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Softball Batting Skills - Bat Selection and Grip

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  • Suzy Willemssen

     
    703-978-3166

    Suzy grew up in Waterloo, Iowa where she was the first female to play in the boys baseball program. She was a 4 sport athlete in high school and was an all-state player in volleyball, basketball and softball. She played softball at the University of Iowa, where she also earned a B.S. in Physical Education Suzy is currently the head coach of Blue Jays Gold, an 18u ASA junior olympic gold team and is also the Varsity Softball Head Coach at Chantilly HS. Prior to the Chantilly position, she was the Assistant Varsity Softball Coach for West Springfield High School from 2003-2005. In 2004 Suzy was awarded the Patriot District Assistant Coach of the Year. She has over 35 years of experience either as a player, coach or teaching professional. In addition to her private lessons, she has run or been an instructor for numerous youth, high school and college softball camps and clinics. Suzy gives instruction on all facets of the sport and is known for her knowledge, passion and enthusiasm for the game.  

  • Softball Batting Skills - Bat Selection and Grip

    In this video series, professional softball instructor and coach Suzy Willemssen describes a number of basic skills required to play fastpitch softball. The videos are designed for the beginning softball player, but include a variety of tips and techniques that would be useful to players of any skill level. This video series includes an overview of the basic equipment and the basic skills involved when throwing, fielding, pitching and hitting a ball.

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    Softball, Fast pitch, Baseball, Ball

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  • Transcripts

    Hi. I am Susie Willimson and I am a Travel Ball and high school softball coach. We are going over some basic fastpitch softball skills. In this particular set of clips, we will be going over some hitting. We will be discussing things like bat selection, grip, your stance, movement and rhythm. Id like to call it the dancing the stance, the contact position and the follow-through. When we talk about right now bat selection, its always a question I get. A general rule of thumb that can help particularly young people decide what is a good type bat for them, is simply to take the bat they think they would like and just hold it out in front with your bottom hand, so if you are a right-handed hitter that would be your left hand and you should be able to hold that bat out in front for at least 20-30 seconds without having your hands drop. So, if you can manage that, that bat should probably be fine. You can also use your toe when somebody takes the swing, if it looks like the player is swinging the bat or if the bat is swinging the player. Obviously, we want the player to be swinging the bat but holding that bat out in front for about 20-30 seconds that would be general rule of thumb that, that bat should probably be okay, at least a good starting point. Must talk a little bit about the grip. We want to your grip to either be with the "knocking knuckles" lined up or slightly offset and with your offset grip you are going to have your top hand knuckles in between your big knuckles and you are knocking knuckles of your bottom hand. I prefer a slightly offset grip anywhere between knocking knuckles and offset you should be fine. Besides having the knuckles in that position we want to make sure that bat is placed in the base of our fingers that will allow us to have a whipping action that we are able to get and we will discuss that a little later in one of our other segments. We dont want to have the bat jammed back into out palms. That is going to be kind of bind enough everything and we dont want to way out in the finger tips because thats not a very strong position as well. So, those are some basic principles regarding grip and bat type and now well move on to stance and getting a little dance and rhythm into our swing.

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