Why haven’t you fixed your crow hop yet? (UPDATED INFO)

Do you still have an illegal hop in your footwork when you pitch? It could be hurting your chances of getting into college!

This is a topic we’ve already discussed at great length, but in the past week I’ve gotten several additional comments and emails about it. It’s so important that I want to make sure it’s constantly accessible to everyone. Plus, since I last compiled our anti-hopping resources, I’ve posted some additional helpful articles.

Still not convinced this is important?

Hopping is illegal, but unfortunately this is not a rule that is enforced very often, so many of you have cruised right through high school without addressing the issue. So why should you care now?

a) Even if it were made legal tomorrow, hopping is robbing you of speed, accuracy, and movement. A LOT of it.

b) It could be hurting your chances of getting into college. Yesterday I sat down with my head coach and we looked at DOZENS of videos of pitchers. He said to me, “Coach, tell me which of these girls are pitching illegally. If it doesn’t look like they’d be able to fix it quickly, I don’t want them” He didn’t even look at their speed and stats first. The really scary thing was, ALL BUT TWO of the pitchers were hopping!

How to fix it

#1: UNDERSTAND THE PHASES OF THE DRIVE THROUGH. Take a look at this explanation with animations of Monica Abbott (who, in case you didn’t know, holds the record for fastest single windmill pitch in the world among women). If you’re hopping, you need to fix both phases. The hop takes place during phase 1, so address that first. But, when you hop, chances are that after your drive foot re-plants, your phase 2 also completely breaks down.

#2: UNDERSTAND FRONT-SIDE RESISTANCE. If you’re hopping, you are probably taking enough posture away from your drive leg to ruin your front side resistance. Take a look at this explanation with animations and this video. Try taking a video of yourself with the app Coach’s Eye and using their tools to draw a line up from your own front foot to see how you compare with Monica Abbott in my explanation.

#3: UNDERSTAND WHY YOU STARTED HOPPING. No one taught you to hop. Sure, your pitching coach should have said something sooner… but I know a lot of you are also self-taught. I guarantee you didn’t hop on day 1 but as you grew and got more aggressive, somewhere along the line that hop sneaked in there. You hop because your muscles are too weak to support the explosiveness of your pitch. If you don’t have the hip stability to maintain your forward knee position (see Abbott) while your body opens into a K, that leg is going to collapse or come off the ground. If you don’t have the core strength to maintain your posture over your drive leg, you will lean forward and your drive leg will become dangerously weightless. Try these strength training suggestions.

#4: DRILLS. Do not move on to drills until you have a solid understanding of the above three concepts. Then check these out.