You’re about to meet a hitter for the first time. You know nothing about him other than his name. You have a handful of tools. You have one hour. You want to create a positive experience for them, knowing this might be the only time you ever have the chance to work with them. How would you spent that hour? 

What would you ask? Do? Collect? What kind of information would you need? Give? When you feel like you have enough, how would you know where to start? Would you give them drills? Would you break down video? How much would you try on that first day, knowing it might be your only day with them?

Remember – you only have an hour. 

…

The root of this challenge comes down to a conflict between two precious resources: Information and time. If you know nothing about the athlete in front of you, there’s a base level of information you need to gather to make good decisions. This level of information varies coach to coach. But the catch, in this situation, is you don’t have endless amounts of time to gather information. If you spend a half hour asking questions, you need to be really precise in the next half hour. You don’t have a ton of time for trial and error. What you do needs to work. 

At the same time, athletes don’t have an endless supply of energy. If you spend the entire hour swinging, their work will come to a point of diminishing returns. You might eventually find the right drill to execute on, but the execution might be sloppy simply because they’re tired. Fatigue makes cowards of us all. 

There are tons of resources you could use to get information on this hitter: Physical screening, general questioning, objective bat/ball feedback, 2D video analysis. But each of these has a time cost. Whatever you collect has to do two simple things: 1) Educate that hitter on exactly where they’re currently at, and 2) Show them exactly how they can get better. Would all of these tools help you do those two things? Quite potentially. But this isn’t about what could be helpful. This is about getting exactly what you need out of that kid to change his life. 

And if you give the body the right things to do, it will talk endlessly to you. 

…

Being able to accurately identify problems, bridge gaps in understanding, and make good decisions on someone you have limited context with is a tremendous challenge – but a fun one. You don’t need to know everything about them to make a good decision. You just need enough to know enough so you can make a decision. It’s not about being precise. It’s about seeing a path. You can always pivot from it. 

If you’re evaluating how someone swings, there’s no better information than observing how they move. You can know everything possible about their joints, resting posture, and where they have ranges of motion. But until you see how the pieces fit together, they’re just pieces. It’s one thing to anticipate how they should move based on how they screen. It’s another to watch how they actually move. Start with what you know for sure. 

This also starts without a bat. 

Warm ups are hidden goldmines when it comes to gaining information about how guys move. If designed well, you can get a two for one: You can prime their body for training, while observing how it moves and produces force through multiple planes of motion. And it doesn’t require a ton of tools or space. You just have to design something that will give you clues as to how they produce force. 

If you only have an hour to learn as much as you need about a specific player, I’d start by taking them through a warm up that looks something like below. This sequence utilizes a waterbag and waterball, but the tool is less important than the movements themselves:

• Single leg/two leg hops 
• Skater hops with a stick 
• Reverse lunge with rotation 
• Shuffle swing (both sides) 
• Split stance rotations 
• Waterbag swing 

Some of the information you could gather from this warm up includes:

• Are they able to pull out muscle slack efficiently, or does it take a lot of time for them to change direction? 
• Do they have a hip extension/vertical force bias, or do they prefer hip flexion/horizontal forces to overcome inertia? 
• Do they have an internal rotation bias, or an external rotation bias at the hips? 
• How do the hips and chest interact? Are they able to get across their body without compensation? Where and when do they create their hip shoulder – if they create any at all? 
• What is their current strategy for rotation? Do they shift or turn? Do the hips drive the move or does the chest? Do they land more neutral, closed, or open? 

Some of these things might be obvious. Others might take a little more investigation. Start where you have clarity and work from there. If the guy who loves hip extension in the warm up starts forcing hip flexion when he swings, you’ll have an exercise you can refer back to – or several – when you try to make your case for how to get him to move differently.

We all have a specific set of movements we utilize when we try to create force. Figure out some clues before they pick up a bat. It’ll help you a ton when you see how they move with a bat. 

…

After you’ve observed the body moves in the warm up, you need to figure out some stuff about the actual swing. For me, I’d start with two simple questions:

1. Do they consistently deliver the barrel?
2. What does the ball do when the barrel gets delivered?

The game doesn’t care how you look when you swing. It only cares about what you do when the bat connects with the ball. If the ball isn’t doing what you want it to off the bat, that’s where we need to start peeling back layers. The first layer would be how the bat moves.

Some things I’d consider include:

• What’s the overall shape? Flatter? More vertical? Steep entry? More shallow?
• Where does the bat start? How does it move during the forward move? Where does it get to at launch?
• How does it move through contact? Is there any sort of depth? Length? 
• Does the overall path afford any sort of forgiveness? 

You can start to gain an appreciation for these things within the first few swings. Like a fingerprint, everyone has things unique to how they move. Style is a little more obvious than substance in the initial look. But as you take a further look, the substance should start to separate itself. How high or low your hands work isn’t as nearly as important as the overall shape of the path through contact. 

If there is an issue with the shape of the path, for example, we have to start peeling back layers. Identifying “what” you see is one thing. Thoroughly understanding “why” it’s happening is where coaching begins. Everyone sees the problems. You have to find the roots of those problems. It could be a bad swing thought (e.g. thinking down and actually swinging down). It could be a poor lower half (e.g. front side heavy, pelvic rotation issues). It could be because they’re a speed guy and they’ve been told their whole life to beat out ground balls. 

You can get further information on the thought process by observing how they operate in contexts important to them – tee, flips, etc. Their intention is going to emerge in environments they can control. The game is going to demand a different set of rules. If you can see what they do before the game demands they do something differently, you’ve gained some important clues – even if it’s nothing. In either situation, you have to change how they move. It’s just a matter of whether you have to start with a different thought process around that movement. 

Better models create opportunities for better movement. 

…

This is the point in the process where my thoughts have evolved.

By now, you should have enough information on how the body moves, bat moves, and their general process to see a path for your work. This is where I used to start plugging and playing certain concepts, drills, or ideas. You can explain a concept and try a drill. Show them some video. If you get a lightbulb to click, you build and feed off that momentum. If something doesn’t, you pivot and keep taking calculated shots. It’s a fun process, but there’s a ton of pressure to find that one thing they’re going to resonate with. Your credibility depends on that moment. 

I think you can alleviate a lot of that pressure by scripting out something ahead of time. Something that’s a little more general in nature, but has the potential to get more specific as you get to know them better. The odds you find the solution to their swing on day one is slim. You only understand so much about them.

I think you’re better off observing where they first exist on a variety of spectrums. Our biases don’t fall into these perfect buckets where everything aligns in an expected way. Movement is messy. If you bucket aerials on the front end, you miss opportunities downstream to see where they might exhibit some terrestrial traits. And those traits are ultimately really important. 

Below is an example of something I’d run a hitter through:

• Open anchor no stride 
• Closed anchor no stride/split stance 
• Shuffle basketball swing (or baseball, depending on equipment)
• Step back 
• Step through/behind 
• Low/in pitch location, high/pullside ball flight 
• Up/away pitch location, low/oppo ball flight 
• Heavy bat pull side HR, light bat oppo gap HR 

Some exercises are going to get their body to sync up nicely. Others, not so much. Which is exactly what you should want in this situation. The focus isn’t on finding the perfect drill. It’s learning more about how they move by watching them execute a variety of drills that test their body in different ways. 

Here is where you can start to take your understanding from the work prior and apply it a little more deeply:

• What kind of spacing and angles do they create throughout the swing? 
• Do they do well with more movement or less?
• How do they create leverage? Do they favor the back leg or lead leg more? 
• Is it tougher for them to create tension or release tension? When do they create this tension? 
• What changes when the movement becomes more athletic? Less?
• What parts of the field are easier to access? More difficult? 

Now is the perfect time to connect the dots with what you observed in the warm up. Did your expectation for how they should move match up to how they actually moved? Are there any movements they excelled at in both the warm up and drill work (e.g. shuffle swings and shuffle waterball swings). Did the inefficiencies you observed in the warm up match up to what you saw with the swing (e.g. front side instability, knee dominant back leg loading)?

This is where the fun begins. 

Because at this point in the process, you’re not really guessing. You’ve done the hard work. You’ve observed how they move in a variety of contexts. You have a pretty deep understanding on what they’re doing and how they try to express force. Pretty strong signal exists for where you should start your work. You’re the right conversation and a few videos away from bringing it to life.

And I promise you, from experience – you’ve got plenty of time left in that hour to bring it to life. 

…

In one way or the other, we’re all going to be in situations where we’re faced to gather a lot of information about an athlete with limited amounts of time and context. Those guys ultimately need a customized plan down the road to make the most out of their training experience. But I’m not sure how specific that plan needs to be on day one. 

It might be better to generalize on the front end and specialize on the back end. 

None of the progressions I provided above contained really complex movements or drills. They were all very basic. But when done in tandem with a variety of complementary movements, they can start to become really helpful. You can’t discover someone’s preference if you only give them exercises that expose them to one side of the spectrum. And even if they bias a certain way, who’s to say they wouldn’t benefit from the other side of the spectrum? Does the back leg guy really just need to crush back leg drills, or would a front side drill every once in a while help balance him out in a positive way?

You don’t need to be precise early on when you’re still getting to know guys. Something they might resonate with now might not be something they need in three months. They might even inspire you to create a completely new drill you wouldn’t have thought of when you first saw them swing on day one. But if you start with a general framework that checks a lot of boxes, you increase your ability to make more accurate decisions down the road. The individualized plan isn’t created on day one. It’s created over time. 

Whether you have an hour to work, or three months to work, I see a ton of value in creating a training experience that gives you what you need to know about how a hitter moves. It shouldn’t take a ton of time and it shouldn’t require a ton of tools. Outside of a tweak here and there, it’s something you can use with anybody. It doesn’t mean you’re going to run the same thing back on day two. But on day one, the information you gather is a lot more important than how precise you are with your judgement. 

Design what you want. Get what you need. Let the body do the talking. Adjust as you go. The pressure should never be on building the perfect plan on day one. The pressure is making sure you have enough information to deliver a better plan on day two. That starts with – but is not limited to – what you do on day one. 

Especially if you only have one hour.