Softball Hitting Drills – Vision Drill 2

August 11, 2010 at 1:45 am | Posted in Hitting | Leave a comment
Tags: Hitting, softball hitting drills, tracking, visualization

Purpose:   To improve pitch recognition abilities. Visualization and tracking is  a big part of softball hitting.

Procedure: Number six to nine softballs with a marker. This drill can be conducted in soft toss or live batting practice environments. The hitter will use solid hitting mechanics to make contact with each feed. After making contact, the hitter will call out the number she saw on the softball, (Number the ball several times to increase visibility.)

Since the rotation will not be as tight on soft-toss feeds, coaches are encouraged to use soft toss when first introducing this drill. As players become more adept at seeing the rotation, progress to a batting practice situation. If the batting-practice pitcher throws with a tight rotation on her ball, players may not be able to identify the numbers. Even so, since they’ll be concentrating on the pitch in an effort to determine the number, the objective of the drill-pitch recognition will be met.