How To Better Your Hitting/Pitching Lessons For Budget

Having been a person who loves tools, gadgets,, anything that can help a player feel or connect what is missing. Over the years I have seen, bought, used, tried, & thought of thousands of tools. There are a lot of good ideas that are poorly executed, then there are just some amazing tools that are WAY over priced. I have been on a budget grind of finding or making my own tools for my lessons. I am going to list the things you NEED in your lessons at a minimal. No matter what you teach, knob to the ball or LA40+ only, these tools will help you work your lesson.

HITTING

Blast Motion~$149.99 ~ Needs a phone or tablet to connect to via bluetooth ~ membership required for FULL access to all data points, there are still enough data points that if you don’t want to do the membership then you can still use it. Just use a new bat for each player, max of 10

Blast Motion is an amazing device that has a silicone wrap that goes around any knob. Connecting it to a phone/tablet you can get swing by swing feed back in any format you can use depending on your membership level. Or you can store swings on the device and when you reconnect it to the phone/tablet it will sync with that device, then to the cloud and attach to the account. If an instructor or coach wants to be able to use unlimited players for one sensor, they can get a $100 year long membership & have each player pay a monthly or yearly membership to connect and store all of this data. Great interface on the website to sort and work players.

PVC Pipe ~ $1.50 10’ 3/4” 480psi ~ Used for warm up moves, swings, drills

I used PVC pipes every single lesson. Whether for my player to do our warm up routine, to do tee work mimicking the ball plane, hitting wiffle balls with the PVC as the bat or on our shoulder for shoulder plane! So many uses for this, and I use 5’ pieces. If you cut it in the middle you get two perfect sized PVC’S!

Tee Ball Bat ~ $15.00 ~ For Drills

I use the tee ball bat to increase the rate of which the player moves. If we don’t force the body to feel what it can do, it never will do it. This is failing in the right directing. If players are pulling off or standing up using this will make them get into a better position otherwise they will miss with the short & light tee ball bat.

Wiffle Balls ~ $15.00 a dozen ~ For Drills

Wiffle balls are great because they move last second just like what baseballs are doing these days. Force players to swing fast and get use to being able to move that quickly. With the ball moving late but also slow, players will have to commit to the pitch later otherwise it might move or swing and miss from being early. When we do this we allow for the hitter to understand their swing time.

Cricket Bat ~ $50.00 ~ Heavy Bat Drills

The Cricket Bat is my favorite modified bat to use. With it being 33” it is similar enough to a bat that they know what to do with it but awkward enough they need to change how they move. Only 1 side being hittable they have to be concise with their grip and wrist move to the ball. Also this acts as a heavy bat coming in at just over 40 oz! So not only are they swinging a heavy bat, a bat with a flat Side to hit showing what they bat is doing at contact (roll over, slice under, drive through), & is cheaper then most over heavy baseball bats.

Frisbee/Bucket Lid ~ $5.00 ~ Free if you have a bucket lid from the baseball/softballs

Have a player put their bottom hand on a bat on the top side of the frisbee, then what would be their top hand on the bat on the bottom side of the frisbee. Have they swing and throw the frisbee at perfect contact spot. If they roll over the frisbee will go straight to the ground, if they push or slide in their swing the frisbee will slice like crazy. Good movement will produce a live drive up the middle to you with slight bend slice side of the hitter depending on how much hip hinge they did.

Bat Weights ~ $45.00

Hitting Jack-It’s use to be sold at 9, 12, 16, 21 oz bat weights for $35 dollars. Then something happened and now slugger fest sells these AMAZING bat weights. These weights are hittable during live, machine, tee anything and can work on any bat! Combo this with blast motion to tack strength and force a place can produce.

Pitching

Diamond Kinetics Pitching Ball ~ $99.99~Needs a phone or tablet to connect to via bluetooth ~ membership required for FULL access to all data points, there are still enough data points that if you don’t want to do the membership then you can still use it.

Using this ball is nice for a cheaper price. Comparing to other more expensive products it sticks its own! Having the ability to track MPH, spin rate, gyro spin & bullpens for different pitchers it does its job for someone needing the job down.