball, but were staring at me, thinking they were watching the ball.
One day it came to me while watching my youngest son Greg and his friend hitting a tennis ball with a small wooden bat. (The kind sold as souvenirs at the Big League games, or given away on fan appreciation days). The bat was about 14 inches long and 1 inch thick. They would bounce the ball in front of them and hit it to one another. As I watched one boy hit the ball with that one inch round bat I noticed that he was watching the ball very carefully to make contact because of the small bat. Knowing that it would be harder to hit with the small bat he watched the ball with greater concentration. When it was my Greg's turn to hit the ball I noticed that he was not concentrating like the other boy and was missing more often and not hitting as well when he did make contact. I told him to keep his eye on the ball as I had many times over the years to my other players. He kept telling me he was watching the ball, but I could see he wasn’t. That is when it came to me. He honestly thought he was watching the ball but was seeing it with peripheral vision. There it was the answer I was looking for all those years! I asked the kids to let me hit the ball to them for a while. I would stare at the ball without thinking about hitting it with the bat and it was so easy, my brain was doing all the work as long as I would look directly at the ball. Then I looked at a spot on the ground and tried to hit the ball. I could still see it but not as clearly. I was able to hit the ball even when I was not looking directly at it, but not nearly as well. I realized at that time all my players in the past honestly thought they were looking at the ball but most the time they weren’t. The brain will tell the arms and hands where the bat should be to make contact with the ball, i.e. hand eye coordination, but you must concentrate on the ball. The brain will even take into consideration the length and size of the bat and equate where the bat should be to hit the ball perfectly. There was my answer to teaching kids to hit as a reflex action. I had to show them that the brain would do the work if they concentrate only on the ball. Now that I had the answer how would I explain it to the players and show them what I meant?
I began to teach my new hitting technique the rest of the time I coached in the Little League Major Division. Our teams won the league 3 out of 4 years. The year we didn’t win we came in 3rd place with a very young inexperienced team. We didn’t always have the best team in the beginning of the season but the second half of the season always belonged to us. Every year we had a nucleus of five to seven good returning players. That was our recipe for success. The good players carried the weaker players till we had time to teach them to field and hit before the second half of the season started.After leaving the Little League Majors with my youngest son Greg for the higher divisions, I worked with older players that were having trouble hitting. I remember one young man 14 years old that was not hitting well. He laughed the day the Senior Major Manager introduced me as the new hitting coach. He was playing on the Junior Varsity baseball team at school and thought a Little League coach couldn’t help him if the high school coach couldn’t. I decided to work with him first to show him I could help him in spite of his statement to the other players. The next week at his school game he went 3 for 4. He came back to the team and told the rest of the players he was wrong. He apologized to me and told the other players to listen to me. That was all it took to get the respect from him and the other players. That year I was asked by coaches in the younger divisions to help their players that were not hitting. I would hold hitting clinics for any teams that wanted to participate. Most all players could be helped if they were not afraid of the ball. Fear of the ball is something that a player must grow out of. You cannot force them to not fear the ball if they have been hit, especially if hit in the head or face. I will talk about that problem later and some methods I used to help them with their fear. I hope I haven’t bored you with the stories but I felt you needed to understand the history and success behind my method of teaching kids to hit.
Remember "Hitting Is Easy"
Rick Hart