Posted by: DJH (dennisharrison@writeme.com) on Thu Apr 7 10:25:38 2005

I'm the batting coach for my son's 14U select team. It took him about 2 weeks to get the hang of it. He had a good swing to start (linear) and was hitting well, but we've seen a marked improvement in his power.

Understanding the 2 week adjustment may not be normal, we have still started most of the team on this regimen. It won't hurt the weaker hitters and I gave the better hitters an option on whether they wanted to try this.

I think for the older kids with decent swings, the adjustments are not great enough to really impact their in-season efforts... at least it wasn't for my son. I started during a light week and in fact he showed immediate improvement.

My suggestion would be to start with one or two players that are ggod contact hitters but have low slugging percentages. Use them as models to make them and you 'believers' and then the team will want to work with you on this.

The second kid we worked through this had many more swing issues and in about 3 weeks he is now hitting the ball with authority. He's almost the smallest kid on the team, but I expect him to be able to hit the fence soon... we have a game tonight. Now that the rest of the team sees his progress, they are lining up to be next.

The third kid took to it immediately and lined a double off the wall in his first at bat... he had been a singles hitter and our leadoff guy.

Just one guy's opinion.... hope it helps