Deven Morgan - Director of Youth Baseball, Driveline Academy (Part I)

[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to the abca's podcast. I'm your host, ryan brownlee. Baseball is a story told across generations through the players, the moments and the gloves that shape the game. Now that story comes to life in Rawlings, the Finest in the Field book available now for pre [email protected] each of the 50 gloves is presented through detailed photography and paired with immersive essays that place the artifact within its historical context. Captivating imagery, period advertisements and additional memorabilia further illuminate the era each glove represents. Reserve your copy [email protected] and be among the first to experience baseball's evolution as told through the story of these iconic gloves. This episode is sponsored by Netting Pros. Netting Professionals are improving programs one facility at a time Netting Professionals specializes in the design, fabrication and installation of custom netting for backstops, batting cages, dugouts, BP screens and ball carts. They also design and install digital graphic wall padding, windscreen turf, turf protectors, dugout benches, dugout cubbies and more. Netting Professionals is an official partner of the ABCA and continues to provide quality products and services to many high school, college and professional fields, facilities and stadiums throughout the country. Netting Professionals are improving programs one facility at a time. Contact them today at 844-620-2707 or infoettingpros.com, visit them online at www.nettingpros.com or check out NettingPros on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn for all their latest products and projects. Make sure to let CEO Will Miner know that the ABCA sent you. Now on to the podcast Next up on the ABCA podcast is Driveline Director of Youth Baseball and the Driveline Academy Devin Morgan. At Driveline Academy, Morgan integrates individual skill development, nutrition guidance and physical therapy. The intention of Driveline is to address what Morgan has seen in the past 15 years, players who are all too often underdeveloped on the fundamental skills that would help them stay competitive in the game as they transition from youth to high school. Anything that Morgan has done in terms of developing programs and systems to improve youth baseball development has been done with an intention to positively impact all the players in the organization, including his own. Morgan has been an instrumental part of the ABCA with his involvement on the Youth and Travel Committees and the Youth Summit. Morgan is a published author publishing Skills that Scale, a Youth Baseball Training Manual. We had a lot to cover since we last recorded in 2020 so this will be a two part episode with part two coming out next week. This is an in depth interview on player development at the youth age Morgan is living it on the daily since his son Danny has been training at Driveline since he was 9 years old and is now a 17 year old going through the college recruiting process. Let's welcome Devin Morgan to the podcast here with Devin Morgan, director of youth baseball, Driveline, also founder at Driveline. But you and I go way back now. It's crazy. [00:03:34] Speaker B: We do academy. I gotta give credit. [00:03:38] Speaker A: See, there we go. [00:03:39] Speaker B: Can't take that away from them. But yeah, man, I, you know, I say all the time that, like, in so much as it matters, like, I've had the opportunity to contribute to, you know, the youth and travel baseball committee at ABC over these last six or seven years. But the genesis of that is like, you know, Ryan Brownlee gave young Devin Morgan, maybe not so young, but like young Devin Morgan an opportunity to like be on the pod and eventually, you know, speak on stage. And it means the world, man. I just, I don't know, I think it says a lot about ABCA's initiative in kind of using that platform to shine a spotlight on people who are just trying to do good work. And you know, for better or worse, man, for the 15 years that I've been coaching like that, that's been the impetus behind all of it, man. Just trying to do the best work I can and serve the kids that I'm coaching. [00:04:22] Speaker A: And I mean, we've come a long way since 2020. But you know, part of the reason I wanted you to come on there and talk is because if you, it was so combative online back then and I'm like, this guy has a great voice and he has a lot of really good information. And so that's why I invited you on because you weren't getting a lot of love from people at that point. But I'm like, he's got great information. But what have we learned since 2020? Because you, you told me that and you're like, hey, can we go back and record? I'm like, we'll go back at some point. But like, I, you were like, I'd really like to go back and, and re record. But that's, that's why I give you credit, because I think you're like me in a lot of those ways. Like, I'm, I'm willing to admit when I'm wrong on things 100. But you're also evolving. And I don't think it's that you're wrong. I think you're doing the best with the information you have at that point, 100%. [00:05:11] Speaker B: And I think that's one thing that I think people perhaps sometimes get a little bit misconstrued about kind of what we're trying to do at Driveline and then specifically for me, for what I'm trying to do on the youth side, right? It's. You're just not attached to dogma. Like, I'm really not attached to the idea of like, well, this is how it's always been. So this is the way that we're going to continue to do it like that. For me, at a personal level, like, that just doesn't make sense, you know. So I think, you know, generally what we're trying to do is, is use the most, the best information that we have possible from science, from research, and certainly some of that is from anecdote and experience, because that's all always going to be part of it. But because you keep that kind of feedback loop and that channel open, it would be ridiculous to do that and then not be open to change when you receive new information that would suggest stuff has to change. So that's, I think that's what we're trying to do at a very like, macro level in terms of what's changed since 2020. A lot, you know, like a lot. I would say, you know, for, for me personally, I think because I'm going through this experience trying to do right by the kids in my program and certainly, you know, learning from smarter and better coaches than I am and then have what we're doing at Driveline reflect both of those things. While that's happening on this side of like my professional life, I'm also still like trying to shepherd my son through the thing. And I think inevitably like having to go through these experiences as a travel ball dad or, you know, or as a select ball dad and as the parent of a high school kid and a kid who wants to go play college baseball and ultimately like play professional, all those experiences are coloring my understanding of kind of this whole thing. And like, most recently, you know, we went down and he had his first ever showcase, first ever showcase as an almost 17 year old kid. He went down and did the PG Main Event Showcase in December of last year. And PG gets a lot of flack because they are kind of the biggest elephant in the proverbial room when it comes to showcase events in the tournament space. And I had always kind of experienced those things from outside, right. Like, I know my local PG State guy who's a great dude, Lee Larson. I know Taylor McCullough, who's the VP of Perfect Game through the committee stuff we do at abca, but I hadn't experienced the thing and, and I think one of the things was really revealing. We go down for the showcase and it was, you know, like the event itself was. Was fine. You know, it was great. I kind of had a decent idea of what to expect. But then we got to the last day of the event and they said it was going to be a coach pitch day. And I was like, oh, this is interesting, right? Like, this in and of itself confirms that somebody at the top of the food chain is wary of the fact that at the tail end of like a three day showcase, the odds that you still have fresh arms to go are relatively low. So in order to do that, but knowing that we still want these kids to get field reps and we want them to get live babies in the box, we're just going to have the coaches pitch. And my own son asked me, he was like, I don't know why we're doing coach pitch the last day. That is dad. And I was like, okay, well, how does your arm feel after, you know, pitching, you know, he. He went. I don't know, whatever, whatever. I think he went 3, 3 innings in the showcase, which was perfect, right? Like that, that was, that was perfect for a showcase pitching appearance. I was like, how do you feel? He's like, not great. Okay, we'll extend that across not only the rest of your roster and these other kids who've had this opportunity and inherently understood that part of participating. This means you're going to like, let it eat a little bit, right? Like, we all understand that. Well, if we're all feeling that way and you extend that not only to you at the individual level, but your team, but all the other teams here, then what's the smart choice in. In order to get you more reps and get you a little bit more exposure away from the pitching side. Well, it is to do a coach pitch end. So I had that experience going into it of kind of thinking whatever I thought about Perfect Game as an observer, being a customer was a very different thing. So now I have to modify my thing. Right. My perspective has been informed, my experience, and I think it really changed the way I thought about like the showcase environment as a whole. So I think that's one big thing. I really no longer think that showcases are like the enemy. But I also think, and I think this bears out, that there is a reasonable and intelligent time to put your kid in that environment. And there's also a period of time where your Calories are probably better spurned, better spent, and your money is better spent going in a different direction. [00:09:54] Speaker A: And by the way we say it all the time, you felt like he was ready at that point as a 17 year old because you felt like his metrics were going to be good enough to showcase. At that point where a lot of kids out there just showcase, just to showcase, well, that's going to live online forever. And that's something I always try to get to parents. Like, if your child is not ready to showcase, do not put them in an environment because that's going to live online forever. [00:10:18] Speaker B: Yeah. And you know, like you, you see this, I mean, you go to any showcase tournament, right, or showcase provider, they'll, they'll show you kind of like the chronolog data. And the worst thing that can happen there is you see a kid who comes in, it's like, you know, 68, and then 68 turns into 70 and 70 turns into 72 and 72 turns into 73 and they just kind of plateau and it's flat. But then they keep going to the showcase thing as if that is inherently like that environment is going to in and of itself push their development. And you know, because at Driveline, we're so just big at the individual development side. Like, one of the things I had said for a while is like, hope is a really crappy development strategy, right? Like you can't hope your way into performance. And especially with everything we understand from like a sports science perspective nowadays, right, where we understand that like the way that you're getting stronger and better is not necessarily under tension or under the bar or under the strain of the physical activity. It's when you give yourself time to rest and recover from said activity. And then ideally you periodize, meaning that kind of at considerate intervals you introduce more stress and then you give a kid time to recover from that stress. Like that's the, that's the thing, right? That, that's the thing. And I think that whole thing, you know, if you want to just have like a 10 minute good Google search or throw this into your, you know, your AI platform du jour, have it explain to you this idea of super compensation, right, where you, you introduce stress, stress creates fatigue, that fatigue creates, you know, an adaptation response. And if you just monitor and introduce that stuff with consistency, you can increase capacity. So like between the time that my son started training at Driveline, which is right before he turned nine, and then when he eventually went and finally showcased the dot, that's going to land at the PG site is going to say that he threw 91 and that was his first ever showcase. And that's great. What I know is going on in the background is like the first recorded throw that he had at Driveline, I want to say was like 47 or 48 miles an hour. And it's this really weird thing where like, hey man, I would agree with you that capturing throwing velocity for 8, 9 and 10 year olds doesn't mean a lot in terms of like big picture stuff. It really doesn't. But I also have to tell you that it was impactful for me to be able to measure it when it was 8 and 9 because now I can observe what's happening between 8 to 9 and 9 to 10 and 10 to 11, etc. And kind of heat check, are we doing the right things, are we making the right decisions, etc. And this is all going on in my head, right? As a kid who, or as a kid who was like not, not as good of a baseball player, my son is a way better baseball player than I ever was. And all I've tried to do is like, you know, shepherd him and guide him through this experience and because I knew this is the one thing that hasn't changed, right? The one thing that hasn't changed. My understanding since we last talked on a pod in like 2020 is just the scale at which the game changes. And there's so many like little iterative steps to go from, you know, gosh coach pitch to kid pitch to, to you know, what we call minors and majors in the little league side. And then in a 13, 14 year old baseball we start to introduce 50, 70 fields and then eventually 60 90s, introducing BB Corve bats instead of drop fives, drop eights, drop tens. Like there's all these little iterative changes and the one thing that I've tried to do over these last six years is be mindful of when those changes are going to happen, what they were going to necessitate for competitiveness and then I guess have the schedule reflect the choices we need to make in order to get there. That that's been the one thing that really hasn't changed is I still think, you know, ultimately the reason we run teams at Driveline, because teams gives us the ability to control the schedule. And if you can control the schedule, you can make smarter decisions about how you burn calories between training and competition and rest in order to continue to build a player up and just help them get as good as they can be. You know, that that definitely has not changed. [00:14:32] Speaker A: And the question too, with Danny on that Sunday, if he doesn't feel good, what about a kid of a parent who knows nothing about warmups, knows nothing about recovery? Like, you guys do everything right with him. You do everything you're supposed to be doing with him. He's still a little bit danged up on that Sunday where. What about a kid whose parents don't know anything about that? How does their arm feel that day? Obviously, you guys do everything right with Danny. So. And that's the other thing on that. Like, he's at the top end of the food chain as far as proper warmup, proper recovery. You've got to think that everybody else isn't feeling good either at that point. [00:15:05] Speaker B: No. And I think that, you know, the one thing that kind of bums me out about that is just a lot of it, I think reflects an information gap, you know, And I don't know anything different to try to, like, attack that thing other than just try to, like, help people understand not only what we're doing, but why, you know, like. Like the why thing is really important. So think about, think about running polls for pitchers, right? Like, this has been a thing in our game for decades. And the one thing I'll say at the top about polls is that I'm not suggesting that cardiovascular health and capacity is meaningless, right? If you, if you don't have good cardio, the odds that you can be in just good physical shape to go out and throw 50, 60, 80 pitches, very, very low. So some base level cardio needs to be trained and developed. However, our sport is not a sustained aerobic sport, right? It's not that it's anaerobic, meaning that you have these, like, short bursts of high activity. And again, I don't have a cscs. I'm not a strength trainer. So if I get any of this wrong, feel free to yell at me on Twitter. [00:16:11] Speaker A: But it is short burn. It's short sprints for an extended period of time. [00:16:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's the thing, right? And the other thing that we understand about pitching in particular is that the best pitchers are going to use like a whole body sequence, right? Like this, you know, whether you call it proximal to distal because you're big segments into your small segments, or whether you talk about it from a framework of like, using your legs and sequencing. Well, that's what we want to have happen. So imagine you go out and you throw X volume of pitches, and that pitching has not only created holistic fatigue Meaning your whole body is tired because it's a whole body activity. But you also have specific fatigue in the areas that are involved with the throw. So when we have kids do polls as a mechanism of recovery, the question is why? Right? And I think if you ask people, if you asked me 20 years ago, what I would have told you is that like, well, I think what's happening is we're trying to flush lactic acid, right? That was the thing that we believed and it wasn't that anybody believed that because their intention was bad. That was just how we understood sports science, fatigue and recovery at the time. What has changed is that we know that that's not a thing anymore. Like we know that this isn't like a flushing lactic acid thing that's happening. We also know that even if that was a thing, all you're doing when you have kids run polls after pitching is you're adding fatigue on top of fatigue, which. And that's the thing about again, reflect back to what you're going to learn through Claude or ChatGPT or whatever about super compensation. The way that you get the positive adaptation is you introduce the stimulus which creates fatigue and you give the body time to recover from, from that fatigue state and then you get the super compensation effect. But when you start to stack fatigue on top of fatigue, now we are not only inhibiting super compensation, but we are probably decreasing your level of readiness for the next thing. So like one of the things I was talking about this morning, every spring I do this thing called this week in pitch counts on social media and I'll talk about some of the gross pitch count stuff that people send to me. What I got sent to me this week was a kid who went like 80 plus as a hard throwing, like throwing hard for their age, 10 year old. So in abstract that might not be the worst thing. But the thing that freaks me out is I highly doubt that that kid has been throwing a series of progressively 50, 60, 70, 80 pitch pens leading into that start in the four to six weeks prior. I just, I kind of doubt that. Right, because who's running 80 pitch pens for a 10 year old? But then when you don't do that, you're not. [00:18:57] Speaker A: And by the way, back that up, it's not an 80 pitch full go, 80 pitches in a row. That's going to be segmented. The first week might be 15 pitches, the next week might be 15 with another set of 15 at some point. It's a gradual build and that's where people that listen in that maybe don't know it's not 80 straight pitches. Just like they wouldn't do that in a game. [00:19:19] Speaker B: Yes. It has to be progressive. Right. Because what you're thinking about, the way to think about this is that, like, I do want to introduce a little bit of fatigue, and I do actually, you know, stress is not necessarily a bad thing. Stress is the thing that drives the adaptation. But only if you maintain the time for rest and recovery after you introduce the stimulus meaning 30 pitch pen on Monday. If you throw on Wednesday, the throwing on Wednesday should be very light in volume and intensity. If you throw on Friday, you probably want a little bit more volume and intensity to set you up to then be ready to go throw again the next Monday. Like very, very roughly. But the pulse thing, right? So you've got a holistic fatigue, you have acute fatigue, and then we add more fatigue on that because we're hoping that there's this physical mechanism of running just to run that's going to flush this out, and it simply doesn't work that way. But you still have coaches who love their kids no differently than I do, and they want their kids to develop and perform no differently than I do that still don't know that. Like our understanding of the process in the system because of sports science, because research has changed. So it's one of those things where I don't have. I know that if I go out there and I like, posture myself and talk in a way where it sounds like I just know more than I'm going to sound like a jerk, right? I'm going to sound like a jerk. And then the message. Message is not going to land. So I try to be really. I try to be better as good as I can about, like, hey, this isn't coming from a place of judgment. This isn't coming from a place of scoring or derision. But I can kind of tell you that, like, we just know some stuff now. You know, we know more than we did 10, 20, 30 years ago. And that's not to say that Steve Carlton was wrong for shoving his hand in a bag of rice as a recovery modality in certain aspects of that. I understand that. But one thing I would grant is that one of the people that doesn't get talked enough about in this space is Nolan Ryan. Nolan Ryan was a early proponent of strength training and used that as recovering modality and stayed relatively healthy over the course of his entire career. Did Nolan Ryan run polls? I'm sure he ran some amount of polls. I don't doubt that because I know what baseball looked like back in those days, I'm probably telling myself on how old I am, whatever. But the tricky thing is, again, when you start to attach fatigue on top of fatigue and you're kind of training one energy system in the body that's the opposite of the one that you utilize in competition, you're doing this with the right intention, but it's just kind of. It's misaligned with kind of the reality of what we understand about sports science for how you can help kids recover and perform their best. And that's ultimately the thing that we should all be driving. [00:22:07] Speaker A: And we went away from it, and that was because of you guys. Like, literally when our guys, when our pictures got done competitively, they did the rebounders, they did some of the D cell stuff, and then they hopped on the mark pro, and then that was it. And then the next day, it was heavy leg day in the weight room and it was heart rate variability stuff. So a lot of, A lot of get your heart rate up, get it down, and get your heart rate up, get it down. It was a lot of that stuff. And then, you know, really, a lot of our guys could pick a ball up the day after they threw. Majority of our guys, which completely changed from years past because of just doing the rebounders and some of the D cell stuff. The mark pro then hammer them in the weight room, then they would come out, get a little bit of their heart rate variability stuff, and then they would play catch. And that was almost 99% of our guys. And you never saw that in the past where, hey, how do you feel, Coach? I feel good enough to toss right now. Okay, great. [00:23:00] Speaker B: Yeah. And so, you know, again, in a team like that, the schedule grants you the opportunity to control for that stuff. And I think that again, the one thing, you know, you talk about what's changed from now to from down to 2020, when we last talked, I do think that, you know that the mechanism of games and youth baseball and the tournament and select space has only continued to get worse. Right? Like, and that's just the fact that [00:23:27] Speaker A: you mentioned coach pitch. PG did it in a showcase. I've thrown that out numerous times. Hey, if you want to play that many games, can we have a coach pitch component on this? Like, yeah, like, if we get to that point where both teams, rather than go home, if both teams are out of arms. Okay, let's do a coach pitch segmented inner squad here. I know it's not sexy because we're trying to win this thing. But if we have the field space rather than both teams go home because we're out of pitching, why don't we tow it up and do a coach pitch here and let our guys get reps and it's a modified go to a college and high school practice. You're going to see plenty of coach pitch stuff going on because you don't have available. [00:24:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I think. And so now, now we're now. [00:24:11] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean you can get creative, like if you still want to get that many games and you can do it, you can do it without the arms. You could get creative. [00:24:20] Speaker B: Correct. But this is the meat of the problem because now we're talking about conflicts around value prop and like what we're trying to get out of the, out of the thing. And I think, you know, this is one of the things that I think excites me the most about the growth that ABCA has had at the youth and travel space level. Because it just affords you the opportunity to help more coaches understand like, what, what, what is the point of this thing? What like, what is the point? And again, like I, you know, we run Dryland Academy teams. You know, we have them from like an 11 year group up to 18. We also do training, we do assessments, you do all this other stuff. But like, point being that I understand what side, what side of the bread I am buttering. I take checks from parents. That is part of my job to do that. We train their kids, we had them play games, we give them access to things like, you know, three A athletics courses through Travis Snyder and those guys over there. We have a nutritionist, we have integrated strength with our program. We do all these things. But ultimately the like the highest volume thing or the highest signal thing I think a parent experiences in youth baseball is the game. It's the game. And when you start to kind of introduce this idea that like, well, maybe the result of that game matters less than the learning and the actual growth and the actual development. Well now you're kind of dealing with like, is a parent actually able to understand that thing? Right. And the tricky thing is like we understand it scholastically. I think parents, you don't see parents typically like going into the classroom after a test and like yelling at the teacher and I'm going to pull my kid, I'm going to put him in the other second grade classroom. Right. Like that's typically not a thing that happens in baseball. However, you know, we've kind of constructed this thing in travel and select sports where we are Just kind of like chasing one carrot on the end of one stick. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of decisions that get made because of our orientation that way. So the idea that you would run a tournament and go like, hey, well, if both teams are run out of, run out of arms and we are going to do a coach pitch thing or do a machine pitch thing, I think that just kind of gets rejected really early because it's like, well, but my kid needs reps, right? My kid needs to pitch. And they're not necessarily wrong. The thing they don't understand is like, they just don't need to pitch on Sunday because they just pitched on Saturday. What they need to do is they need to pitch on Wednesday or Thursday. So then you end up with like very, you know, incentive structures are kind of, kind of in conflict. And then we have what we have [00:27:05] Speaker A: now, we gotten a good arm side, glove side, set up on, on the rubber in New York as we're walking back from dinner. But the other thing I noticed, and Contreras is getting a lot of play. Contreras is overhand delivery guy, which is a throwback. You know, here, here's a 17 year old kid who's a very, very special arm. But if you look at his delivery, it's a throwback delivery because he's going overhead with his arms and his delivery, which allows his body to have some free freedom and some athleticism, you know, and, and shout out to whoever coached him or didn't coach him at a young age. He's probably been doing that since he's a kid. And shout out to whoever allowed him to keep going over the head with his hands with his delivery because it's a throwback delivery. [00:27:44] Speaker B: Yeah, so. So I was, I've been doing a bunch of coaching clinics lately for like our local little leagues. You know, we do them for $0 and we just bring them in. And I'll do right now what I got is kind of like a soup to nuts, like 90 minutes, kind of like all of it. But one of the things I do in these coaching clinics really early is establish like what I really want to be able to give to any youth baseball coach is two things. Number one, I don't need you to be like a master technician. I really, really don't. If you get to a point where you learn enough about this thing and you have enough experience, you can go be on a professional staff, then by all means, please get there. But where you are right now, be where your feet are That's a Ken Reveza thing, right? Uh, you're coaching nine year olds, tomato, potato. These two things are not the same. So I, So I don't need you to necessarily be a master technician for the ages of kind of anybody in youth baseball because the one that they all share is that they're not in their grown up adult bodies yet. And you should coach them differently. You should have different expectations of their coordination systems, their ability to be fairly consistent with movement. Like that's just not a thing. Put a pin in that whole separate conversation to be had about elite performers and their ability to actually be adjustable and not necessarily wrote repeated mechanics. But I digress. I think the number one thing I want youth coaches to understand is like, you don't need to be a master technical person. But the second thing is I want you to think about training these kids in the skill more of an, more of like a guided discovery thing than like move the right way. And I want you to think about creating environments for these kids to practice the skill in that allows it to inform how their bodies work relative to the skill. Right. So now you're talk. So now this conversation about arm slots that you and I were talking about in New York. I've seen kids who have really low arm slots and can throw really well. I've seen kids that have really high arm slots and can throw really well. I think so long as you have you throwing, revolving around, accomplishing a task which is throw it at a competitive level, intent in and around the target, you're affording yourself the opportunity to have a wide range of movement solutions that are centered around what works for the athlete. But if you get dogmatic about it, right. And you try to force a kid to move in a way that their body doesn't want to move, you're just going to end up with like a crappy mover. Like you're just going to end up with a crappy mover. You know, we were fortunate enough to have a college coach, came to my son's first pitching start a couple of days ago. I didn't. I like, I know he's there, but I'm kind of just like sitting back because I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to go up and be that guy. [00:30:32] Speaker A: Don't be that guy. Parents not be that guy. [00:30:37] Speaker B: I can't be that guy. But, but he, you know, he comes up and we start talking. [00:30:42] Speaker A: If they approach you, that's a different deal. [00:30:44] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:30:45] Speaker A: If they approach you, that's a different Deal. [00:30:48] Speaker B: And he says to me, because you know he's, he's on the bump, he goes, the arm speeds there and he's a really good mover and I want parents to understand that, that like it wasn't like, well, he moves in a way that I find aesthetically pleasing or it doesn't move in a way that is like checks the box for how I expect all my athletes to move. And again like I'm, I'm telling myself a little bit like Tom Seaver. Drop and drive was a cue that was used in our game for a long, long period of time. And again you can spend probably 30 seconds on Google, Google Image search Tom Seaver. Look at the pictures. You're going to see, you're going to see a dude who's like an incredibly stretched out linear position, meaning he gained ground from where the rubber was to where the, where home plate was. But from that really stretched out position was still able to rotate enough to throw competitively hard. [00:31:44] Speaker A: Me back knee got dirty. [00:31:47] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So that movement solution did not work for me in 1992, much less it doesn't work for me in 2026 because my body doesn't work that way and I certainly move a lot worse than I did back in 1992. I don't know that you just can't be, you can't kind of be like square hole, round peg about this stuff. And so when you think about kids who, you know, a 17 year old who's pitching the World Baseball Classic and then comes out and has his first high school start and he's like 98, 99 with like a five pitch mix and you see him again throwing from what nowadays might be a little bit of an unconventional slot to me. I just look at that as somebody who has been in throwing environments for a long period of time that allowed him to find what works for him. But, but the tricky thing is that like when I start talking about that stuff, especially with younger or greener coaches, I worry that I'm just like, I'm like just Gandalf in the whole thing. And I'm saying a bunch of stuff that doesn't really mean anything but, but again, come back to the number one component. I can't and I won't expect a youth little League or a recreational baseball coach, even a travel ball coach at like 14 you down to be a master technician. You don't need to be facilitators. [00:33:01] Speaker A: We've used that, that term for so long now. Just be a facilitator. Facilitate a great environment, whether it's a training environment or game environment. Facilitate and anybody can facilitate a great, great. Everybody knows what they've done in the past that makes them feel good or enjoyable. And just create that environment through training or games and making an enjoyable experience for them. Just make it an enjoyable experience, whatever that looks like for each individual. Make it an enjoyable experience for them. [00:33:28] Speaker B: Exactly. So, so I'm talking to these coaches and they were talking about, well, how do you run bullpens? And I was like, well, one issue in youth baseball is you don't have enough catching, right? Just nobody has enough catching, especially in a lot of times when they're young. The catchers you do have are not particularly good at the skill yet. So a walk becomes a triple, like that's just a thing. But you still have arms that need to throw. But they, you can't have them all throw to like one kid because then that other kid who's catching isn't going to get any of their skill work done. [00:33:57] Speaker A: You're better off having your coaches down there get your coaches to catch well. [00:34:01] Speaker B: So this is, this is what I was telling guys. No 100%, but, but what I was telling these coaches, like if you create a training environment where you go to the dollar store and you get hula hoops, or you go to Home Depot or Lowe's and you get blue painters tape and you, you tape up targets on a fence and you have them throw to these targets and you play games where you can just play horse, you can literally play horse. You can put, you can put like a nine zone up, you can just have a target that's based in four boxes, four quadrants and then have them go like a two on two throwing game to that target. In doing that, in preventing that training environment which suggests that both competitive level of intent and command matter, you're not taking your hands off the steering wheel for coaching. You're literally giving them an environment where they're going to afforded the opportunity to discover how to succeed at the task. And so long as that task is relevant to the task in the game, which it is, the game is all about throwing to a spot. It's not like you're, it's not like you're abdicating the throne, you know, like you're, you're doing, you're burning calories on the right thing, which is giving them a system of training, an environment of training to incentivize the thing that they need to get better at. [00:35:20] Speaker A: By the way, you're Getting challenged in multiple ways with Danny now because he's the trifecta. He's a pitcher, but he catches and he's. Any hits also. So, like, you're, you're right in the middle of the, the whole deal of, like, how do we manage an arm that also catches, also hits? Like, you're right in the middle of that thing right now. [00:35:37] Speaker B: It's, it's a lot and, you know, it's. It's something that. Knowing kind of what the high school season was going to look like, because that was our first, first thing, you know, we've, we've talked a lot about the need to, number one, build up progressively before the high school season. So, you know, Danny went, he went. I think he went 70 in his first pitching appearance, which didn't freak me out because in the eight weeks that we had, we probably had a cadence somewhere between four to five scrimmages that allowed him to build up progressively. And that was built on the back of knowing we had to build him up to go like 30 at the end of December for the PG Main Event Showcase. And all of these decisions started back in June or July of the year previous. Like, that's, that's, that's how this whole thing went. So, you know, sometimes I, sometimes I worry that, like, the amount of care and consideration that I've put into my own son's kind of development and moderation around all these things and knowing when it's the right time to put gas pedal down, knowing it's the right time to back off, it requires me to be like, highly invested. It requires my wife to be highly invested. You know, he set a goal. Danny set a goal, like wanting to be 185 pounds or better before the high school season. So every single morning it's like my wife and I are running like a, you know, we're running like a BNB where I gotta, you know, my kid does not just wake up. [00:37:11] Speaker A: What is he at right now? He wanted to be at 185. What's he at? [00:37:14] Speaker B: He, he had 185 before the season started. He's probably, you know, down a little bit early because, you know that, that's one of the things. [00:37:21] Speaker A: So go through his meal frequencies right now, like, lay out his, lay out his daily nutrition plan for people that don't, like. What was he at? So last year at this time, what. What was he weighing? [00:37:31] Speaker B: Oh, see now, Ryan, you're going to ask me to pull up the data, and I have access to the data. [00:37:35] Speaker A: So see that's why we track data. [00:37:37] Speaker B: If you give me tells a story. [00:37:39] Speaker A: Best use of data is to tell a story. And we're telling a story right now. So last year at this time, what did he weigh? [00:37:46] Speaker B: Let's see. Let me pull up the reports. Fortunately, at Driveline baseball we collect all these things. And because my kid is like one of the longest term athletes in Driveline, [00:37:55] Speaker A: he's the longest lab rat we've got. [00:37:58] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I think we have more biomech retests on him than potentially anybody else in the system. Um, and at some point, you know, I think we are going to do something really interesting with like this longitudinal data and kind of what it teaches us. [00:38:11] Speaker A: It's like the Harvard Happiness Study. [00:38:14] Speaker B: Yeah, so, so here's, here's a little bit of a story. In October of 2021, he was 98 pounds. Okay, you flash forward a little bit. Go to January of 25. So that was the, going into the high school season for him as a sophomore. [00:38:33] Speaker A: Hey, back that up. So what, what year finally hit puberty? Yes. I'm not going to hold you to you, but from you, you started him at nine. What year do you feel like he, he hit puberty? [00:38:46] Speaker B: Really started hit at 14. Like when we, when we went his that summer, you know, we went out and played and I was just looking at some of the pictures from that summer and he still looks like a little bit like a kid. And when he got like the next summer after it's like, okay, now the young man thing is starting to happen and then, but the leap from there has been pretty crazy. So 2025, he's 14. He weighs 157.9 pounds by December of that year. So basically 11 months he was at 175. So added basically what is that, 16 pounds of mass. And then between December of 25 and February he added another 10. That got him up to 185. So the meal thing is it's intense, man. So every morning we are doing somewhere between two to three eggs, somewhere between three to six chicken sausages or pieces of turkey bacon and then some type of carb with that which is either going to be waffle with peanut butter protein waffles, which are like a new thing that Eggos released. Any parents that are looking for a quick way to get their kids some calories and protein, big in on the protein waffle, a bagel or a croissant, or during that period of time from December to February crushed a lot of quesadillas. So There again, you're getting a little bit more protein, but certainly a lot of carbs. And that was just breakfast. So call it. I don't know. I mean, I think I worked it up somewhere and it was like, probably right around. I think it was like 1100 calories. Oh, and also a glass of whole milk or a glass of apple juice. Plus creatine, plus his multivitamin, vitamin D, calcium. I mean, you know, just the whole. You like. We're doing all the things. [00:40:43] Speaker A: How many. How many. How many grams of creatine? [00:40:47] Speaker B: Just five. You know, we just do a daily.5 gram of creatine. [00:40:50] Speaker A: Five? [00:40:50] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes when I don't sleep that well, I will go up to 10 just because there's some new studies that suggest that as you increase creatine, it actually decreases some of the effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive function. But I digress. So, yeah, big, big breakfast to get him set up for the day. He'll go to school with, like, a protein bar or two or beef stick or two. You know, he has to work in the student source sometimes. So he'll just crush, like the uncrustables, you know, Nothing wrong with the PB and J, man. Like, nothing wrong. [00:41:22] Speaker A: Tried and true. [00:41:24] Speaker B: And then ideally, you know, he'll. He'll come home and eat right after school. A lot of times, what he'll do is he just crushes a whole pizza, like a Costco pizza. Not. Not the ones you get at the window, the frozen ones that they have. But it's still. I want to say that Costco pizza is somewhere north of like 40. 40 to 50 grams of protein. If you eat the whole thing, which he does, and then we'll have dinner, there's some amount of snacking that he does between that period of time where he'll. Yeah, I don't know. I just. I let him. I. We let him eat. You know, like, if. If he's hungry. Man, the body's telling you something. And then again, as he was getting closer to high school season, sometimes he would do a protein shake, like a light protein shake right before bed to try to get a little bit more protein in there if. If we needed it, or maybe some. Some carbs if we missed some stuff throughout the day. [00:42:13] Speaker A: What's his lifting schedule look like? He lift mornings. He lift after practice, after games. When. When's he getting his lifting in? [00:42:21] Speaker B: Right now we're doing it after practices, typically, sometimes after games, depending on what the schedule is. And because we're in season, we're just trying to hit somewhere between two to three lifts and, and one of the things I told him, you know, I told him yesterday, you know, he again, he pitched on Monday, Tuesday they had to do a little bit of running and practice. So last night when, when we were talking about, you know, what he was going to do for a lift, I was like, look, I don't need you to turn this into like a low load rep fest because again, all that's going to do is push fatigue up. Even, even if it's low, low, you know, low weight lifting, it's still going to push fatigue because the rep volume. So I was just like, hey man, I need you to hit. You know, think about this from a standpoint of I want you to be able to get five to six reps in of what we're doing and probably feel like you've got one to two reps in the tank. And that was kind of the guidance for him to figure out what he needed to, to, to do in terms of like weight intensity. It's not like we're not trying to shoot for necessarily a PR in season, but again, you need enough strength stimulus to, to maintain what you got. So somewhere between two to three lifts a week is kind of where we are in a maintenance phase because we're in season. [00:43:31] Speaker A: And he also is a high level hitter too. Now, whether he hits in college or not, but he's a very good high school hitter. So go through the hitting progression with him too. The same thing, like you've done it on both sides. He's got, he's got elite bat speed too. [00:43:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I will say that like in terms of the hitting stuff, a lot of this just kind of comes back to the same thing about like holistic whole body strength training. Like we haven't neglected that at all. And one of the things, you know, so we talked in 20, 20, so six years ago. So he was 13. Wait, no, I'm sorry, I can't do math this morning he was like 11ish. So probably a couple years after we, we did that first podcast, he was like 13, 14. And he's been lifting with me since he was tiny. Right. Like I have, I have video of him like benching the bar with me when he was a little dude. You know, we've been, we've been on this journey for a while, but when he was like around 13 or 14, we started talking about the necessity to not only get the lifting to take a little bit, you know, we, a little bit increased level of seriousness because we were ready for it because we had patterned a lot of these movements over a long period of time, but also that nutrition and adding mass was going to be highly important. And I remember these conversations with him where he'd be like, but dad, I don't want to get slow and be like, okay, son. So what we're going to do is we're going to spend like 10 minutes on the couch looking at pictures of NFL running backs, right? You're going to see this body type of like 5, 10, 2, 35. And I want you to understand that these guys are not slow. So, you know, so then he continues to add mass and get bigger and, you know, and the speed didn't go away. Like, you know, ran, ran a 6, 6 down in PG backed it up with a 6, 6, 8 indoor about a month ago. So like the speed's there and I, I'm fairly confident he can find like a 6, 5 to a 6, 4. I digress. You know, the hitting progression has been, I mean, if there's one thing that stayed consistent, it's been intent and objective. We've been consistent on the idea that like the intent needs to be high because that's what good hitting is. The thing that we were told back in the day, that the pitcher supplies the power. Nobody said that because they were trying to do us harm as hitters. That was just what we, what we understood. Thanks to the work of Dr. Alan Nathan, University of Illinois, we understand that's no longer the case. So since he's been a kid, we have prioritized hitting the ball really, really hard. And what we've also done is paired that with training environments where the goal was not to produce just like infinite f7, f8, f9. Right. It's been to do the thing that Ted Williams told us to do in like 1972 or whatever. The Science of Hitting was published, right? Hit the ball hard in the air. And in a technical sense, I suppose what we've been training to do is hit a launch angle of somewhere between like 5 and 35 degrees. And that's been the goal. That's been the singular problem that he has tried to solve as a hitter. Since we started to take training seriously, we've paired that with an age appropriate focus on bat speed, either using the old school bat speed trainers that we had for him as a kid. We have now a single bat speed training thing that I patented and developed at Driveline called our youth power bat. He swung that. He also swung. What we had is called a youth underload bat. So it's a really, really skinny barrel, but it's also really, really light. [00:46:58] Speaker A: The old Thunderstick, which is very similar [00:47:01] Speaker B: to what the Thunderstick was back in the day. The only thing we did on the [00:47:04] Speaker A: youth side was Thunderstick a little heavier, though. I mean, Thunderstick is a little bit heavier, but people use broomsticks back then, like it said. [00:47:10] Speaker B: Yep. [00:47:10] Speaker A: What it was. [00:47:11] Speaker B: Yep. And that. And now it's just been, you know, speed training again at a cadence that's very similar to what we're doing on the strength side. Right. Like, you want exposure to that overload underload stimulus probably three times a week. Ish. You know, you could probably go a little bit higher if you need to and necessary. So. And you know, in the hitting environments have been, you know, intentionally challenging. Right. Like, one of the adjustments that I think all of our kids are having to make as they move into their high school seasons is because, you know, in Pacific Northwest baseball you're not going to just see like a, every staff doesn't roll out a bunch of like 88 to 92 arms. Right. Like that. That's just not what we see. And I know that there are some high school conferences in the country look like that. Ours doesn't. So the adjustment our kids are having to make is like, okay, well now I'm seeing 78 to 81. Okay, that's fine. Because for the, for the, the last six months since August that we've been training or for the last six years, we've worked on being adjustable. Right. Just because we trained bat speed does not mean that we didn't train to like, let the ball travel deep and try to hit a liner on the opposite side. Like we're, we're trying to do all the things because that's what high level hitting is at basically any age. It's your capacity to be adjustable to when where the ball is going to be in the zone like that. That's the infinite problem. Right. So the infinite problem, if you're trying to solve that, isn't. Can't be predicated about like one movement solution and one swing and one swing plane and one batted ball objective. It has to be the other thing, which is hit the ball hard all over the place. So, you know, we have our first high school game of the season. Well, let me, let me actually back up. Last summer, you know, we're doing some showcase events at some local colleges. And one of those, we went out to Gonzaga and I think like the second game of that little tournament, Danny hit a Ball out that landed on the roof of a building on the other side of the fence. And I risked literal life and limb climbing. Allegedly. I mean allegedly. For the record, I'm not saying I did this, but somebody risked life and limb climbing over multiple fences that as a 48 year old man, I have no business scaling to go get that baseball. So. So like I've known the kind of the stuff was there, right? So then, you know, we go into the off season and it's not like, well, we're just going to punt on bad speed because you don't need it anymore. It's like, no, again, if you don't train it, you're going to lose it. And also the greater bat speed you have, the more of it you can deploy when you're miss hitting balls. Which is I think, a conversation that people don't have a hard time wrapping their head around. So we run the program from August through February. We're not playing games, we're not doing fall ball and wear ball. We're doing scrimmages starting in late December, moving into January and February. But we're not going out and playing games because we're just heavy, heavy, heavy on the skill side. We get to our first high school game, we are at the field that I literally used to, used to like do side soft to him and he would try to hit over the fence when he was like nine and we use this fence out in left center as like our external goal. We would go out there, we would figure out a distance between where we were and where the fence was. That I know in my head is like, well if he hits this thing over the fence, it's going to have to be at around like a 20 to a 30 launch angle for where we are relative to the fence and the weight of the balls we were using, which is like the little like purple plyos or maybe we were hitting regular baseballs, I don't remember. So we've. I have a memory in my brain of having my kid hit on that field when he was a single digit. So now here we are as a 17 year old in his junior season. First AB struck out. Second AB bases loaded, grand slam pulled on the left center side and he missed it like it was, it was a grand slam home run. And it's great, right? It's, it's absolutely wonderful. I'm so happy for him. I'm so proud for him because of how hard he works. But when it came off the bat, I said an expletive inside my own head because I thought that he missed and somebody was actually taking pictures and happened to catch it at contact. And that thing was easily like a 35 plus degree launch angle. Like he hit that thing hard up in the air, but if you hit the ball hard enough, it's still going to go more than 350ft pole side, right? Like, so it's, it's this crazy thing where I really, really think that if you kind of take this perspective on hitting that there's like one thing that works and all these other kind of movement solutions that don't, then you're kind of like handcuffing kids. And I think the inverse is also true where if you construct this environment in training and even in the approach to competition that revolves around a simple goal. If you do that while you're helping them develop the engine, right, which is, which is what we're talking about ultimate bat speed, you're talking about rotational acceleration, blah, blah, blah. If you do both of those things, you're literally giving kids a more broad pathway for how they can find success. And on that night, on my friends and my son's first high school game as a junior, it resulted in a grand slam off of a miss off of a ball that he didn't get flush. So what I take from that is like, all right, we got a whole lot of season ahead of us, right? It's, it's March. We're going to be playing through July. Between high school and what we do in the summer, he's in a great position to have good results. Not only the stuff that he sits flush, but also the stuff that he might miss a little bit because that's going to happen in the game. [00:52:59] Speaker A: Now, how are you handling his workload catching wise? Because again, we run into this a lot. So how'd you handle his workload catching and pitching wise, coming through in the [00:53:10] Speaker B: summer, in last summer, you know, so as a 16 playing 18s and then also in the summer playing against actual adults in Puerto Rico and the Dominican because of a trip we took down that way, he caught a lot more. So when he was doing that, he's probably only pitching once a week at best. And some of those outings were a little bit shorter. But we also kind of built up to the point that we were in our little league, our league tournament at the end of the year. And he ended up going, I think, five and a third or five and two thirds. I don't remember what the pitch count was, but I do remember he had 13 punches. But that was. But, but we had kind of built up to that start over the course of the whole summer because it was like, all right, well, I'm not going to deploy one of our better arms. Going full tint, full tilt. Right at the immediate aftermath of the high school season. Right? Let's, let's build up towards it. And that was something that, you know, that the coach at the time did a really good job of, I think, building up what that looked like in high school. Now he. [00:54:24] Speaker A: And no time off in between the high school season and when he got going. [00:54:28] Speaker B: Not, not really, by the way, it's [00:54:30] Speaker A: a bad thing to stop and then restart back up. [00:54:33] Speaker B: Exactly. So, you know, last year his team was. Was led by, you know, a couple seniors are really good. Joey and Jamison, if you're listening, how are you guys are playing college baseball right now? He didn't have to pitch much in the high school season last year, so he was able to kind of get more of those opportunities going into the summer. But there was really no break because the high school team made a good run into state. And then once that ended, it was like, hey, the travel select season in the summertime was off immediately. So at the start of the high school season, now we're. What are we, like two games and a jamboree into it. He's caught a little bit, he's played some third, he's played some outfield and he's pitched. And I'm fine with that. Like, I'm really, really fine with that. I think it would be more challenging if he was like the everyday, hey, you're going to catch seven, three times a week and then also, also pitch. It's, it's. It's a challenge. And I think on the other hand, like, it. I understand parents that react to that where it's like, hey, I want my kid to be understood by these, by these scouts and recruiters as like a dude at this particular, particular position. [00:55:46] Speaker A: And then, by the way, as a former college recruiter, I'd rather see a kid be able to play all over the field. [00:55:53] Speaker B: Right. [00:55:54] Speaker A: My best catchers that we ever had didn't just catch. [00:55:57] Speaker B: Right. [00:55:58] Speaker A: They play other positions in high school. [00:56:00] Speaker B: Yeah. So. So right now, you know, because he's got some great teammates who can kind of, you know, filter around other places too. You know, they're kind of just moving them all over the field and I'm. I got no compl. I got no complaints. I got no complaints. And in part of that, because I know that there's Some inherent, Some inherent opportunities to moderate throwing volume because he's moving around in the field, you know, so if they play him in the outfield, that's just a fundamentally different workload cost than being behind the dish. Those throws he might make in the outfield, if he has to make them, have the opportunity to be a little bit higher intensity, right? Like if you got, you know, something shallow hit to him in the outfield, you got to run around. Thirds is going to try to tag and go, well, then, you know, you're going to throw a seed, and that seed you're going to throw is going to have a relatively high workload cost. But there might not be that many of those plays behind the dish. Hey, man, you're definitely going to be throwing down once an inning. You're going to be throwing down on any runners that try to advance, and you're pairing that with the volume of throwing. Just receive, throw, receive, throw, receive, throw. So it's one of those things where, you know, again, I was talking to my coaches that I was working with in this clinic, like a week ago when I was coaching him in Little League. Quite frankly, there was never a period of time where I stepped on the field and looked at my lineup card and didn't know who my best option at either pitcher, catcher, or shortstop was. Even center field, right. Those are the highest leverage positions on the field. And by hook or by crook, my kid was always going to be the one who would give me the most leverage in any one of those positions. And some of that just happens to do with the fact that, like, man, he just. He loved it in a way that was weird since he could barely walk. And because of that, and because his dad is a baseball guy and his mom is a baseball girl, we've. We've done baseball things with him since he was little. So it wasn't just at practice, it was all the time because he chose it. So there's a whole conversation there about intrinsic motivation that we can get into. But. But I coach Little League games where I put him in right field. Like, I've done that repeatedly, and the odds are that I lost a bunch of games that way because of that are probably relatively high. However, when he got the opportunity to get called up to varsity after two games at JV as a freshman, it was to fill a role in the outfield. They had a junior starter who went down with an arm injury, and I would suspect that they probably knew that Danny was the first best up, but he was competitive at a bunch of different places. It wasn't like he was like a dyed in the wool second baseman. And if that's a thing that's happening in high school, I think the odds that that could happen at a decent level when it comes to position players in college is like, look, man, that can be a thing. You got to be able to play all these other places. But I think this also ties back into the current thing that we were, the thing we were talking about a minute ago about value prop, right? If my whole thing is like, my child is being offered a starting spot as a second baseman on the 11U team right now I'm thinking about construction of a prepubescent lineup the way that I think about construction for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Now my kid is put in that box, right? And my kid is going to spend 9, 11, 12 months on this team in that box. And when they're in that box, they are not afforded the opportunity to learn the game and learn how to be competitive and competent at other positions. And unless you can guarantee that child is always going to stay in that box, I have some fairly strong feelings that like, you're just, you're solving a problem now and you're creating another one for later. [00:59:45] Speaker A: There's a bright future for youth baseball with the people we have involved in the ABCA on the youth and travel committees. Devin has done so much for us moving things forward. We know it's a huge undertaking, but we will get there. Thanks again to John Litchfield, Zach Hale and Matt west and ABCA office for all the help on the podcast. Feel free to reach out to me via email or brownleebca.org Twitter, Instagram or TikTok coach BRNABCA or direct message me via the MyABCA app. This is Ryan Brownlee signing off for the American Baseball Coaches Association. Thanks and leave it better for those behind you. [01:00:29] Speaker B: And there's no that way Yep Wait [01:00:33] Speaker A: for another day [01:00:38] Speaker B: and the world will always return as your life is never for yearning and you know that ways Wait for another day.