Pitching Skill Acquisition

Opposed v Unopposed

Should we do a bunch of training in isolation or should we have guys play more games? Safe to say we would all agree that we want “athletes” on the field. We want guys who have “instincts”…

But what does this mean? How do we develop it? Do we “not over coach” and throw the player into a sink or swim environment on the field so they develop “instincts”? Do we stop simulated games constantly to create “teachable moments”? What the heck does it mean to be an “athlete”? How do we define that?

Research is coming out rapidly on Ecological Dynamics… this is a model that illustrates how we as coaches can change understanding and action in an athlete by planning or observing 3 things…

Organism- the individual (think size of a player or how good their eye sight is)

Task- the instructions (think rules of the game, what bat to use.. etc)

Environment- natural elements (think turf vs grass or the presence of a crowd vs not)

At any point these 3 things impact our abilities to deliver applicable changes to our athletes. Even with this detail in hand it can often be difficult for coaches to understand their role in the over all skill acquisition process. When do we step in to intervene? When does speaking too much become over coaching? If there is such a thing as over coaching then there must be the possibility of under coaching right? Truthfully we all just want to choose the best practice plan to assure our athletes receive the best outcome! 

So back to our core question… which is better unopposed or opposed?

It seems opposed small sided games teach athletes in a way no “lesson” can. Most of this comes from the elevated intent most athletes gather when in gamified environments. Now with that being said I also think it’s massively important for us to recognize that not all games have to be “the game”. Creative practice models are often best when coaches implement consistent skill development games with the goal of using the game to strengthen a team weakness.

Small sided games are used around the world and universally in other sports. Sports like soccer where “academies” take on the responsibility of long term athletic development are known for investing millions in what look to be play grounds. These playground are meticulously crafted small sided game environments. These players are sculpted by years of skill specific small sided games.

If you think about it, it’s what we used to do as kids in the back yard. We set up challenges, expanded our creativity, threw things over trees, hit things with various size bats, jumped over things just because we wanted to “see if we could”.

That creativity is disappearing today in our youth and we have a responsibility now more than ever to encourage this challenge of pushing athletic boundaries in our athletes.

How we push these kids athletic creativity matters… how these kids respond to our encouragement matters. Again back to our question, opposed or unopposed? How do we teach our kids to improve?

Here’s the frame work we use at KP. It’s a simple test re-test model…

Step 1- “The Skill” (Opposed)

Putting an athlete into an opposed environment doesn’t mean they have to have a hitter in the box. Opposed means they just have to have an environmental constraint for feedback. Think about a pen where there is no hitter, then think about a pen where there is a hitting dummy in the box. Hitting the dummy provides feedback and can lead to improvement. This is opposed.

This for us is using posts to determine a quality miss from a poor miss on the zone. This for us is using a smaller than strike zone BP Zone and additionally putting an intended zone green target up to identify the “ideal” location of a pitch”. This is also working sequences and establishing “consequential” counts in pen where an athlete can walk a batter in a pen even with a constrained zone.

Check Out BP Zones Here!

We use opposed pen, live AB or game data for evaluation as much as possible. All of our pens are generally seen to be “evaluations” of athlete. It’s our time to discover how the athlete is developing. We want this to be the skill in a full game environment or resemble the skill in a full game environment as best as possible. We ask questions like…

-Is this athlete making faster adjustments pitch to pitch to achieve the desired outcome?

-Is this athlete showcasing any newly formed good or bad habits from training?

-Is this athlete expressing frustration or excitement surrounding the outcome?

Then from there we begin to consider our step 2…

2- “Unopposed”

At KP we use a skill acquisition model we developed that goes “Assess, Feel, Drill”…

ASSESS

In our Step 1 we covered the assess aspect of our skill acquisition model. Assess is not just the “test” though. One of the most overlooked aspects of an assessment is the period of time at which an athlete begins to “understand” the problem. Assessments are important but how we communicate the problem to the athlete is the MOST important part of an assessment. It is critical an athlete understands the difference of “good” and “bad” through the lens of the assessment to invoke change. Too often coaches stand and deliver a high level assessment and the athlete listens to how smart the coach is but doesn’t understand the actual training demand. Smart coaches are good. Smart players win games.

Once the assessment is clear to our athletes we can move to the next step, Feel.

FEEL

Towel drills, water bags, belts with bungee cords on them, swing aids that you can’t actually hit things with… these are all things that while they resemble the skill aren’t actually the skill. They are designed to help you understand the skill… but again they aren’t the skill.

My eyes were opened to this at the start of my career. I got to spend a few years in a biomechanics lab where we tested all kinds of movement. Without fail what we found is that modalities are great of allowing players to think about isolated movements but they almost always cause a drastically different movement pattern than the actual skill. A good example of this is a towel during a pitchers towel drill. Athletes don’t experience as much layback, abduction angles get higher, elbow extension happens at a much different time and the timing of what would be release is much different than when throwing.

For this reason many in the industry demonize modalities. It’s become popular to hate towel drills but most can’t articulate why they don’t like them. Instead they use a water bag and it’s funny to watch because water bags fall under the same category… just a modality for FEEL.

So what is a feel? A feel is a place to find a cue. It’s an isolated movement or constraint that allows the coach to help the athlete identify how they can strategize mentally to achieve the desired outcome.

A great example of this is if you have ever walked around mimicking a small part of a golf swing or throwing motion over and over and over… in your head you think “…right there… boom. Right there… ok flatten the wrist just a touch… keep the thumb down from the start on this one… boom. There it is. That’s what I am looking for. Repeat that.” Over and over you are in your head trying to strategize the movement cue “thumb down”, “wrist flat”…. You aren’t actually throwing but you are planning to take this and you are eager to go put it into action to see if it will translate to the actual skill next time you go to practice.

Feels are cues. Most private lessons today coaches spend hours of time here. Over and over getting the athlete to establish a cue. Sometimes this is all the athlete gets from the coach. Cue upon cue upon cue.

That takes us to the last part though… it’s time to implement the cue. How we choose to implement is important. It time for a drill.

DRILL

Everyone has a new “drill” today. Hop on Instagram for 5 min and you see “3 drills to improve your fastball velocity”. The mistake most make with drills is they don’t understand that drills themselves are worthless. It’s not the drill that makes you throw harder. It’s not the drill that “fixes” that mechanical issues. Drills provide us a grounds to achieve a higher probability of success in changing skill.

When an athlete does a drill they should be thinking on the cue they’ve established through feels and applying it to the understanding they have crested in assessment.

Prior to the drill the athlete must consider the cue they are using, “thumb down out of the glove, thumb down, thumb down…”. Then they make the throw through the drill, “YES that was GOOD!”. Because they have a comprehension of good vs bad they can now vet throw to throw success of the cue into drill.

If enough YES then the athlete can move to a less constrained drill still unopposed and keep working on solidifying that skill. Too many NO, the athlete needs to regress the drill to a more constrained position or go back to the FEEL stage to rethink the cue.

At some point we move to step 3 and this is the unique part that most coaches miss… opposed development…

Step 3- “Small Sided Games” (Opposed)

Most coaches make the mistake of constantly assuming that athletes can bridge the gap from unopposed to full game or “Full Opposed”.Think about a pitcher getting ready for a baseball season. Why do they naturally want to throw pens before facing live hitters? Why do we as an industry require pitchers to throw pens before getting into a game? We would all agree that most pitchers cannot just jump from offseason build up to live environment and find success. They have to “shake the cobwebs” or “get their feet under them”.

So if we all agree on this then why do we allow our athletes to go straight from drill work to live game delivery of the skill?

How do we insert a time frame for this athlete to express the newly developed skill and work out strategies to successfully deliver this skill in game? It’s simple, “Small Sided Games”.

Small Sided Games give an athlete the chance to compete and problem solve in realtime while the set up of the game tips the scales in the athletes favor for success in implementing the newly learned skill. While in unopposed settings the coach might intervene often, during Small Sided Games the coach must learn to allow the feedback loop to come from the outcome.

For young coaches and coaches new to these concepts this is the toughest part, WE HAVE TO LET THE ATHLETE FAIL! 

Success and failure feed the developed feedback loop from the unopposed and the athlete must strategize to create adjustments on the fly to find success. Earlier we asked how to we develop adjustability? How do we develop athleticism. In Small Sided Games athletes and coaches can exaggerate constraints toward successful skills or failing skills. This gives the athlete the ability to take what they have learned in the unopposed and condition it in various environments. The skill becomes “battle tested” and the athlete explores options to express the skill when needed. We as coaches say someone is athletic when they display fluidity in movement, surprise us with decision making strategies on the field, adjust quickly to environments that require adaptability.

If an athlete doesn’t meet our standard of athleticism we often write them off or send them for “lessons”.

Obviously this closes the loop and takes us back to step 1. An athlete we deem to not be athletic, or possess the skills we desire, we must develop. Development is continuous. Opposed to Unopposed.

To Conclude.

It’s not one or the other. Development requires both. Development requires a detailed understanding of what “successful skill” looks like. It requires methodical thinking to outline and detail a plan of coaching that delivers an athlete from problem to solution. Then it requires relentless upkeep and stress testing as the game evolves into the future.

While most of the universe tweets about the small details of unopposed skill development it’s important to realize that majority of time for athletes should be spent in the opposed environments.

Coaching staffs need a plan. They need to understand the goal collectively of the plan. Blurring the lines of opposed practice time vs unopposed only leaves the athlete in confusion or feeling like they are working hard when they really aren’t getting better.

Coaches want to help. They offer insights and “panic coach” when things don’t go their players way in opposed settings. Out of fear of looking like they don’t know how to help they bring the athlete to a safe space and change the practice to unopposed. They spout cues, they teach mechanics, they interject subjective perspectives.

All of this is a lack of unified planning and process. They don’t realize or understand the importance of opposed practice time vs unopposed. Knee jerk reactions to identified failures lead to over coaching and underachieving athletes.

So who are you?

Are you an athlete that is getting over coached routinely? Are you a coach who struggles to detail and trust a development process? Maybe you’re a parent who is unable to allow your kid to fail?

We live in an instant gratification world where desire and expectations “HAVE” to be met in real time. Real development can’t meet the demand of NOW. It requires hard conversations, real failures… a real process to provide solutions to those failures in the long run. Productization of the unopposed has made athletes today REQUIRE coaches to tip the scales and offer more unopposed training today than we have experienced in the past.

Want to stand out in today’s world and see your athletes get high level results? Bet on Small Sided Games, don’t over coach and have a long term development plan for your athletes.