Dear Families,
As another year is coming to a close and a new year is upon us. This is the time of year I want to remind everyone that January and February are the busiest months of the year for our facility. Please book your lessons early to make sure you don’t miss out on important training for the upcoming season.
High School Tryouts are a bit later this year and begin on Monday, March 3rd. Every February we receive numerous requests for training a few weeks before tryouts so book early to reserve your training class and favorite instructor.
Here is a summary of group training or classes that will be offered in January and February:
Youth Arm Care Class: This training is essential in teaching younger players how to properly warm up, take care of their arm, introduce proper long toss, improve arm strength and the importance of “post armcare” drills. Most youth coaches are not familiar with the drills and training involved in this level of training.
Velocity and Arm Care for High School Players: This training is 3 days a week so requires a serious commitment but is essential to improve overall pull down velocity metrics which is one of the 5 categories that college recruiters look for. Every player that has participated in this train has experienced 2-6 MPH increases.
Group Pitching Classes: 8 Weeks of training 1 day per week for players 14 and younger. This training will focus on proper mechanics, grips for different pitches, while focusing on improving command.
Group Hitting Classes: Training focuses on having proper posture, improving overall separation, engaging an aggressive lower half, while addressing any specific mechanical flaws.
Group Catching Classes: Training is 8 weeks long one day per week. Focus will be on proper receiving for all types of pitches, footwork to improve pop time for throws to 2nd base, and blocking.
Strength and Conditioning: Training is 3 days a week and will focus on baseball specific drills like med ball rotational drills to improve overall separation and encourage lower half violence. Speed and agility drills for improving footwork and high repetition weight training to increase strength while not getting overall bulky. We will most likely continue to add classes based on demand. Classes and small group training tends to be our priority in the months of January and February so we can help as many players as possible.
NOTE: High School allows 3 workouts a week starting in January but for serious players that is simply not enough. When managing our pitchers, we focus on arm care first and we start building up their bullpen work so they are ready to compete at tryouts with the endurance to throw 80 pitches by March 3rd. First games are in the 2nd week of March so January and February are essential time to develop and train pitchers to be close to peak performance by March.
In addition to the above, we will have clinics for younger players on January 2nd, 3rd and the MLK day Monday the 20th.
Training is not simply about repetitions, it's about good, high quality repetitions.
Sincerely,
Tim Driscoll
Co-Owner
503 Baseball and Softball Academy