I was not a pitcher and have never thrown a competitive pitch to a batter. As a result I don't teach something I learned years ago, probably from someone who learned years before that. I was not encumbered by my personal technique. I had to learn pitching from basically ground zero. At the time I lived in Minneapolis and there was no tradition of good pitching, even on the high school teams. The youth pitchers had no role models to emulate and no competition to push them to get better.

My daughters were starting to pitch. We went to a pitching winter clinic that the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board was providing to the city players. Even though I knew nothing about pitching it was very clear that the technique they were teaching (hello elbow and wrist snaps) made no sense. My niece was a 12U pitcher in Illinois and I got some tips from my brother.

As luck would have it my first corporate boss was married to Stan Waldhauser, a well respected clinician who had trained several Division 1 Pitchers. At a Christmas party we were at I found out that he was a pitching coach. I showed him was I was teaching my daughters. There was a long silence as he was trying to process what I showed him, then he invited me to his Hopkins clinic. In a small elementary school gym he put us between the starter from Penn State, who was home on break, and a future Gophers pitcher. Watching them up close I was both awestruck and hooked.

I took every opportunity to learn from him. I also picked up some drill books and got some VHS videos to help me learn. I bought a VHS recorder, a luggable thing that was state of the art in video at the time. It could do slow motion and even stop action though there was a warning to not look at a frame for more than 8 seconds as the tape might wear out.

The following year I asked Stan to help me at a Minneapolis clinic, not so much to teach the girls but to teach me how to teach pitching. That worked out well and he invited me to help with the Hopkins clinic. The following year he asked me to help him in Forest Lake. We did many other clinics together after that.

My next big leap in understanding how pitching works was at a NFCA course where Kirk Walker was one of the panelists. Kirk introduced the Right View Pro system which was a PC based program that could look at video 1 frame at a time. Also included were clips of some geat pitchers shown from multiple angles. He had spent years looking at slow motion videos trying to determine the key principles involved in pitching. He went through what movements all the great pitchers did. It wasn't until he studied some less than great pitchers that he figured out what made the great ones tick. He pointed out that what would years later be called internal rotation was a key part of pitching and that pitchers did not snap their wrist until after the ball was gone.

I undertook a similar study of 10U and 12U pitchers and found that the keys to success at 10U were quite different that what he found for college pitchers. I was disappointed in that finding but my professional background in science made me look deeper. A couple of years later I studied those same pitchers again and found that most of the top performing 10U pitchers who were having success without following his key principles had not gotten better and by 14U were no longer the tops for their age group.

The 10U pitchers who were trying to follow his technique became the leaders at 14U. They were on the right track at 10U but their neurological systems were not developed enough at that age. The fine motor movements in the kinetic chain needed to pitch at a high level typically develop between age 13 - 16. But I have since found that with enough focused practice some develop earlier, and if not their good technique often appears when their neurological chain is ready.

. After seeing Kirk's presentation I went to a Mary Nutter clinic (NFCA runs those now after Mary passed away). Hall of Fame pitcher Cindy Bristow, author of the twice monthly blog "Softball Excellence" was a presenter and was demonstrating the hello elbow approach including wrist snaps. I talked with her and invited her to look at my website. She saw videos showing IR and no wrist snap. She also had RVP on her computer and looked at the many different pitchers on that.

Her next blog was titled something like most of what we know about pitching is wrong. The following one was about the mind numbing number of wrist snaps pitchers practice. Then those topics we never mentioned again and those blogs were removed from her archive. My guess is that people complained about those then controversial topics and that she thought she might lose followers.

Since then I have been studying the pitchers at the college World Series every year looking for any competitive that I can pass on to my students. I also watch a lot of video and read articles on the internet and have the confidence that I can separate the good advice from the questionable stuff. I also pick up things from my pitchers who are working with other coaches.

My professional career was in science and I have carried the research, experimentation and demonstration aspects of that field into my learning of how pitching works. I try to not teach things until I fully understand how it works and how it fits in with everything else I know about pitching, the kinetic and neurological chains and the physics behind ball movement.

That approach has led me to teach many things before they became commonly accepted by most coaches. While video clearly showed that the top pitchers were using internal rotation technique well before it had that name, many coaches held onto their old ways of doing things. Not snapping the wrist snaps is similar but not as consequential as no matter how much pitchers practice those, when they pitch the snap occurs after the ball is released. I studied the Seam Shifted Wake effect for about a year before I fully accepted it and started teaching it directly. As of the end of 2026 there has not been wide acceptance of SSW pitches except at some tech focused colleges like Oklahoma, Texas Tech and UCLA.