Billy Horton

“Practice what you preach.”
- Get connected and stay connected
- Connection —— Direction —— Extension
- Short to contact and long through the hitting zone
- Have fun!

Here are two great tee drills for connection, direction, and extension: The Rhythm Drill and the Walk Through Drill.

Staying in your legs throughout and having great direction are keys to success for both drills. Let us know what you think!

Target hitting in a constraints based environment allows hitters to make their own swing adjustments based on the result of their swing. This can rely more on being athletic with their swing versus getting too mechanical. Using positive verbal ques as reminders helps a ton!

Example- The right handed hitter rolls over and hits a weak ground ball to shortstop. Instead of staying “Hey Jonny you rolled over” tell him “Line Drive second base or line drive right-center”. Jonny already knows he rolled over. You don’t need to say it.

Now Jonny makes an athletic swing adjustment with his body and puts himself in a position to hit a line drive at the 2B. That athletic adjustment might be with his posture or maybe his wrist position. Allowing him to make this adjustment on his own empowers the hitter and encourages problem solving. Try this out and let me know what you think!

Hey everyone! Here are 3 great connection drills I encourage you to do prior to your tee and front toss work.

1.) PVC Pipe- Place the pipe on your shoulders and rotate the pipe to the contact point on the tee with your hips. I like doing 3 locations in the strike zone- low, middle, and high

2.) Rubber Tubing- Attach the tubing to a pole, fence, or an eye hook attached to a wall. Get to a point where the tube is taut (pulled tightly). From that point you should be in a loaded position in your backside. Rotate your hips forward and get extension with your arms later in the swing.

3.) Med Ball Swings- Get into your stance with the med ball taking the place of your bat. Go through your swinging motion to the contact point and focus on having the palm of your top hand facing up. After doing multiple reps proceed to throwing the ball with the palm up into a wall or to a partner.

I will have some tee drills for you in our next video!

Connection, Direction, and Extension are all vital parts of having a good swing. Having short compact explosive movements are key as well as allowing your hips to drive your hands to the baseball. So in order to having the short compact A to B swing, you need to think about extending your hitting alphabet to C, D, & E.

Leave me a comment with what you think and if you love this please repost. I’m looking forward to posting some drills that will help with these 3 swing components over the next few days.

What an awesome summer with the La Crosse Loggers Baseball in the Northwoods League league! It was an excellent team and our offense was so impressive. We ranked #1 in the league in OPS, SLG, AVE, Runs Scored, RBIs, and Base Hits. These 6 categories plus OBP, and HRs, were all single season La Crosse Loggers team records.

Thank you to all of the coaches I worked with, the front office staff, and obviously all of the players who make coaches like me look good. I’m so glad I took this opportunity.