Posted by: Robie (alinda@metc.net) on Mon Jun 28 11:01:27 2010

> I coach 7 year olds and have been following this site for a couple of years. I teach them rotational but it is more about enhancing their natural swings than teaching them soem complex system. I find that kids naturally have a rotational swing and its the coaches that mess them up.

My daughter had a natural rotational swing and led the high school team in hitting thru her junior year. She pulled the ball and would hard line drives. She never learned to wait and go with the pitch but she could turn and hit the top pitchers that threw with velocity.
Her senior year they hired a new coach. He ad played a lot of baseball and taught linear mechanics. As you can guess, my daughters batting average dropped in half. Weak bloopers and ground balls.
My daughter graduated but I still like to follow the team. The coach has done an excellent job of teahcing "hands to the ball" and now the teams batting stats are at the bottom of the conference. I laugh when he says on the radio that the the idea in softball is to get the bat on the ball. With that strategy wouldn't you want all your hitters go up to the plate and bunt? I agree with the previous posters that many coaches do more harm than good. They have good intentions but for whatever reason they can not grasp the physics behing rotational hitting. I had a excellent softball coach tell me that if has a player hiitng the ball hard , he just leaves her hitting alone- he doesn't want to mess her swing up. In summary, no kid is too young to teach rotaional mechnics.Ifyou leave them alone and let them take a bat and some balls and go to the back yard they will eventually- depending on their atletic ability- develope rotational mechanics.
In summary, please study this site before before instucting any kid how to swing- and hope their coaches do the same.