You Can’t Fix What You Don’t Understand

When you’re all alone in the eight foot circle and things seem to be falling apart around you…who are you gonna call? If your answer is anything other than “your own self,” you’ll probably get a busy signal.

While watching a teaching segment on The Golf Channel about how to correct a slice (golf’s version of a fastball on the outside corner that ends up hitting a right hand batter in the back) it became incredibly obvious to me how alike athletic movements from different sports are and how understanding the problems with one can help you with another.

It is certainly a primary objective in the training of our athletes to provide them with the best information and methodologies for developing optimal mechanics.  But, perhaps even more important, is a detailed explanation of why we teach what we teach.

If you are riding in a car that suddenly starts to shake, sputter and smoke, leaving you and all of the occupants of that vehicle stuck on the side of the road, unless you have a clear working knowledge of internal combustion engines, you are in trouble. Put more simply; you can’t fix what you don’t understand.

We neither expect nor want our students to blindly accept what we are teaching. Our most successful pitchers and hitters, over the years, are the ones who question, who inquire into the nuts and bolts of our instruction so that they may develop their own understanding of how their natural body movements, and the mechanics we teach, relate to each other. We give all our girls the same message: “Understand what you are learning; pay attention to the results, both positive and negative, and you will become your own best teacher. ”

We, as coaches, can’t always be there in crucial game situations to point out the mechanical flaw that is creating, for example, a consistently low and inside delivery. If, however, you have understood, as a student, the relationship between premature hip rotation and the resulting inability of your pitching hand to follow the throw zone, you will rely on that knowledge to give yourself the ability to adjust in any situation.

We are thrilled for the on-field success of our athletes. But my most satisfying accomplishment is when our former students return from college or graduate school, show up at one of our clinics, and start providing flawless instruction to a class of new students. They remember the days when the greatest challenge to their own evolution was trying not just to learn, but to understand.