Posted by: THG () on Thu Feb 14 09:58:14 2008

> Sorry this is kind of long, I'm now a high school junior, and over the past two seasons I've had probably the biggest turnaround ever. In my freshman year (freshman are at the junior high school in my city with two junior highs feeding into the largest high school in the state)I led my team with a .523 avg in twelve games, and then hit about .450 over the rest of the summer, only striking out 4 times all summer in about 40 games. I'm a big kid at 6'3" and a very strong core and lower body, but I've always been a contact hitter. In my sophomore year though, my JV coach told me the only way I would get to play was if I started to hit for power which is really dumb b/c JV is supposed to be a developmental program for varsity, and his philosophy was win every game. He changed my stance up and I had a ton more power when I hit the ball, but I could barely make contact. Anything I would hit would either be a foul tip backwards or an infield pop up. Then on my junior legion team, my coach was a coach for the local catholic school and he had a lot of his players on my team and always favored them in the line-ups. I would always get a lot reps in batting practice and could always hit the ball then. I even found out how much power I had when I put a ball on the roof of a school across the street from the outfield fence, but that was basically my only highlight of the year. So I've gone almost a year with reduced hitting and just want to get back to my contact hitting. It seems like I always end up with most of my weight on my back foot after swinging, and still am only foul tipping a lot of balls. I also have bad habits from the "power" hitting like a bigger upper cut. What are some things I can do to just get back to my contact form and get away from the "power" form?


Razz. You were put in an unfortunate dilemma. As such, I would even suggest that you consider a tranfer to a different school if in fact you have professional aspirations. With that type of raw potential it is shame that you were forced to change in an effort to get on the field. The catcher from Minnesota Twins is a good example of a contact hitter who is being allowed to develop.