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Re-Release: Linda Lensch · From the Coach's Mouth

• 0:00
  You can't rest on your Lord. You're, you're done.
• 0:02
  The, the minute you, you stop learning, you're done, OK?
• 0:05
  Because somebody who's still learning is going to, is going
• 0:07
  to pass you. I did it in police work.
• 0:11
  You know, I, I, I knew I was at a somewhat of a disadvantage as
• 0:15
  a female. I was a little bit, I was older.
• 0:17
  My my ticket was going to be education to train, to train
• 0:22
  myself, to pad my training folder more than anyone else in
• 0:26
  my department except for my chief, which I did every
• 0:30
  learning opportunity to make myself better because each
• 0:32
  learning opportunity can lead to another learning opportunity.
• 0:36
  Whether you live northeast, West or South, the best fast pitch
• 0:40
  info comes from the coach's mouth.
• 0:57
  Welcome to the From the Coach's Mouth podcast with your host Jay
• 1:02
  Bolden and Ken Krauss. Yes, hello everyone, welcome to
• 1:21
  From the Coach's Mouth podcast. I'm Ken Krauss here, as always
• 1:25
  with with my friend Jay Bolden. Jay, how you doing this morning?
• 1:30
  Good Ken, feeling pretty good this week.
• 1:32
  How about yourself? I'm doing great.
• 1:34
  Yeah. I bet you're feeling good this
• 1:36
  week. I just saw yesterday that you
• 1:38
  guys won your conference. Yeah, we still, we still have
• 1:42
  two games left to play, but we are currently undefeated and the
• 1:46
  next team that's closest to us has three losses already.
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  So we won that conference outright.
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  We're currently undefeated in it and we hope that we remain
• 1:54
  undefeated for the next two games this this upcoming
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  Saturday. So super excited.
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  It's a great team. We're 31 and six on the year,
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  ranked 17th currently in the in the latest NAIA poll.
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  We're just, we're excited. We but we're, you know, we're
• 2:09
  still, we're still working towards our goal.
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  And that is, you know, past our tournament and into the
• 2:15
  postseason a little farther than we as far as we can go,
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  actually. So that's the goal.
• 2:20
  Well, that's great. I mean, I, I think that anytime
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  you get into that situation and get all those kind of wins and
• 2:26
  all of that, it you're having a a great season.
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  It's fun to watch. I'm sure it's fun to be a part
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  of. And we'll see, you know, where
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  all you had with it. Yeah.
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  So it looks like it's going to be a pretty good weekend for
• 2:38
  softball here, at least in the Chicago area.
• 2:40
  The weather is not quite as warm or won't be quite as warm as
• 2:44
  it's been the last couple of days, but still not in that 40°
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  range where everybody is out there but really hates being
• 2:51
  there and can't wait to get out. Yeah, it definitely, it's it's
• 2:54
  been better. It was actually warm yesterday,
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  which was fantastic. So this is great softball
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  weather. I hope it stays this way all the
• 3:00
  way through the rest of the rest of the time so.
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  All right, well, why don't we? We'll go ahead and get to our
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  guest. She's been waiting patiently.
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  I will say that we're excited and honored to be hosting
• 3:12
  today's guest because not only is she a true pioneer of women's
• 3:15
  fast pitch softball, she's also a personal friend of both Jay
• 3:19
  and Ken. She began her ASAUSA softball
• 3:22
  playing career on the famed Linden Aryans under the tutelage
• 3:26
  of not one, but two Hall of Famers, Margaret Tutz Nuss, who
• 3:29
  is a member of the USAA Softball National Hall of Fame and Millie
• 3:33
  Deegan, one of the actual Rockford Peaches who was
• 3:36
  enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in
• 3:39
  Cooperstown, NY. During her long playing career,
• 3:42
  our guests competed both with and against numerous legends of
• 3:45
  the game and future Olympians. Our guests began her coaching
• 3:50
  career in 1983 by taking over the Lindenarians as a Player
• 3:54
  Manager where she immediately captured the New Jersey State
• 3:57
  Championship. She continued as coach for the
• 4:00
  Aryans in Women's Majors and Class A fast pitch for 16 years
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  before leaving to found her own team, the New Jersey Divas, in
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  1998. That organization enjoyed
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  tremendous success in the ASA Women's Majors, Class A and 23
• 4:15
  and Under divisions. They won the 23 and under
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  national title in 2003 and came close to winning the Class A
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  national title that same year, which would have been the first
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  time one organization won two national titles in the same
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  year. She also coached at the
• 4:30
  collegiate level for 11 years, serving as the pitching coach at
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  Seton Hall, Keene and Stockton Universities.
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  After winning the national title, our guest left the world
• 4:39
  of fast pitch softball for a while to compete at the national
• 4:43
  and international level and paddle sports racing.
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  She then returned to the world of fast pitch in 2020, founding
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  her business Grease Lightning Fast Pitch, where she continues
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  to train the next level of elite pitchers while maintaining an
• 4:55
  unquenchable thirst for new knowledge.
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  There's a lot more to her story, but we'd rather hear it directly
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  from her. Ladies and gentlemen, please
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  give a warm from the coach's mouth Welcome to our own Jersey
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  girl, Linda Lynch. Welcome, Linda.
• 5:14
  Yeah. You need an audience reel there
• 5:17
  with the drum. Yeah, I was thinking actually
• 5:21
  about getting a sound effects thing and to put in there get
• 5:24
  more, more of a an applause. So how you doing?
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  I'm good, I'm good. I've been watching a lot of
• 5:31
  games here locally lately. You know, put the lessons on the
• 5:34
  back burner for now. And getting out to high school
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  games, following up with some of my kids, checking out some local
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  college games to see what's out there.
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  I'm dealing with you guys at least once a week.
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  I'm very nervous. Yeah, Blessing us with your
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  presence once a week. We love it.
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  We can't. That's why we had to have you on
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  here today too. We couldn't get enough of you.
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  We need more. We need more of Linda.
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  We need more of that Linda. So.
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  First time I met met Jay in person I drove up to Fordham
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  because he was there with Loyola and I think we hung out in the
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  hotel lobby just talking softball for how many hours?
• 6:09
  Oh, it was great. Yes, yes, yeah.
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  I was just telling Ken about that.
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  I'm like, yeah, I'm like I've had a chance to hang out with
• 6:14
  Linda and just talk softball. It was, it was fantastic.
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  Just when we were after playing Fordham, it was good.
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  It was good stuff too. Still use your eyes bowl video?
• 6:22
  Your eyes bowl demos. Don't be.
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  Don't. Don't give all the secrets away,
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  Linda. Don't give all this.
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  I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
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  For anybody, we all share. But let's yeah, for sure,
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  absolutely, especially especially in our group.
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  But let's get into it if if you're ready, I want to, I want
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  to, I'm going to start with the first question for you and just
• 6:40
  give us a little background as as how you got started in, in
• 6:43
  fast pitch softball. Where did it start for you?
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  I know it's seems like a long time ago, but give us a little
• 6:50
  bit of that journey where it started well.
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  You know, I grew up in a small town in New Jersey, which was
• 6:54
  really great for sports, at least for boys, all right?
• 6:58
  We weren't allowed to play Little League back then.
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  It was before the 1st girl who was also from New Jersey, broke
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  the Little League barrier. And I played with these guys on
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  sandlots and parking lots. You know, just neighborhood kids
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  doing baseball year round, football year round, best
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  whatever we could throw, throw a hit, which I think was really
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  important for that development, the coordination and
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  understanding of how to move, at least for me.
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  And later got into some rec ball in town.
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  We had a rec team that played on the county level.
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  I became the catcher because I probably had the worst fielding
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  level on the team. I didn't know what pitching
• 7:40
  looked like 'cause everybody then threw that, you know,
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  really slow slingshot. I mostly got into tennis then I
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  didn't play high school softball, which was just
• 7:49
  starting. We had a petition to get girls
• 7:52
  basketball in the school and Title 9 came around and at that
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  time in 72. So we thought it was a petition
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  that that did it, but it really wasn't.
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  It was the government and, and I was when I was around 15.
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  Well, the church league sports were very big in my town,
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  especially basketball. I mean, I was all into
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  basketball. I wanted to be the first, you
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  know, college basketball player from my area and I was lousy at
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  basketball. So luckily I found softball most
• 8:26
  of my time during that. That era was dedicated to
• 8:29
  tennis. Remember that was the Chris
• 8:31
  Everett, you know, Billie Jean King era.
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  Tennis was huge. And my high school tennis coach
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  lived directly across the street from me, and he kind of took me
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  under his wing. And we were, by the time we were
• 8:43
  playing, we were also coaching juniors.
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  He also taught me how to shoot a basket methodically, which I
• 8:50
  later used when I went off on my own to try to figure out
• 8:54
  pitching. I used his techniques.
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  So I was very lucky. Right place, right time.
• 8:59
  My church basketball coach took me to the softball game.
• 9:03
  She said, you got to come see this every Tuesday night.
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  This team called the Linden Arians in Linden, NJ, has a
• 9:08
  double header, and I knew nothing about this.
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  Well, I show up there at night. I'd say there's a few 100 fans
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  in these stands. I mean, they were real stands,
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  big stands with lights, with a Batgirl, with uniforms, with an
• 9:24
  announcer and two aces at the time going against each other.
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  For the Aryans, it was Pat Willis, who coached Rutgers for
• 9:33
  about 30 years. She was in that first pro league
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  back in the 70s, so she left the Arians just as as later.
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  I came on, so I missed that pack of players.
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  And when I finally did join them when I was 17, there was a whole
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  youth movement. The whole older team had gone
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  and it was all local high school players or young college
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  players. So I came around at the right
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  time. I was a very late bloomer in
• 10:02
  softball. I had not had.
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  There wasn't anything. There was no girls softball like
• 10:06
  there is now. That came around later.
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  There was only, at least in the area that I played in, New York,
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  New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut.
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  There was only, to my knowledge, women's major.
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  There were about four teams in New Jersey, so to get on those
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  teams you had to be really good. Think like Class A.
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  There was some Class A teams that seemed to grow bigger
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  later, especially in New Jersey and New York and Connecticut.
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  So when I saw that first game, that was it.
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  I had never seen anybody throw a softball like that, and it was
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  all slingshot in my area, all right.
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  Probably because of the influence of Joan Joyce.
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  Everybody was slingshot. I didn't see Windmill until a
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  few years later, and windmill really took off with the advent
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  of Kathy Aronson. Coming to the Braquettes, who
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  was the greatest, probably the best that I ever faced, one of
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  the best that I ever faced, Imposing height, 40 feet away,
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  probably 36 feet away by the time she let the ball go, and
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  probably coming in way over 70, you know?
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  Yeah. And.
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  White ball with white seams too, right?
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  White ball white seems a little dirty at dusk before the lights
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  come on as a pitcher's best time.
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  You know, you could probably do that and visit that no no pitch
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  ball trick with the catcher. So yeah, so you go back a while.
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  Let me ask you did did Jesus come to your games?
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  And if So, what was he like as a fan?
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  We had a lot of them. We had a lot of those guys
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  there. There were guys that were just,
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  they were just crazy about women's softball and they would
• 11:47
  show up all the time. They, they, they would help, you
• 11:50
  know, carry water. They would help with whatever.
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  And one of them, I'm going to talk about him for a moment.
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  I wasn't planning to. Tony Zapula just passed away
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  last year. Tony Zapula was a little guy.
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  You wouldn't even notice him. He was a scorekeeper for some of
• 12:06
  the top teams on the East Coast. He started in the 1960s.
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  Somebody dared him to go to a women's game and he said, I
• 12:13
  don't want to go to a women's game.
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  You know, that's who wants to see that.
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  And by the end of the game, he was signed up for life.
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  He he started with the Elizabeth Marauders or the New Jersey
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  Marauders, which were perennial national powerhouse.
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  One of them, my friend Angie Blase, is not too far away.
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  And I bring her out to events whenever I can.
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  She was a 1961 World All American, played behind Joan
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  Joyce, friends with all of those people, left New Jersey, went
• 12:44
  out to play for the Whittier White Sox for many years in
• 12:47
  California, and now she's back here.
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  She's a lot of fun. She's about 5 foot nothing.
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  She was a second baseman and big personality.
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  Yeah. So Tony, Tony played.
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  He was on teams I didn't even know about till after he passed.
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  His nephew sent me all these photos.
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  He was with the Budweiser Bells. He was with Marauders, He was
• 13:06
  with the the New Jersey Blue Jays, being with and and Tony,
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  he wasn't particularly the coach.
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  He was a recruiter before he was the Internet.
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  He would pull players from all over the country to come to New
• 13:17
  Jersey to play. One of his biggest was Vicki
• 13:19
  Morrow from Michigan, who's a Hall of Famer up there, played
• 13:22
  for the Bells and the Bell. Budweiser Bells were powerhouse
• 13:27
  here for many years. And when I started the Divas
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  later, the first guy I went to was Tony, because everywhere I
• 13:33
  went, I could go to Connecticut, there was Tony, I could go out
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  to Harrisburg, PA, there was Tony.
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  He was everywhere. So I grabbed him and he was a
• 13:42
  good luck, John. Kids love them.
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  So anyway, sorry I had to give him a little credit.
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  We're trying to get him in the Hall of Fame too, in New Jersey.
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  Well all the women that worked with him or played for him are
• 13:55
  100% behind it. You know, it's nice to, you
• 13:57
  know, see somebody jumping onto it.
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  I mean, you look at how popular women's softball is today and
• 14:03
  how the Women's College World Series outdraws the men's
• 14:08
  College World Series on TV and all of that.
• 14:11
  But it all had to start somewhere, you know, just a few
• 14:14
  people. So I did want to ask you when
• 14:17
  you were playing sports in high school, I remember because I
• 14:19
  think we're about from the same era and I, I just remember how
• 14:24
  my friends who would play basketball, you know that in
• 14:28
  particular, but you know, some of the other sports and all
• 14:30
  that, it was not really an official sporting, a varsity
• 14:33
  sport. There was more of a, you know,
• 14:35
  almost wreckish in high school. But then, you know, like the two
• 14:39
  teams would play and then afterwards they would have juice
• 14:43
  and cookies in the locker room. And it's just hard to imagine
• 14:46
  with today's competitive women that, you know, something like
• 14:49
  that would fly anymore that. Was high school that that
• 14:52
  wouldn't real. That didn't happen.
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  It didn't happen in a or major ball.
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  We didn't have juice and cookies, I'll tell you that.
• 15:00
  But I mean, it was just to me, that was kind of the attitude of
• 15:03
  the administration. Yeah, it was, you know, the
• 15:06
  attitude of the administration and the people that were
• 15:07
  running. It was like, OK, well, Title
• 15:09
  Line said we have to have these programs, but, you know, we'll
• 15:12
  just give it. The girls aren't really
• 15:13
  competitive and all that, and clearly that was different and
• 15:17
  you saw that when you were playing in women's majors.
• 15:21
  It, it depends. Like in my high school, we had
• 15:23
  two girls. I was lucky again, I was in a
• 15:25
  part of there was some good athletes in my, my age there.
• 15:28
  When you're younger than me or my age.
• 15:31
  One of them, Eiler Rasmussen, she was asked to play on the
• 15:34
  boys baseball team in 1977 at third base.
• 15:38
  I mean, and the baseball team was good.
• 15:41
  ILO wound up playing in the Linda Majors with me and was,
• 15:44
  you know, MVP in some Big East Coast tournaments.
• 15:47
  Kelly Givens, who's now in South Africa, was asked to play play
• 15:50
  on the boys high school basketball team.
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  She was a guard. She was not tall.
• 15:56
  And I mean, just really, really skilled.
• 15:59
  I was around some good athletes. So occasionally the athletic
• 16:03
  correctors would recognize, hey, that that's an athlete, no
• 16:06
  matter whether they're male or female, they're they're going to
• 16:08
  help that theme. They would bump them up.
• 16:10
  So again, I was lucky to see that because if you don't see
• 16:14
  that, it's it's like when I was in police work, right?
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  If you don't go to conventions or conferences and see that
• 16:21
  there's women who are higher up, they're supervisors, they've got
• 16:26
  medals, they've done some really cool things.
• 16:28
  How are you going to know if you stay in your little pod, right?
• 16:31
  So I was lucky to be exposed to all that early, which is why I
• 16:37
  say I was in the right place at the right time.
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  I was I was living in the right place at the right time because
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  this area was just loaded with people that knew what they were
• 16:44
  doing, including umpires and administrators.
• 16:47
  And I was just lucky to cross paths with some coaches who gave
• 16:52
  me an opportunity when I was a really late bloomer.
• 16:55
  What was it like playing for Toots and for Millie?
• 16:57
  Do you have any great stories from that era?
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  Well, I was just kind of a dopey 7 year old, so I didn't know too
• 17:05
  much. And Millie would always talk
• 17:06
  about her days in Pro Bowl. And all of us teenagers went,
• 17:12
  yeah, she's just, she's crazy. There was no Pro Bowl.
• 17:15
  This is way before League of Our Own came out.
• 17:18
  You know, there was no Internet, right?
• 17:20
  So we didn't believe her. And then the movie came out and
• 17:23
  like, oh, my God, this is real. She really did play Pro Bowl.
• 17:27
  Yeah, she would talk about the Brooklyn Dodgers.
• 17:30
  She would talk about training with them.
• 17:32
  She would talk about some of her teammates.
• 17:35
  Millie was hardcore. She was from Brooklyn.
• 17:38
  Her dad ran A-Team called the American Bloomer Girls, and they
• 17:42
  used to run on the beach in Coney Island in the winter to
• 17:45
  strengthen their legs. She took and slide on the sand.
• 17:49
  That's what these are the stories she would tell me.
• 17:52
  And she got to play for some former major leaguers who were
• 17:56
  her coaches. Jimmy Fox was one.
• 17:58
  She always mentioned and she was a second baseman in one game and
• 18:02
  she made this fantastic diving stab, right?
• 18:05
  And she comes running in expecting everybody to cheer on
• 18:08
  the coach just stood there very stoically and later said to her,
• 18:11
  that's your job. Don't expect to be complimented
• 18:14
  for something that you should be doing anyway, like, so that's
• 18:16
  where she came from. She rarely to me anyway, gave a
• 18:21
  compliment. It was mostly like, what are you
• 18:23
  doing there? One, one time I left the Fender
• 18:27
  in my car there because I backed up and left the parking lot so
• 18:30
  angry I hit the fire eye, I went.
• 18:35
  But she was tough. She was very tough and austere
• 18:38
  and it in a way it kind of it, it definitely pushed me to focus
• 18:43
  harder on little things, little technique, techniques and things
• 18:47
  that she learned from these baseball greats.
• 18:50
  And frankly, some things haven't been taught in softball ever to
• 18:54
  me except by her. Toots was more quiet.
• 18:58
  She was more in the background or the manager at that point.
• 19:01
  You know, she was a little, she was more complimentary of all of
• 19:05
  us. So it was an interesting dynamic
• 19:08
  there. And then how did that affect
• 19:10
  your coaching later on? You know, that kind of that
• 19:14
  experience with the the two sides.
• 19:16
  Did you feel like you leaned one way or the other more?
• 19:19
  Well, it set that standard for excellence.
• 19:23
  It was an yet another thing and, and that was normal to be up at
• 19:27
  that level. I then went to play for Glenn
• 19:30
  Payne, who was the coach at Wagner.
• 19:32
  We talked with Kate, Kate on your last podcast.
• 19:35
  I, you know, she, she played there.
• 19:37
  I actually trained some of her team mates and some of her team
• 19:39
  mates played for me, so I played for Glenn Payne.
• 19:43
  He was a New York City commissioner at the time.
• 19:46
  He coached the Staten Island Saints.
• 19:48
  Got to catch Darlene Crowe, who was one of the last
• 19:51
  slingshotters. She threw really hard.
• 19:54
  And after that I moved back to New Jersey with the Linden
• 19:58
  Majors, which was a new team and Betty's wingraph was one of the
• 20:04
  players and a coach. Betty had a long history in the
• 20:07
  East Coast softball. She was a big time hitter,
• 20:10
  played at actually played at the only game, softball game at
• 20:13
  Yankee Stadium that the Lindenarians had against the New
• 20:16
  York Pandoras. And I actually tracked down the
• 20:20
  only home run ever hit by a woman in Yankee Stadium was by a
• 20:23
  Lindenarian. And I spoke to her daughter.
• 20:25
  Betty was very different. Betty was very positive and I
• 20:29
  blossomed under Betty. Betty was a college professor,
• 20:33
  was very much into pitching and mechanics ahead of her time,
• 20:37
  literally affected hundreds of kids in this area.
• 20:41
  Very good pitchers influenced them.
• 20:42
  The best known of her students, Michelle Smith, the Olympic
• 20:45
  pitcher and ESPN correspondent. If Betty could help you and
• 20:50
  bring in information about pitching, she did it.
• 20:53
  And I latched on to that because I never forgot the first time I
• 20:56
  saw those two pitchers throwing Kathy Matthews and Pat Willis,
• 21:01
  who taught me my knuckleball. That's another topic under
• 21:05
  Betty. Like I said, I blossomed.
• 21:07
  There was never a time when she said, no, I can't work with you.
• 21:10
  We worked constantly, and I was just surrounded again by really
• 21:16
  knowledgeable people. Like I said, it was very, very
• 21:18
  positive. OK, Even if you were on the
• 21:20
  mound and you were, you were dying, you were screwing up.
• 21:23
  She would just keep cheering. You can do this, you know,
• 21:26
  follow through whatever, step straight.
• 21:28
  So it it it allowed me to grow. It was very different than what
• 21:31
  I had come from under under Millie.
• 21:33
  Not that Millie, Millie's just a different style.
• 21:35
  But you asked me how does that affect my coaching or how did
• 21:39
  it? I probably started more like a
• 21:42
  Millie and I'm ending more like a Betty over time, you know?
• 21:46
  But there's definitely a time when you need both.
• 21:48
  So Linda, I want you to just give us an idea of what like
• 21:54
  about the tournaments back then when you were with the Linden
• 21:56
  Arians. Like, I don't think people
• 21:58
  understand like how this kind of evolves.
• 22:00
  Like did you like, how did you all get to those tournaments?
• 22:04
  You guys carpool? Did you take a bus?
• 22:06
  Like what were some of the struggles you went through there
• 22:08
  during that time when you're playing in the against some of
• 22:11
  those upper teams? How did how did things work back
• 22:13
  then? Well.
• 22:14
  I, I was basically with three or four teams in my career, the
• 22:17
  Arians, then the Saints, the majors, and then I became mad.
• 22:22
  I took over the Aryans cause million tuts retired and I'm
• 22:26
  like 21 years old. I don't know anything about
• 22:28
  managing. I don't know anything about
• 22:30
  administrating, but somebody had to do it.
• 22:32
  So a couple of us got together and I wound up being the player
• 22:36
  coach. Remember, there was no Internet,
• 22:38
  there were no cell phones. Everything was done by pads of
• 22:40
  paper, phone lists, snail mail checks, you know, no, no Venmo.
• 22:49
  And I grew into it. And I tell you what, there was a
• 22:52
  time like when I was, I was younger and 1st in college, I
• 22:55
  had to take speech courses because I couldn't look you in
• 22:58
  the eye and talk. I was that shy.
• 23:00
  I would, my eyes would tear up. I put my head down and you know
• 23:04
  what broke broke that was working with kids and being a
• 23:08
  coach. It changed my life, you know,
• 23:11
  just getting up in front of kids and doing clinics.
• 23:13
  I mean, you know. Yeah, I mean, that's what I was
• 23:15
  going to say is I just can't imagine you being that way, you
• 23:18
  know, knowing how you are now and, you know, the interactions
• 23:21
  we've had and all that, you know, you're, you know, you seem
• 23:24
  pretty confident when you're talking to people.
• 23:26
  So that's that's an interesting thing.
• 23:29
  The leaf bloomer, not just not not just in skills in
• 23:32
  communication, everything else. I just, you know, not everybody
• 23:35
  comes out of the chute and you know, is that state All Star and
• 23:38
  goes right to Division One and the pros.
• 23:40
  You know, one of the early videotapes Michelle Smith made,
• 23:46
  she talks about she talked a lot about perseverance.
• 23:48
  That was her keyword early on and I took that to heart.
• 23:52
  It's just if you stay around long enough, whether you're in
• 23:55
  softball or would in my, you know, police career and you just
• 23:58
  keep studying and working and working and getting better,
• 24:01
  eventually you're going to get there.
• 24:03
  You know, Rick, Rick did a a recent podcast where we talked
• 24:07
  about Sarah's climb and speed right as every year.
• 24:13
  You know, she's 485254 whatever. And she didn't hit her top speed
• 24:19
  until she was 29 1/2 years old. Yeah, I didn't hit mine until my
• 24:22
  30s really not not pitching speed, arm speed because I got
• 24:27
  injured. So my pitching, pitching speed
• 24:29
  was my pitching career was over relatively early, my good
• 24:32
  pitching career. But my overhand speed I don't
• 24:35
  think peaked out till I was about 37.
• 24:38
  Wow. You know, and hitting, hitting
• 24:40
  ability and recognition. The pitch is if you work at it,
• 24:43
  really work at it. I'm talking about like every
• 24:45
  other day in the batting cage doing something to prepare for
• 24:49
  that one or two at bats you're going to see against the best in
• 24:53
  the country when it counts. That's how you get better over
• 24:56
  time. But unfortunately, that doesn't
• 24:59
  really exist anymore at the the level it did before.
• 25:02
  Like I think I came in at the end of that women's softball era
• 25:07
  and even people who played a little bit after me say, well,
• 25:10
  we may never see that again, that level and that intensity
• 25:13
  because college bowl took off and youth ball and now you
• 25:19
  graduate college and you're either done, maybe you go play a
• 25:22
  little bit on the side somewhere or you go to the pros.
• 25:25
  So the options are nowhere near as much and you don't get to
• 25:29
  mature like you used to, which is why I think that first, first
• 25:32
  Olympic team or two was was just so experienced IQ wise and else
• 25:37
  other, you know, are iron sharpens ironed?
• 25:40
  Yeah. I mean, when you think about it
• 25:41
  that, you know, the first Olympic teams, I remember seeing
• 25:44
  them play. But even, you know, looking at
• 25:48
  the last Olympic team that we had, you know, there were a few
• 25:50
  people that had been around the previous time the Olympics were
• 25:55
  there. And there was a big gap, you
• 25:57
  know, over a decade's gap in there.
• 25:58
  And they were still so good that they took them on there and put
• 26:02
  them on the team. You know, it was just, it was,
• 26:05
  yeah, just a different type of player, a different type of era.
• 26:08
  I mean, is there still even women's majors around anymore?
• 26:14
  I know that they run the, the Braquettes still have a team up
• 26:19
  there and they have a junior Braquettes team.
• 26:22
  There's trying to jump start 23 and under in my area.
• 26:25
  Again, it wasn't like it was before, you know?
• 26:28
  Yeah, it was serious before. Class A was really strong here,
• 26:32
  23 and under we just happened to qualify.
• 26:34
  So I went for that that year and Class A, which cause of the, the
• 26:39
  way the rules were written in the ASA book.
• 26:41
  I, I could do that, but we played major ball.
• 26:45
  We, it only mattered when you went to state regional
• 26:47
  tournaments to get the championship ball.
• 26:49
  But informally, you could play each other as much as you want.
• 26:53
  So who were some of the best pitchers that you played
• 26:55
  against? Oh.
• 26:57
  God, I was up last night putting this list together.
• 26:59
  All right, so initially we got the slingshotters and, and
• 27:04
  again, we when I first started with the Aryans and the majors,
• 27:07
  there was, there was what was left of Tootsie's Eastern Major
• 27:10
  Softball League, which stretch from the Miami, I'm sorry, the
• 27:14
  Orlando Rebels down in Florida where dot Richardson started as
• 27:20
  a Batgirl. And my coach Betty's Wingraph
• 27:22
  played on that team for a while and that was her Batgirl.
• 27:26
  So Betty had connections there. And the league went up through
• 27:30
  DC. There were a couple of teams in
• 27:32
  the DC Maryland area. There used to be one in
• 27:35
  Delaware. There was a bunch in New Jersey,
• 27:38
  Eastern PA, New York City area, Long Island, Connecticut, of
• 27:43
  course with the brake hats and a few other teams that came and
• 27:45
  went from Connecticut all the way up to Massachusetts.
• 27:50
  You had the Waltham Drifters up there when when I was playing,
• 27:54
  which was the home of the first Olympic coach, Waltham Mass, who
• 27:58
  came from the brake hats. Some of the pitchers I first saw
• 28:01
  were slingshotters. I missed Joan Joyce because the
• 28:04
  year I started playing with the area and she's they began that
• 28:07
  pro league. Donald Lowe piano was I think
• 28:09
  retired at that time, right? So we had all these
• 28:12
  slingshotters coming out of there.
• 28:13
  Bertha Techie, Joan Joyce Lowe piano.
• 28:16
  I still have Lowe piano's videotape, which was all
• 28:18
  slingshot and I initially threw slingshot.
• 28:22
  I threw really hard, but I couldn't manage control until
• 28:25
  Betty taught me windmill, some other slingshotters.
• 28:30
  Darlene Crowe, Gene Fielder, who was with the Johnny's Jets of
• 28:35
  Baltimore. She was an older woman.
• 28:36
  She's in the she was older at the time I faced her.
• 28:40
  She's in the Maryland Hall of Fame.
• 28:43
  Maureen Galvin, who played with the Pandora's, Barb Knutson and
• 28:48
  Kathy Matthews and Rose Kalisac with the Linden Majors.
• 28:52
  All really good pitchers, all slingshot and or there was this
• 28:57
  this odd hunched over, almost Figure 8 style of throwing that
• 29:01
  was popular here for a while. I had Pat Willis with was with
• 29:05
  the Ariens went pro. She was a slingshotter.
• 29:08
  Belinda Baranac from Rutgers, Roz Bostonian with the Budweiser
• 29:12
  Bells who was very influential teaching pitchers for a long
• 29:15
  time in North Jersey and Hallie Cohen who's pitched for Rutgers,
• 29:17
  pitched them to AIAAIAW pre NCAA national tournament.
• 29:24
  Then Kathy Aronson and Barbara and all, they were the premier
• 29:28
  windmillers out of the Bray Cats.
• 29:29
  They're both National Hall of Famers.
• 29:31
  They were very tall, very big. They threw really hard.
• 29:33
  You had teams down in DC that Plain Americans, the Garbin's
• 29:37
  Grill, all Windmillers. You had Sherry Davis from the
• 29:41
  Allentown Pates or Patriots. Kathy Neal was a pro, former pro
• 29:46
  Falcon. She came back and pitched for
• 29:48
  the Budweiser Bells. She was excellent windmiller.
• 29:51
  Rita Highbow from the DC Metros. We would also bring in Not We,
• 29:56
  the New Jersey organization in Newark, NJ.
• 29:59
  And Budweiser would bring in the Puerto Rican national team, the
• 30:03
  Venezuelans and the Canadian National team for a few years in
• 30:07
  what they called the Bud Light series.
• 30:10
  And the Puerto Rican national team, known as the JC Dolls
• 30:14
  would would come to New Jersey and the New Jersey guys from
• 30:17
  Newark would send their baseball players to Puerto Rico as an
• 30:19
  exchange. And they would play around the
• 30:23
  New York metro area to prepare themselves for Pan Am games
• 30:26
  against the top women's teams. Some of these games were held in
• 30:29
  Branch Brook Park in Newark. And they drew, I think they one
• 30:33
  newspaper article I just found that there was a draw with
• 30:35
  10,000 people for one of those games.
• 30:38
  There were no stands. They were just people in the
• 30:41
  park. And we had the escorted in and
• 30:46
  out with the Sheriff's Department because the crowds
• 30:48
  were so huge. Wow.
• 30:51
  It was big. All the newspapers covered it
• 30:53
  here. It was phenomenal.
• 30:55
  It must have been fun. Yeah, Yeah, We look forward to
• 30:58
  it. And then we would have Puerto
• 31:00
  Rico would come in every year we had them at our tournaments.
• 31:03
  And I think that lasted for about 10 years.
• 31:06
  Later, we had the Dominican national team come in.
• 31:10
  One of my, one of my former players, Elizabeth Sanchez,
• 31:12
  she's still coaching and living in New York City, had
• 31:14
  connections to that team. She's actually in their National
• 31:17
  Hall of Fame. They would come in and we would
• 31:21
  take care of them. Some of them didn't even have
• 31:23
  equipment and we would get them out.
• 31:25
  They would rent a van and drive out to one of the biggest
• 31:28
  tournaments, the oldest tournament east of the
• 31:31
  Mississippi at the time. I don't even think it's still
• 31:33
  going, was the topped in an Invitational in topped in
• 31:36
  Pennsylvania on July 4th weekend and bringing the Dominicans out
• 31:41
  to Amish country with the Mennonites driving by was an
• 31:44
  experience. It was great.
• 31:48
  They were awesome. They had some real talent on
• 31:50
  that team. Elizabeth, my coach Betty said.
• 31:54
  Elizabeth Sanchez could have been one of the best in the
• 31:56
  world had she got in coaching early.
• 31:58
  She was already at the end of her career, but man, she still
• 32:00
  threw close to 70, played modified bowl with her and her,
• 32:04
  you know, Rick says your, your, your K is 90%.
• 32:09
  So she was still, she was still chucking in modified ball.
• 32:11
  That's why we did so well. Did any of the slingshotters
• 32:14
  convert to windmill later on, or did they kind of each stay in
• 32:18
  their own lane? I did, yeah.
• 32:20
  The famous story is Joan Joyce, when she was young, was throwing
• 32:23
  windmill and was having control issues and some guy up on a
• 32:28
  telephone pole was working on the line, said hey, you should
• 32:31
  go slingshot. And he came down and taught her
• 32:32
  and that she made it from there. She just took off.
• 32:36
  I did Bose for a while. I never had the control I did
• 32:39
  with windmill. OK, but I I felt I could
• 32:43
  throwing slingshot to me I felt I could hide the ball better,
• 32:45
  especially the off speeds and I could really sling the ball like
• 32:49
  almost like throwing overhand but underhand.
• 32:52
  Whereas I don't get that same feel with Windmill.
• 32:54
  Linda, tell us a little bit about where you got your, where
• 32:58
  you first learned how to, how to pitch.
• 32:59
  Like who taught you? Did you have an instructor?
• 33:02
  Was it more like observe and imitate?
• 33:05
  And then what were some of the pitching methods you were taught
• 33:07
  back then when you were starting and how does that differ or not
• 33:10
  with what you were teaching now? Well.
• 33:13
  Remember, I didn't see that first game until I was 15, so I
• 33:16
  immediately went out and tried to imitate.
• 33:19
  There was nobody coaching. There was nobody that gave me
• 33:22
  useful information. I mean, Toots was a Hall of Fame
• 33:25
  pitcher, pitched for decades. For decades, she was the only
• 33:28
  pitcher on the team. And the only thing she said to
• 33:32
  me about pitching was stick your stomach out.
• 33:35
  So that didn't work really well for me at Rutgers.
• 33:39
  Pat Willis, work with me a little bit, showed me the
• 33:41
  knuckleball. I got in immediately.
• 33:43
  I actually kind of did a few more things to it that worked,
• 33:47
  helped make my career. I would go to a park, find a
• 33:50
  wall and just throw, throw, throw, throw, throw and try to
• 33:53
  figure out what was what. There was a guy in Rahway Park
• 33:57
  who worked for the Mosquito Commission who was a very good
• 33:59
  pitcher, and at lunchtime he would come over and give me a
• 34:02
  few tips. So I always looked for his
• 34:04
  truck. I tried to reach out to several
• 34:08
  of the male pitchers. Didn't get too much from them,
• 34:11
  you know, in this area. Not until I I found Betty and
• 34:17
  Betty actually first formalized the training.
• 34:21
  The Donald O piano tapes, Every book, every videotape, any
• 34:24
  source I could find. I haunted down and tried it.
• 34:27
  But mostly it was just me and that wall, right?
• 34:32
  Like I said, a wall throws it back every time, gives you
• 34:34
  fielding practice, gives you instant feedback, and it doesn't
• 34:37
  complain. And I would literally go to the
• 34:39
  park alone every day and just throw, throw, throw and figure
• 34:42
  out how to hit my spots, what felt good and how to repeat it,
• 34:46
  how to make it work again. But yeah, that the formal
• 34:49
  training came a little bit later.
• 34:50
  Betty would actually bring in Donna Terry, who played with the
• 34:56
  Falcons pro team. She was instrumental with the JC
• 35:02
  Dolls Puerto Rican team. She was a coach at Texas Women's
• 35:07
  and later at University of California.
• 35:10
  And Betty would bring her in every now and then to sit with
• 35:13
  us and teach us about pitching and nutrition and whatnot.
• 35:16
  And sitting next to me was young Michelle Smith taking notes.
• 35:19
  And I was like, can't we just go throw?
• 35:20
  So. So you know, the lesson there is
• 35:26
  like, listen and take notes. So yeah, I, I got exposure where
• 35:30
  I could, but mostly it was Betty, my bad guidance.
• 35:34
  And initially it was hello, elbow.
• 35:37
  You know what you might call hello elbow right now, you know,
• 35:40
  step straight, clear a path, get that arm lined up with the
• 35:44
  target, snap your wrist. But when you saw kids that
• 35:50
  didn't do that, what we now know is brush contact and internal
• 35:53
  rotation. We would just go wow, they just
• 35:55
  look, they're really good because they're just natural.
• 35:57
  They move naturally. And I think over time, my, even
• 36:02
  though I was working one way or teaching one way later to throw
• 36:08
  hard, you have to be more natural, quote UN quote.
• 36:12
  You have to get that IR going. And I look back at photos of
• 36:15
  myself and I'm doing it, you know, my arm's in the right
• 36:18
  place. My maybe my balance wasn't
• 36:21
  because again, everybody was taught to, you know, brace
• 36:23
  behind that foot. That didn't work for me, as we
• 36:25
  know now from motor preferences, but I found the way.
• 36:30
  And whether it was even with hitting, I kind of taught
• 36:32
  myself. I listened to everybody else
• 36:34
  read what I could. But it's when you're alone in
• 36:36
  that batting cage or batting cages, batting lefty, batting
• 36:40
  righty, different speeds, preparing for that one time of
• 36:43
  the year you're going to face Kathy Aronson.
• 36:45
  You do what your body needs to do to be on time and deliver the
• 36:49
  most energy to the ball. And I figured it out now in
• 36:53
  accordance with what I should have done in terms of motor
• 36:56
  preferences. So what does that mean as far as
• 36:58
  how do I? I taught myself, I guess I
• 37:00
  listened to my body and I, I analyzed what I did.
• 37:04
  It wasn't mindless. And hey, I threw that one well
• 37:07
  and I didn't throw that one so well.
• 37:09
  What was the difference there? How can I calibrate myself to
• 37:13
  improve? So is that something that you
• 37:15
  think maybe kids today don't get as much of everything is so
• 37:18
  organized and so formal and everything that maybe they do
• 37:23
  more following directions rather than learning what their body
• 37:27
  actually wants to do and kind of, you know, you can adapt the
• 37:33
  the instruction to what your body wants to do or the way it
• 37:36
  wants to move. Absolutely not just pitching
• 37:39
  everything. How many, how many kids nowadays
• 37:42
  will put the bat on their shoulder, toss the ball up and
• 37:45
  hit it and see how that feels where it goes.
• 37:48
  Hit, hit. Infield coaches are doing it all
• 37:50
  for you. Tony Abbotteen, he was the he's
• 37:52
  the frozen ropes guy and the Olympic visual coach he was went
• 37:57
  to a speech he gave and he says, you know, kids aren't getting
• 38:01
  their feedback. That is a simple drill that kids
• 38:03
  don't do anymore. They're not gaining feedback.
• 38:06
  How does that feel? What angle?
• 38:08
  If you do this, where's the ball going?
• 38:11
  I remember being a kid and just picking up a stick in a rock.
• 38:14
  You know, when you would do the same thing, you would, you know,
• 38:15
  just hit a stick in the rock. You know, now you got to pay,
• 38:18
  you know, 150 bucks to get that special skinny bat and, you
• 38:22
  know, or you have to find a dowel rod somewhere.
• 38:24
  But you know. Didn't you throw things at
• 38:27
  targets all the time? Oh yeah, Who does that?
• 38:29
  Yeah, each other. We used to, yeah, I was going to
• 38:32
  say we used to take a tennis ball and throw it on the
• 38:34
  neighbors steps. You know, one 1000 to 1000, how
• 38:37
  fast can we get rid of the ball? So all like the throwing angles
• 38:40
  would be different and you had to move your feet and just
• 38:43
  reacting to the ball off of the off of the the neighbor's front
• 38:46
  step. Throw the ball at the base of
• 38:48
  the house, because if I got it up too high, I'd hit the
• 38:50
  shingles, you know, So I had below.
• 38:53
  Yeah. I you need to.
• 38:54
  You need time to experiment, You just go find a wall.
• 38:57
  You know, you don't need mom and dad standing there.
• 38:59
  Go find a wall, put up some targets and move it a dime and
• 39:03
  see how that works. Hey, I wanted to ask you about
• 39:05
  the New Jersey Divas. You, you know, you were doing
• 39:08
  fine with the Arians and all that, but then you at some point
• 39:11
  you decided you were going to form your own team.
• 39:13
  How'd that come about? And you know what was that like
• 39:17
  kind of running the show that way?
• 39:18
  Well, I spent probably about 10 years or more running the Aryans
• 39:22
  and I was tired. I I needed a break.
• 39:26
  It was a full time job. It wasn't fun anymore.
• 39:29
  So I handed it off to two women on the Aryans who did a good job
• 39:32
  taking it forward. I think the team lasted about 66
• 39:35
  years before it folded, which is pretty good run.
• 39:38
  They're still friends of mine and I just took time off to go
• 39:42
  play ball. I went into New York City,
• 39:44
  played a little modified and just relaxed and I played.
• 39:47
  I found myself again and then I found Elizabeth Sanchez and a
• 39:51
  team called the Cha Cha's Ladies out of Harlem and wound up
• 39:55
  playing with this team. It was awesome in all the
• 39:58
  boroughs of New York City with a world class, in my opinion, a
• 40:01
  world class pitcher. She pitched for the Dominican
• 40:03
  team too, when she went home and the whole team was made out of
• 40:07
  people from South America and the Caribbean.
• 40:11
  It was, it was a blast. And I played modified ball for a
• 40:15
  few years with them and a few other teams in New York.
• 40:17
  And then a few years later, I got the itch to start up a team
• 40:20
  again and things slowly came together.
• 40:25
  You know, we based the team colors on what was on sale at
• 40:28
  Modell's Sporting Goods uniforms.
• 40:32
  And first, first game we ever played, we got really pounded,
• 40:38
  got crushed. And the last game we played was
• 40:41
  a national championship six years later.
• 40:43
  One of the reasons for the success of that team was I was
• 40:46
  much more seasoned, all right, so a little smarter about
• 40:49
  recruiting. And we landed a phenomenal
• 40:52
  sponsor, which I'd never had before.
• 40:55
  We were blessed with Frank and Mary Lou Kardashian decided to
• 40:59
  Frank was a successful businessman.
• 41:02
  He said, why should girls pay if they're trying to do the right
• 41:05
  thing? Kind of.
• 41:06
  And that was his attitude. And I was like, we didn't even
• 41:08
  believe it when he, when he first wrote a check, We, we
• 41:10
  still thought it was a scam. And he took care of us for six
• 41:15
  years. And you asked about how we got
• 41:17
  to games. Well, initially, you know, of
• 41:19
  course we carpooled back in the day.
• 41:21
  But with Frank, we were flying and Frank took care of it.
• 41:25
  He not only flew us, he flew with family members and took
• 41:28
  care of everything. We are very lucky.
• 41:31
  So it allowed me to attract players.
• 41:34
  It mostly allowed me free reign because I didn't have to answer
• 41:38
  to parents and and I, you know, I talked, I answered to him, but
• 41:42
  he didn't interfere much. The only time he said, the only
• 41:45
  thing he said to me once about midway through the through the
• 41:47
  Divas was why are you bunting so much?
• 41:50
  Because we got into this whole short game mentality and I go,
• 41:53
  you know, he's right because the top teams, they don't bunt a
• 41:55
  lot. And my non softball friends who
• 41:58
  came to game games would go well.
• 42:00
  That team, they just like the brake hats.
• 42:01
  They just swing harder than you guys, which was something that I
• 42:05
  guess I had the blinders on it didn't notice because you're
• 42:08
  looking at so many other things. And those two things I just let
• 42:13
  them hit after that and we did very well.
• 42:16
  So with the sponsor it, it worked out really well.
• 42:18
  I don't know if that answers your question.
• 42:20
  But yeah, yeah, it's, it's funny when you bring that up about
• 42:24
  bunting because I'm sure you know that I'm, I always get
• 42:29
  annoyed that people automatically will sacrifice
• 42:32
  bunt when they have, you know, a runner on 1st and they think
• 42:36
  they have to bunt her over to 2nd.
• 42:38
  They've got good hitters up. I was actually watching that in
• 42:41
  a college game. One of my hitting students, best
• 42:44
  hitter on the team, got the best average, pretty much leading or
• 42:47
  #2 in everything, you know, every offensive category.
• 42:52
  I see the first batter I think takes a walk.
• 42:55
  It's on base. And then they have this girl
• 42:57
  that I work with bunting, and I'm like, what are you doing?
• 43:00
  All I can think of is, again, a league of their own.
• 43:02
  Are you stupid? You know, we should be playing
• 43:04
  for a big inning here. You got your best hitter up and
• 43:06
  you having a bunt. That actually worked for us in
• 43:09
  the the Nationals against team that was the reigning champs.
• 43:14
  I had a girl who couldn't bunt to save her life, but man, she
• 43:18
  could she pull an inside pitch. So I knew that I knew the
• 43:22
  pattern of the pitcher. I mean, I was watched.
• 43:24
  I knew her before the Nationals. I knew I knew it.
• 43:27
  I pretty much confirmed where she was going.
• 43:29
  So I gave her the bunt. It wasn't even a fake bunt.
• 43:31
  I gave her the bunt because I knew she would screw it up.
• 43:34
  And 3rd baseman comes crashing in because it's like a, you
• 43:38
  know, she screws up the bunt foul ball.
• 43:40
  So I take the bunt off the next pitch and the pitch is inside
• 43:42
  third baseman's up and it just gets blasted past her.
• 43:46
  So yeah, hit. Yeah, swing the bat, bunt when
• 43:50
  you have to. If it's late in the game and
• 43:52
  it's a you haven't been hitting very much and you haven't been
• 43:55
  scoring, then yeah, I can see, you know, trying to get somebody
• 43:57
  over into scoring position. But just mathematically, a run
• 44:02
  is more likely to score from first base with no outs than
• 44:05
  from second base with one out. And my tennis players are my
• 44:11
  have always been my best bunters because it's not that different
• 44:14
  from a forehand. So I recommend kids play tennis.
• 44:17
  Let's talk a little bit here, Linda, too.
• 44:18
  So after after that in the nationals you talked about you
• 44:22
  won the national championship. It's fantastic.
• 44:25
  You, you retire after the national tournament going a
• 44:27
  different direction. Tell us a little bit about the
• 44:30
  paddle sports racing how it started for you.
• 44:32
  Like how did that come about? Were you just looking for
• 44:35
  something to do or or was this a passion that you've had the
• 44:37
  whole time, just you never knew it?
• 44:39
  I. Had a friend that was into
• 44:40
  kayaking and I had a small dog so I bought a kayak with a big
• 44:44
  cockpit so my dog could go kayaking with me and I put
• 44:48
  softball behind me. I was done with softball after
• 44:51
  that because she and I were competitive.
• 44:53
  It then led to kayak racing and then it led to hey, I found
• 44:58
  dragon boating. This was she was down in the
• 45:00
  Philly area, which is not, that's about an hour and a half
• 45:02
  for me. The Philadelphia is the United
• 45:05
  States origin for dragon boating.
• 45:08
  If you don't know what that is, Dragon boating came to this
• 45:12
  country same year as I started coaching 1983 came to Philly.
• 45:16
  The Chinese came over and said, hey, you should try this sport.
• 45:19
  And coach Bob McNamara and the rowers in Philadelphia, because
• 45:23
  that was a big rowing center, decided to try it, and they did
• 45:26
  pretty well. It's a long boat.
• 45:29
  It has two paddlers per seat, so it's a long, narrow boat.
• 45:34
  You sit either on the right or the left.
• 45:36
  You have a drummer up front banging the heartbeat of the
• 45:39
  boat. And it's a cadence, all right.
• 45:41
  It's in the rules. And you have somebody in the
• 45:44
  back standing with a long rudder to keep the boat straight.
• 45:47
  And the races are 205 hundred 1000 and straightaways and a
• 45:53
  2000 meter Oval, which involves passing.
• 45:56
  So that's really exciting. So I kind of got into that,
• 46:00
  joined the Philly, the Philly group.
• 46:03
  And if you want to get good at dragon boating, you have to get
• 46:05
  yourself a single Outrigger if you really want to get good.
• 46:08
  So you can just go on an Outrigger.
• 46:10
  So it's a boat that you sit on with a pontoon on the side for
• 46:13
  balance, and I got myself an Outrigger and started paddling.
• 46:17
  So now I get into Outrigger racing too, which also leads to
• 46:20
  six person outriggers. The long boats that you see in
• 46:23
  Hawaii, there's an East Coast Outrigger racing association.
• 46:27
  Ecora got very involved with that, got involved with New York
• 46:31
  Outrigger. And then we split off and
• 46:33
  started a group in Hoboken, NJ, and we paddle up and down the
• 46:37
  Hudson River from past the Statue of Liberty around
• 46:40
  Manhattan. There was a race back in the
• 46:42
  day, a Liberty Challenge, where racers would come from around
• 46:45
  the world, from Hawaii, Thailand, Polynesia to New York
• 46:49
  City, and we would race around, up, up and down the Hudson River
• 46:53
  into the East River past the Statue of Liberty.
• 46:55
  It was, it was amazing. Then I got into Marathon Canoe,
• 47:00
  which is a small tippy boat. A single can be at 18 1/2 feet
• 47:05
  long. The boat weighs about 20 lbs as
• 47:08
  extremely tippy and by marathon I did some races of 10/12/15
• 47:14
  miles. The longest one I ever did was
• 47:17
  70 miles in a day. I did that twice.
• 47:19
  There are races that go 100. Shoulders started hurting just
• 47:21
  listening to that. There are, well again, the focus
• 47:24
  on technique, conditioning. You can be as fixated on how
• 47:31
  your paddle enters the water. You can spend a year just on
• 47:33
  that as you could on how the ball leaves your fingers, that
• 47:40
  degree of attention. And people do this for 120
• 47:45
  miles, 1000 miles. There's endure.
• 47:49
  There's just like there's ultra marathons, there's ultra
• 47:51
  marathons in paddling too. I never got to that point, but
• 47:55
  for a time it was really fun. I, I used to practice.
• 47:59
  My partner Gil Gil Ross is from Staten Island.
• 48:01
  He used to be the engineer on the Staten Island Ferry with
• 48:04
  Save People during 9/11 and we would get up in the morning,
• 48:09
  take our two person Outrigger and go practice in the
• 48:12
  industrial channels by Bayonne and the Statue of Liberty with
• 48:15
  tug, with tugboats cursing us out, you know, people up on the
• 48:19
  Bayonne Bridge, you know, dropping tools at us.
• 48:21
  It was it was a great time. I was probably in the best shape
• 48:24
  of my life from doing all that. And you did that internationally
• 48:27
  too, correct? Yeah, with the dragon boaters I
• 48:30
  belong to, I'm a Team USA, did some 40 and over.
• 48:34
  It goes in in rowing and paddling.
• 48:37
  You're either premier, which is open, right?
• 48:39
  You have men's, women's open, you can do mixed and then it's
• 48:42
  by age 40 and over, 50 and over, 60 and over.
• 48:45
  Then there's people still paddling in their 90s.
• 48:48
  So I went to Italy, I went to Hungary, Canada.
• 48:54
  I went to Hong Kong as a support member with the Philadelphia
• 48:58
  Dragon Boat. So you would have international
• 49:01
  competitions every other year and then you would have them
• 49:04
  also every alternate year for your club.
• 49:08
  And I belong to Philadelphia Dragon Boat Association and the
• 49:12
  Philadelphia Flying Phoenix women's team out of Philly.
• 49:15
  I would drive to Philly at 3:30 in the morning for early
• 49:18
  practices, takes me about an hour and a half through an hour
• 49:21
  and a half practice and then shoot back up to work in North
• 49:24
  Jersey. So I was 200 miles a day.
• 49:26
  Wow. For a little while I destroyed a
• 49:30
  car. But you know, I loved it.
• 49:33
  It was great. So then what brought you back
• 49:35
  into the softball? That was around 2020.
• 49:37
  It was just before the pandemic. Well, I got hurt paddling.
• 49:41
  I had a serious accident where I broke my neck and paralyzed my
• 49:43
  right side for a while. So I was out for a while.
• 49:47
  I came back, did OK for a while, but then the pandemic hit so
• 49:51
  everything kind of settled down. But right before that I started
• 49:54
  getting the itch again and I saw an article, saw some articles in
• 49:57
  the local paper about a big softball center complex opening
• 50:01
  up not far from me. Adventure sports, which is all
• 50:05
  turf, has 8 turf fields, state-of-the-art, and they were
• 50:09
  looking for coaches so I applied.
• 50:12
  I wanted to do just pitching, but before I knew it I had a 14U
• 50:16
  team kind of back, kind of backed into that and all of a
• 50:21
  sudden I'm a coach. So stayed with those kids for
• 50:24
  like two or three years. So where they turned 16, they
• 50:27
  did very well. Then I decided to just go into
• 50:32
  my own business, started my own business in 2022.
• 50:36
  I'd always been coaching pitchers.
• 50:38
  Like I said, I had several years off.
• 50:41
  Then I got the bug, came back into it, found Rick Pauli, which
• 50:46
  I was I was lurking on your disgust fast pitch all the time
• 50:50
  over the years. Kind of gave it a break for a
• 50:52
  while, but then I got the the itch again and looked up Rick,
• 50:57
  signed up for some of his courses, got to know him, got
• 51:00
  absorbed into your PCC group, which has just.
• 51:04
  I would say the last 2-3 years has been phenomenal growth
• 51:08
  period for me as far as learning.
• 51:11
  I wish I had this to this regimen when I was in college
• 51:16
  because it's every single day. Every day I'm doing something,
• 51:23
  learning something new, all right, exploring new areas,
• 51:26
  whether it's motor preferences or, or pulsing or, or, you know,
• 51:29
  fascia, whatever. And the ladder out.
• 51:32
  Not right now. I'm reading a book on laterality
• 51:34
  in sports because we're we're questioning just how much
• 51:38
  ambidextrousness left right effects, how we move overall.
• 51:41
  And it's not just handwriting or pitching.
• 51:45
  You know, I just, I just saw a very good Division One pitcher
• 51:48
  who's a lefty and talking to her dad, she's a natural
• 51:52
  right-hander. They never let her pitch or bat
• 51:57
  left-handed. And I wouldn't be surprised if
• 51:59
  she makes all American. So just watching her because I
• 52:03
  said, man, she's giving me confusing signals about what her
• 52:05
  profile is. And I think there's some of that
• 52:08
  going on there. So that's a whole other area,
• 52:11
  you know, another rat hole as we call it.
• 52:13
  Yeah. In our future.
• 52:14
  So where does that curiosity come from?
• 52:16
  I mean, certainly you've done a lot.
• 52:18
  You've been around some of the best players who ever played the
• 52:21
  game, you best coaches, whoever coached the game.
• 52:24
  It'd be really easy for you to say.
• 52:27
  You know what? I pretty much know what I'm
• 52:30
  doing here. I feel like, you know, I've got
• 52:31
  a strong background. I know all these things.
• 52:34
  And yeah, you're probably one of the most curious people that
• 52:37
  I've ever met. You brought motor preferences to
• 52:39
  the whole group. You know, I had no idea before
• 52:43
  you would even mentioned it. You keep on looking up all these
• 52:46
  other things. Where does that come from?
• 52:48
  Why now? I've always been like that.
• 52:51
  I don't Why now? Because I'm smarter, I guess.
• 52:53
  Smarter. I have the sense to do it.
• 52:55
  Yeah. You can't.
• 52:56
  You can't rest on your Lord. You're you're done.
• 52:58
  The the minute you, you stop learning, you're done.
• 53:02
  OK. Because somebody who's still
• 53:03
  learning is going to, is going to pass you.
• 53:05
  I did it in police work. You know, I, I I knew I was at a
• 53:08
  somewhat of a disadvantage as a female.
• 53:10
  I was a little bit, I was older. My my ticket was going to be
• 53:14
  education to train myself to pad my training folder more than
• 53:19
  anyone else in my department except for my chief, which I
• 53:23
  did. Every learning opportunity to
• 53:25
  make myself better because each learning opportunity can lead to
• 53:28
  another learning opportunity. 1 rabbit hole leads to another.
• 53:31
  We know that very well. I never stopped doing that with
• 53:35
  softball or tennis or paddling, even with hitting.
• 53:40
  I mean picking up Ted Williams book and going from there.
• 53:43
  Every book after that, every videotape, watch baseball
• 53:47
  videos, whatever. I think I have almost every
• 53:50
  softball videotape that came out in my era.
• 53:54
  Yeah, I have. I have.
• 53:56
  I have them all. Me and Steve Howard, library.
• 54:01
  We just have to find the machines to play them.
• 54:04
  Yeah. But yeah, when, when I, when I
• 54:07
  was, when I stumbled across motor preferences, I was looking
• 54:11
  for anything to help with Dr. mechanics.
• 54:14
  My background with the, I used to run the forensics unit for a
• 54:17
  while. So I have all of that training
• 54:19
  under my belt too. And I knew that gait analysis
• 54:22
  was, was something that wasn't looked into enough.
• 54:26
  There are experts in it. They can tell so much about you,
• 54:29
  just the way you move and walk. So I looked that up and soon I
• 54:34
  started coming across these studies by the sports lab called
• 54:38
  Bolodalin, based in Switzerland and different gait cycles for
• 54:43
  runners. It was a Eureka moment.
• 54:45
  I, I, it's like my body stopped. The hair stood up on my arms.
• 54:48
  I'm like, Oh my God, Oh my God. My, you know, I kept it to
• 54:51
  myself for a while. The more I read, the more I
• 54:53
  realized that Rick isn't going to like this.
• 54:55
  You guys are not going to like this.
• 54:58
  This is going to be like a, a, you know, an upper hook from
• 55:03
  unseen upper hook coming at you. So I sat on it for a few months
• 55:06
  and I kept learning more and more.
• 55:08
  Most of it was in French. I tried to translate whatever I
• 55:11
  could with apps. Then I stumbled across motor
• 55:16
  preference experts, saw a course opportunity, went to the
• 55:20
  University of Maryland and sat there and I knew I was on the
• 55:23
  right track. I didn't know where the track
• 55:26
  was going, but I said, how could I have missed this for 50 years?
• 55:30
  How could we have not seen this? Because it all clicked.
• 55:33
  It all made sense. And the same thing with, you
• 55:35
  know, Sean, Sean Walker bring up the fascia.
• 55:37
  Whoa, that's a whole nother area, right?
• 55:40
  So now we're all reading anatomy trains and looking at how how
• 55:43
  those contribute to stability because we know that stability
• 55:47
  is super, super important in anything we do to generate
• 55:50
  force. What how does that actually
• 55:53
  happen? Fascia plays a big part in it.
• 55:56
  You know I have a picture of Herb Dudley where he's throwing
• 56:00
  his curveball, right? He's everything is twisting in
• 56:02
  his tongue and his eyes are sticking in the same direction
• 56:04
  as the curveball. We listened to a Zoom about two
• 56:07
  weeks ago by a podiatrist, and she talked about the deep fascia
• 56:11
  line, the real core, which runs from your tiptoe to your tongue.
• 56:15
  How does this all tie together? How does Derek Jeter jump in the
• 56:18
  air, lose contact with the ground and still move against
• 56:22
  his body? What in there is tightening to
• 56:25
  allow him to do that? Well, half of his body is mobile
• 56:29
  enough to get that ball over to first base.
• 56:31
  How does that relate to when you leave the mound?
• 56:34
  Where? Where are we creating that
• 56:36
  tension, as some people call it, right?
• 56:38
  Yeah. And isn't it really a like a
• 56:40
  series of moments of tension? It kind of moved through the
• 56:43
  body and and you know, one thing happens and then it releases and
• 56:47
  then that triggers the next step down the chain.
• 56:50
  Yeah. You know, it goes back to the,
• 56:52
  the, the what is the pulse cycle that, as McGill describes it,
• 56:56
  it's a contraction immediately. So you have a spike contraction
• 57:00
  immediately followed by a moment of relaxation, then a second
• 57:03
  spike to deliver the energy either through the, you know,
• 57:07
  punching through a board, getting the ball out of your
• 57:10
  fingers. It's, it's that how do we make
• 57:14
  that cycle faster, including the relaxation part?
• 57:18
  We're we're exploring drills on how to do that.
• 57:21
  But they say that the top athletes in the world are 6 to 8
• 57:23
  times faster with that cycle can relax that much faster.
• 57:27
  So practicing relaxation was normal for the Eastern European
• 57:31
  block. I can Dave it.
• 57:33
  They would put a lot of energy into that, teaching that just
• 57:36
  how to relax and combine it in between those two peaks of
• 57:40
  contraction. What's the next rabbit hole for
• 57:43
  you? What are you thinking you're
• 57:44
  going to I know you're doing the fast fit.
• 57:46
  You got the the business going. All that stuff is there.
• 57:49
  Is there another thing on the on the list that you want to
• 57:51
  tackle? You've done the paddle sports,
• 57:53
  been amazing in that played at a high level pitching.
• 57:56
  What's next on the What's next? Any agenda for?
• 57:58
  You I have, I have a business, but it's not a big business.
• 58:03
  I'm retired, right? So I want to do this.
• 58:07
  I want quality. And I have a bunch of 11 year
• 58:10
  olds right now, a couple of 11 years that are real good, couple
• 58:14
  of twelves. My oldest kid is a junior, 11 is
• 58:19
  a new kid. She's going to college next
• 58:20
  year. But my oldest kids, a junior
• 58:22
  still looking. I want to guide those kids.
• 58:25
  I have a lefty freshman that I'm very excited about, but I would
• 58:28
  like to get back into the college game, something local,
• 58:31
  just as a pitching coach. You know, I don't want the my
• 58:35
  head coach days are long past. I'm a good recruiter.
• 58:38
  I'm a good pitching coach. So there you go.
• 58:40
  College is New Jersey. If you're looking for a pitching
• 58:42
  coach, you got the real opportunity here.
• 58:46
  Yeah, but at most I just want to my kids to be able to feel what
• 58:49
  I felt, what I feel every time I see a game.
• 58:52
  I cannot go to a game without having a heart attack and
• 58:54
  getting like right in there. That is definitely an endorphin
• 59:02
  burst right there. Yeah, and Speaking of which, you
• 59:05
  know, I know how I react when I'm watching things on Game
• 59:08
  Changer. And do you ever have that
• 59:09
  feeling if you're following several games, it's like you
• 59:12
  feel good, OK. Yeah.
• 59:13
  This kid's doing this good. This kids doing great.
• 59:16
  This kids doing great. Oh, no, this one's having
• 59:18
  trouble. I'm terrible.
• 59:19
  I'm a terrible coach. I should just give this up.
• 59:23
  Absolutely all. The time two years ago when when
• 59:28
  everyone was in Colorado, I was literally, I think, sitting on
• 59:32
  my couch weeping. I'm like, Oh my God, I'm
• 59:34
  terrible. And then, you know, the, the
• 59:36
  ball flies a little a little farther out there and I'm just
• 59:39
  like, who, boy? And then I think it was he was a
• 59:43
  pitching coach at Georgia Tech, Marty, he made a post on
• 59:46
  Twitter. He's like, OK, everybody can
• 59:47
  relax now. Next week, everybody's in
• 59:49
  Georgia. It's going to be humid and the
• 59:50
  ball's not going to fly at all. He's like, so everybody just
• 59:52
  relax. It was great.
• 59:54
  But that I'm like, oh man, every every year for Colorado, I'm
• 59:57
  like, don't. Don't look like, you know, don't
• 59:59
  look like like I said, if I can pass on.
• 1:00:02
  And they can, the ones that are really sharp about the game, the
• 1:00:05
  nuances, the high IQ kids, they, they get it because because they
• 1:00:10
  see, they see the possibilities and they, they see how much fun
• 1:00:13
  they can have with it. You know, I have some kids that
• 1:00:15
  just sit there and they just, they're stat freaks, right?
• 1:00:18
  They look at it mathematically. Not that I do, but they do.
• 1:00:22
  Yeah, it can still be tough. You know, they always say that a
• 1:00:25
  parent is only as happy as their unhappiest child.
• 1:00:29
  And for me, I feel like a coach is only as happy as their least
• 1:00:32
  successful player. Luckily, you know, most of the
• 1:00:34
  time it changes on any given day, you know, so it isn't
• 1:00:37
  always the same one. Yeah.
• 1:00:39
  They find, you know, you can try to get in there and micromanage,
• 1:00:42
  which you should never do as a coach, you know, and, but we
• 1:00:45
  have a tendency to try to do that because we, we, we want to
• 1:00:47
  fix them, right? And again, I think our job is to
• 1:00:53
  let them reveal who they are, help them reveal where their
• 1:00:58
  where their natural movement is, where where their strengths are,
• 1:01:01
  how they think is also very much tied in with the motor
• 1:01:04
  preferences. That's going to come to pass.
• 1:01:06
  People will see that being a role model, telling them how to
• 1:01:08
  think, how to, how to, teaching them how to approach the mound
• 1:01:13
  right, just walking good from the back of the circle, how to
• 1:01:15
  approach, how to carry yourself, what to look for in hitters.
• 1:01:19
  There's a predator component here you got to know here, pray,
• 1:01:21
  you got to be able to read the hitter's strengths and
• 1:01:23
  weaknesses. They're showing you open your
• 1:01:26
  eyes. So a couple of my kids are
• 1:01:29
  pretty good at that. One of them, one or two of them
• 1:01:32
  are already looking at motor preferences in their opponents,
• 1:01:35
  throwing balls where they know the weaknesses are.
• 1:01:37
  So like that to me is learning. Although that brings up another
• 1:01:42
  question then is that, you know, especially in today's adult
• 1:01:44
  driven game, a lot of the kids don't have the leeway to throw
• 1:01:48
  that pitch. They may be able to recognize it
• 1:01:50
  in there, but the coach is going to say I'm calling the pitches
• 1:01:53
  and you throw what I call, you throw where I call to throw it
• 1:01:57
  and you have no input. How do you feel about that?
• 1:01:59
  So Linda, hold on before you answer, can I answer something
• 1:02:02
  real quick because Ken, Ken's got me all fired up now.
• 1:02:06
  I think that. So for me, I I pitch call for
• 1:02:09
  Saint Xavier, but after every inning, I'm conversing with the
• 1:02:13
  pitcher and the catcher and the first words out of my mouth are,
• 1:02:16
  Hey, what are you seeing? What are you thinking?
• 1:02:19
  What sequence do you think here? What's you know, what are you
• 1:02:22
  seeing from the hitter that that I'm not seeing?
• 1:02:24
  Is there something that we need to do the next time around with
• 1:02:27
  that hitter? I think that's coaching, right?
• 1:02:29
  Like that's what coaching is about.
• 1:02:31
  And this is another thing that kind of makes me a little bit
• 1:02:34
  angry is that coaches will say, oh, well, you can't make
• 1:02:38
  adjustments during the game. Baloney.
• 1:02:41
  If you don't think hitters are making an adjustment every
• 1:02:43
  single pitch, you are absolutely fooling yourself.
• 1:02:46
  So if you don't think as a pitching coach that I'm not
• 1:02:48
  helping my pitchers, if I see them, they're over rotating or
• 1:02:52
  their weights more on their front, right?
• 1:02:54
  And that's not what they're supposed to be doing that I'm
• 1:02:56
  not helping that kid fix that during the middle of a game or
• 1:02:59
  even from pitch to pitch. I think that's what the coaching
• 1:03:02
  aspect of it is. It's not just, well, we'll fix
• 1:03:04
  this in practice. No, we need to, we need to work
• 1:03:06
  on that now at this moment, cuz this game is important right
• 1:03:09
  now, right? And I think that's it's, it's
• 1:03:11
  making these players a part of the process and not making it
• 1:03:15
  where it's just, I'm calling this pitch, you throw this pitch
• 1:03:17
  because that's what it is a part of.
• 1:03:19
  It is like Linda, like you said. And Linda said, being able to
• 1:03:23
  read what the hitters are not able to do and then using
• 1:03:27
  pitches to take advantage of that.
• 1:03:29
  Or if their tendency is to go a certain way and you want that
• 1:03:32
  ball hit to 3rd, or you know you have runners first to second,
• 1:03:36
  you know less than two outs, you want that ball hit on the ground
• 1:03:38
  to third. Stop trying to strike them out.
• 1:03:41
  Put the ball or you know they're, you know, pull the
• 1:03:43
  strings and make them your puppet.
• 1:03:45
  Put the ball where you, you know, they're going to, you
• 1:03:48
  know, help your defense. It that's a whole nother aspect
• 1:03:52
  that some of them actually they like that.
• 1:03:53
  Oh, I can do that. You know, I have that power.
• 1:03:57
  But some of the coach, you know, This is why I get out to games,
• 1:04:00
  because I'll see a freshman. You know, she'll have 10
• 1:04:03
  strikeouts and gave up ten hits and like what's going on here,
• 1:04:07
  you know, and sometimes it's just that there's not a defense
• 1:04:11
  behind her. I I have, you know, one.
• 1:04:13
  So the kid has a great drop and coach never calls it and keeps
• 1:04:17
  throwing fastballs or, you know, change UPS outside to weak
• 1:04:20
  hitters until that kid finally drives a ball to right field.
• 1:04:26
  You know, I pull the kid aside and go.
• 1:04:28
  I know you don't want to go against your coach, but you
• 1:04:30
  know, you know it's not working. What are you going to do?
• 1:04:32
  Talk to your coach? Do something different?
• 1:04:34
  You can't keep doing the same thing.
• 1:04:36
  Yeah, the definition of insanity.
• 1:04:38
  Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different
• 1:04:40
  results. Right.
• 1:04:41
  You know, or your kids not even catching up on an inside pitch
• 1:04:45
  and then you throw her change up and blue pit right field.
• 1:04:48
  Come on. Yep.
• 1:04:49
  You know, what do you advise your pitchers to do if they're
• 1:04:52
  in that situation where the coach insists that the pitcher
• 1:04:55
  throw what's called and there's no leeway, no ability to shake
• 1:04:59
  it off? Do they just go, OK, here it is,
• 1:05:03
  go hit it. I think they need to at least
• 1:05:05
  bring it up to the coach, you know, in a non threatening way.
• 1:05:08
  And then if the results at the coaches morning off and they'll
• 1:05:11
  see it's not working, hopefully they'll change.
• 1:05:14
  You know, sometimes you you can't go against your coach.
• 1:05:17
  You know, one kid I know is a senior.
• 1:05:19
  She's she's ready to go and she's the only pitcher.
• 1:05:22
  So she has a little more pull maybe, but she should be talking
• 1:05:26
  to her coach about that. That communication should be
• 1:05:28
  open. And some of them just say, hey,
• 1:05:32
  it's only high school ball and I'm looking forward to getting
• 1:05:35
  to travel ball. How would you say that your
• 1:05:37
  coaching style has changed over the years?
• 1:05:40
  Any anything that you've you're doing differently just in your
• 1:05:44
  approach or I mean, you did mention about kind of, you know,
• 1:05:50
  more of the revealing of what things are doing rather than
• 1:05:53
  trying to direct it as much. But are there other things that
• 1:05:56
  you feel like you've evolved on? You mean in terms of working
• 1:06:00
  one-on-one with pitchers or coaching a team?
• 1:06:03
  I'd say probably working one-on-one, but you know, you
• 1:06:05
  can mention coaching A-Team as well.
• 1:06:07
  Again, we have to be careful to not have this, you know, North
• 1:06:11
  Star of this is the perfect pitching form or this is the
• 1:06:14
  form I like or this is what I've always liked.
• 1:06:17
  And then trying to have those kids that don't, that aren't
• 1:06:21
  perfect like that kind of gravitate toward that because
• 1:06:24
  you've been around long enough, you know that there's people who
• 1:06:27
  don't throw quote UN quote perfectly, OK.
• 1:06:31
  There's people that lean over, look at, look at Pickens.
• 1:06:34
  All right, you're going to mess with that, right?
• 1:06:37
  Off balance is maybe that off balance is part of her pulling
• 1:06:40
  together to generate more speed. Who knows, right?
• 1:06:44
  These are things we don't really know yet.
• 1:06:47
  And I don't know if technology can help us find that.
• 1:06:49
  But the three tenants that you learn from motor preferences
• 1:06:52
  are, is it safe? Is it effective and is it
• 1:06:55
  efficient? We need the 1st 2:00, we hope
• 1:06:59
  for the third. I kind of swing to that approach
• 1:07:03
  more so now instead of trying to hammer kid, Oh, you're still,
• 1:07:06
  you're not doing XYZ. You're doing better at that.
• 1:07:09
  You're shaping over this way. Are you getting the results?
• 1:07:11
  Are you healthy? OK, so how can we improve that?
• 1:07:13
  And we work together. I, I, each of my students is, is
• 1:07:17
  in partnership with me. They need to contribute.
• 1:07:19
  I need that feedback. That has to be two way
• 1:07:21
  communication, you know, if I'm having one set up, like I never
• 1:07:25
  thought that I would ever tell a pitcher to drive from their
• 1:07:28
  heels. OK, well, for those who it's
• 1:07:32
  natural for, you're going to see a three to four mile an hour
• 1:07:35
  jump. If that's their if that's their
• 1:07:38
  natural preference, you have to be open minded and see what
• 1:07:41
  works for that kid. And I'll ask that kid after
• 1:07:44
  that, did that feel right? You have to be honest.
• 1:07:46
  Did it feel right or did it feel weird?
• 1:07:48
  And you know, we talk about this usually you see the smile on the
• 1:07:51
  face that that indicates that, yeah, this is home.
• 1:07:54
  This is where I feel good, even though it's not something that
• 1:07:58
  maybe match your own coaching preferences.
• 1:08:01
  So you have to over, you have to be aware of that coaching bias.
• 1:08:05
  Most of my life, I'm sure I coach just like I pitch.
• 1:08:09
  You have to listen to the kids and see what works.
• 1:08:11
  And it's a whole new development of vision for us as coaches.
• 1:08:16
  That's why you step back, reveal, let them show
• 1:08:18
  themselves. That might be the skill.
• 1:08:20
  How do you let them reveal? How do you take yourself out of
• 1:08:23
  it and try to see what's right there?
• 1:08:26
  Again, there's no final determination of what is good.
• 1:08:30
  We're still all trying to agree on that.
• 1:08:32
  But we kind of know what goes in the soup and when it's supposed
• 1:08:36
  to happen. I have pictures that get to that
• 1:08:39
  point of the motion in different ways.
• 1:08:43
  And it's because maybe they have a horizontal preference or they
• 1:08:45
  have a large preference versus me who I'm very vertical and
• 1:08:49
  axial. And that's the way you can't be
• 1:08:51
  out here. You got to be here.
• 1:08:52
  Well, as long as you're here coming down, you're in a good
• 1:08:54
  spot. It's we get there, we get to the
• 1:08:57
  same place in different ways and you have to respect.
• 1:09:01
  I think you can use that word a lot.
• 1:09:02
  Most motor preferences respect the individual's preference.
• 1:09:04
  Absolutely. And respect your own.
• 1:09:07
  Well, Linda, we've taken up over an hour of your time.
• 1:09:10
  We really appreciate this. You know, it's been great
• 1:09:13
  talking to you. As always, fun.
• 1:09:15
  Yep, Thank you so much for joining us today, Linda.
• 1:09:17
  Can't thank you enough for just your, the history that you you
• 1:09:20
  have and, and your absolute ability to just continue to be a
• 1:09:24
  lifelong learner. It's just, it's just awesome.
• 1:09:27
  I know Ken and I both agree that you've inspired us to be better
• 1:09:29
  coaches by what all of the digging that you've done and and
• 1:09:33
  the things that you've introduced us to.
• 1:09:35
  So I think that's great. I don't know if you're taking on
• 1:09:37
  new clients, but if there is somebody that's looking for a
• 1:09:40
  pitching coach in that New Jersey area out there, is there
• 1:09:43
  a place that they can find you to get some more information
• 1:09:46
  about some pitching lessons? Website
• 1:09:49
  greaselightningfastpitch.com. I have been giving lessons out
• 1:09:55
  of Adrenaline and Toms River over the winter and I was up in
• 1:09:58
  the Morganville area for the northern kids, but I'm around.
• 1:10:01
  Just reach out. There's a questionnaire thanks
• 1:10:04
  to Ken Ken, design that one on my website so I can get a little
• 1:10:09
  idea of your history. Every kid that comes to me is
• 1:10:12
  going to go through a motor preferences assessment.
• 1:10:14
  I will not teach without it anymore.
• 1:10:16
  It's that important. You cannot just blindly go at a
• 1:10:19
  kid. You need to know who they are,
• 1:10:21
  or at least have an idea who they are.
• 1:10:24
  Yes, for sure. About half of the nonsense out
• 1:10:27
  right off the top. I think you guys would agree it.
• 1:10:29
  Provides really good guidance on, you know, kind of you still
• 1:10:33
  have to see how they move and you have to talk to the kid and
• 1:10:35
  see what they feel. But it's a great starting point.
• 1:10:39
  And I think for me personally, I know it helps keep me from
• 1:10:42
  putting my own biases on top of the kid or thinking you need to
• 1:10:46
  do this. Well, I have two kids that came
• 1:10:48
  to me with aches and pains, you know, arm and and hip problems
• 1:10:53
  that I don't know if it's because of this, but they're
• 1:10:57
  gone because their posture is 100% better.
• 1:11:01
  So this stuff works, right? They're using their body the way
• 1:11:05
  it should be, not the way that they were trying to fit into a
• 1:11:08
  square peg into a round hole. I agree, and I know Jay does as
• 1:11:11
  well. All right.
• 1:11:12
  Well, thank you, Linda, for spending all this time with us.
• 1:11:15
  That's it for us this week. Thanks to all of you for
• 1:11:18
  listening and the kind words you've been sharing with us.
• 1:11:21
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• 1:11:23
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• 1:11:27
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• 1:11:30
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• 1:11:33
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• 1:11:39
  On behalf of the From the Coach's Mouth podcast, have a
• 1:11:42
  great rest of your week and weekend and keep playing.