by jofus » Mon May 25, 2009 8:01 pm
So, I'm coaching a newly formed travel team, 14U. We played our first tournament this weekend, and we need to work on our hitting, which I knew already, and get used to each other (a few of the girls have played all-stars together, a few others have played against each other, and a couple are complete strangers, and we've only had one practice due to high school mainly).
The thing is, we have 7 or 8 legitimate pitchers. I'm not naive enough to think we have 7 or 8 studs, we don't have any true "shut-down" pitchers that are gonna goose-egg a good hitting team, but at least 6 of them are pretty decent pitchers, and the other 2 have potential but haven't had as much instruction (one is a lefty and an exceptional athlete, she has some serious potential, I think...). Three of them have pitched a good bit of travel ball, so they're a little ahead in experience.
So, my question is.....would I be crazy to set up a rotation and pitch each pitcher 2 (or maybe 3, if she's on fire) innings and then move to the next on my list? Obviously we're not talking a national championship caliber team or anything, or maybe even a state championship team, but I think we have the athletes to be decent in the tournaments we are going to mainly play in.
I was thinking of mistakes I may have made this weekend (we went 2-4, but I wasn't upset, with only having one practice as a team before the tournament), and there were a couple pitchers that I had warmed up, but didn't get them in.
Plus, most teams my DD has been on has always seemed to hit a pitcher better the second time through the lineup, so I figure switching pitchers to give them a different look/speed/etc. may not be an entirely bad thing?
Am I crazy to even think about trying it? Not just to try to keep all of them happy, since they will probably only pitch 4-6 innings in a weekend, but maybe to keep the offenses off balance. It will definitely take overuse injuries out of the picture about as much as possible....
Proud fastpitch, baseball, volleyball, soccer, basketball, etc. Dad