Travel Ball Pitching

[Izzy's Dad]

How many games a week does your DD pitch in? List the age Division as well.

[DonnieS]

Izzy, when you ask that question, be more specific about the kind of games. Are these timed, are these 7 innings, if timed, is this the 65 minute, finish the inning, 75 minute finish the inning?

During our 14u and before days, our typical weekend tournament would be 4 games on saturday, 2 pool, and 2 bracket, the pool are 60 minute drop dead, no seed games. The brackets were 75 minute finish the inning. Typically, my dd would pitch the last inning or two of the last pool game, other pitchers would work the majority of the pool games. Then my dd would pitch usually one of the bracket games, but would warm up for both. If we didnt know the teams, she would pitch the first, but warm up for the second as well in case we needed her to go in. On Sunday, she could pitch 2-3 games, again depending on the situation. What we tried to do, specially if we were in the loser's bracket, would be to choose visitor, then pitch her until we had a decent lead (which I count as grand slam + 1 runs), and then pull her and put in other pitchers. If we were in the winners, usually it was a well spaced out 3 game day and she might take all 3, depending on how our other pitchers were doing. If we were in the winners and we had a 4 game day, she would do the 1st, then a break.

A lot depended on the kind of tournament, there are a few, other than qualifers, that we consider high priority, like the Schlitterbahn, Ronald McDonald, Katy Klassic, and we would push it on those games.

Now, its a different story, typically the games are 7 innings, you cant do as many games, we have other pitchers that are as good as her, lot of different factors now that she is a grand old 15.

Now at 18 whatever, she may go 4 7 inning games over a weekend, and the situation now is that we have to have other pitchers or we cant play. We dont get many 'blowaway' games anymore where we bat for 30 minutes, and she is in the dugout with her feet up like back in 14,12,10 y/o days, so there is no point in wasting money to travel without other strong pitchers.

Edited to add: her max was 9 games on one day, 11 on the weekend. This was in 10u and the games were 70 minute finish the innings. Two of the games, we had 30-40 minute at-bats, we dh-ed her all day, it was a hot day, August at New Braunfels as well, one game we got 26 runs in the top of the 1st, and the other team conceded after she struck out the 1st two batters in the bottom of the 1st. We had bats on fire that day, and the Sunday, from 10:30 on was back to back. We have always iced her at the end of the day, we saw MLB pitchers doing that and figured it made sense even back when she was 9. After a big weekend, we take off Monday, sometimes until Wednesday. Early on when we would do a little throwing on Monday, she said, it would feel tight, she didn say it hurt, but it felt tight. So we would just pass. On these tournament weekends, I think its very important to ice saturday night - on sundays when we forgot to ice, she would throw accurate but didnt have the heat, and she would tell me, 'pop, i cant ' so she wouldnt.

[hit4power]

Last spring playing both middle school and 14U, DD pitched a total of 72 innings over the 8 weeks where the two overlapped. She was the '1' pitcher for the MS team and the '2/3' pitcher for TB. A typical week would be 2 MS games (80 min) and a weekend tourney either MS or TB. The busiest week I remember was pitching twice during the week and then 3 games on Saturday at one of the MS tournaments.

[Clean_up]

12U Travel, DD has 30 min lesson each Friday plus 15 min warm-up, Finch windmill Mon-Thurs; 30-45 min pitching twice/week with dad or catcher (30 IF she's on, 45 if she's not, etc); 4-8 innings in "Friendly" on Sunday twice/month avg; pitch count in friendly around 100. Tournament games once/month on average Jan - July, could pitch 1-3 games in a day depending on schedule - usually 1-2 only and games are generally 4-6 innings longs. One Sunday each month OFF to hangout and Finch Windmill again.... :O)