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It is the bottom of the seventh inning with two outs. You’re the pitcher on the home team and your team is up by one run. As the pitcher, all you need to do is throw one strike for your team in order to win the game. Thoughts of losing, winning, striking out the batter and walking the batter overwhelm your mind. One pitch makes or breaks the game, especially since the count is 3-2. At this point, there are two options; throw an off-speed guaranteed strike and win the game or a fastball that may miss the strike zone and walk in the winning run. This is the moment you have been waiting for, the opportunity to show off your pitching abilities and end the game. Thinking back, you remember how you learned to pitch. You suddenly hear the words of your pitching coach always telling you that it was not about the speed, accuracy is what counts. She always said you cannot strike out a batter on balls. After the flashback, your mind jolts back to the game; you step on the mound and are in the zone 100%. There is nothing better than energy of the crowd and the support from your teammates while you’re on the mound in this do or die position. You’re thinking over the options; fastball or off-speed.  Accuracy is the key to this win, so you go with the off-speed. You picked this because Fitts’ law suggests going with the off-speed pitch, since a slower speed will increase the accuracy of the pitch. You’re in the pitching motion and begin to release the off-speed pitch. All you can think of is striking the batter out or your team making a play. A brief second later you hear, “STRIKE THREE BATTER OUT!” The crowd goes wild, and your team bombards you on the mound. You struck the girl out and won the game! The speed accuracy trade-off worked and you are so thankful that your pitching coach reminded you that strike is a strike no matter how fast or slow the ball gets to the plate. Fitts’ Law explains the pitching process during this game situation because speed and accuracy are indirectly correlated. As the speed of the person’s release of the ball increases, the accuracy, or likelihood to for the ball to land in the strike zone decreases. Along these lines, since the pitcher’s main goal is to strike the batter out, and is successfully done during this game, she slows the release of the ball leaving her hand, ultimately slowing down the speed of the pitch and increasing the accuracy and chance of the pitch being a strike.

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I'm in the groove with a batting average of .700 that’s on the rise. The performance curve looks positively accelerated and on the verge of something great! The next tournament weekend, I was 5 for 10 and my average plateaued. What happened? I have been doing everything the exact same way, but the bat and ball just were not making contact. My average went from an uphill climb to a plateau, similar to an ogive shape, but I am in no means ready to give in to the slump. This can suggest a performance plateau. I am still learning even though I am not getting any better at the plate.  All I can think about during each at bat is, “don’t strike out,” but that and ground balls are all that seem to be happening. Maybe my strategy changed, or I am tired, there are so many performance variables that could tweak how I am performing in the batter’s box. However, every player knows that a slump is an opportunity to try a new hitting strategy. Immediately after the third game of being in a slump, I call my hitting coach to get some extra practice in to find my groove again. He and I worked together for a few days, and found that if I shift my hips the power from behind the bat will explode. The next weekend tournament rolls around after a week of nothing but practice. I’m up to bat and ready to smash the ball out of the park. The pitch comes in, I swing, and the ball goes sailing into right field. Finally, a hit and I’m on base! The slump, or performance plateau, ended and I am back on track to a successful softball season. Once I found the groove again, my batting average was on the incline, and eventually plateaued again because nobody has a perfect batting average in the realm of softball. My experience through the slump displayed a positive accelerated curve then a negatively accelerated curve, making an ogive shape. Finally, after the slump an ogive curve reappeared because an alteration in my hitting strategy improved my average, which eventually will result in a plateau because the likelihood of a perfect average is slim to none.

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Over the years softball players learn how to effectively field the ball and plant to make a throw at the same time. By doing this, fielders can get rid of the ball faster to make a play on the runner. Advancing to making a play during the middle of fielding the ball from just making sure the glove stops the ball takes a long time and a lot of practice. Fitts and Posner’s Three stage model of learning includes cognitive, associative, and autonomous stages of learning. During the cognitive stage, individuals are just learning how to get in the ready position and keep the glove down when the ball is coming their way. When preparing to field a ball during this stage players continuously repeat the phrases, “stay low, eyes on the ball, glove in the dirt,” in their heads until fielding becomes easier. When the vocal cues diminish, the associative stage emerges. During this stage players get the fielding mechanism down, but now are adjusting their stance from batter to batter to maximize their likelihood of successfully fielding the ball. Individuals also are able to find errors in the fielding process after the task is completed. Many players stick in this stage for a while because they cannot adjust their movements in the midst of the fielding movements. After many years of playing softball or practicing, fielding a ball becomes an unconscious skill. This stage is known as the autonomous stage, where fielders can field the ball and position to throw the ball in one fluid motion and correcting errors along the way. During my years of playing, I learned how to field a ball in first grade and used verbal cues to keep me from pulling my head off the ball and lifting my glove. Around the fourth or fifth grade, I progressed to the associative stage and could field the ball without the cues, but still made the errors without being able to correct them until after the play. I stayed in this stage for quite a while until the eighth grade, when I started diving for balls to stop them and making throws from my knees. Once I reached this point, the only thought in my mind was to stop the ball and make the play, rather than how to keep my head down and watch the ball. The bat makes contact with the ball, it gets fielded and all you hear is the snap of the ball meeting the glove to end the play in the blink of an eye.

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Everyone asks how can you throw so far or so fast and screams teach me, teach me, but teaching someone to throw using words is next to impossible. How can you tell someone when to release the ball from their hand or how to have the right amount of power to throw the ball a certain distance? It’s never easy to teach through words how to successfully show someone, but rather much easier to teach by showing. The idea of teaching by showing relates to procedural knowledge because the only way to explain how to complete a given task is by showing someone how to do it. While declarative knowledge uses words to describe how to complete a task, throwing a softball is much more than telling someone point, aim and release the ball. While verbal cues can be given to someone during the learning process, learning how to throw a ball strictly through the use of words is impossible. Daddy’s little girl looks her father in the eyes and says, “Dad how do you throw a softball?” He responds, “You go like this,” and shows her the steps to throwing the ball. She watches her father throw the ball and eventually repeats the motion but throws the ball into the dirt. She tries again and it sails over her daddy’s head. Her dad says, “aim at my chest,” and she does just that. Her third throw goes at her father’s chest and through practice she learned how to throw the ball from center to home in a blink of an eye and right on target. She never learned how to throw a ball using a how to list, but rather by experience and stores that knowledge in the same way she learned it.

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Either get dirty, or rub some dirt on it 

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Either get dirty, or rub some dirt on it 

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Every softball player experiences a time when she has to slide in order to be safe at the bag. Either you get dirty by sliding in the dirt or you get hurt and have to “rub some dirt on it” to brush off the pain.  All slides come with a few raspberries or scrapes, but the most pain comes from a slide gone wrong. Learning how to slide is a long process, but once the skill is learned, the chance of injury goes down by a large amount. Limb segment coordination explains how the status of the degrees of freedom changes as learning progresses. Imagine a young softball player deathly afraid to slide. Her legs are stiff, knees locked in place when she sees the base in front of her she plops on the dirt. The toe of her right foot is stretched out, but land three feet away from the bag, and her elbows are locked holding her upper body upright from behind. Many of the degrees of freedom are locked in place in the upper and lower limbs in attempt to make the slide easier, but in reality, locking makes the slide ineffective. As she learns the technique, her confidence builds, her understanding of how to transition from a run to a slide increases, and essentially her body loosens up. Its game day and she knows what to do when there is a close play on the bases. She’s on first, and the pitcher is getting ready to pitch the ball. It’s the moment she has been waiting for, to steal a base. She’s leading off first base, arms in position, legs are loose and ready to take flight. The ball leaves the pitcher’s hands and she’s off to second. The catcher bobbles the ball and throws down to second base, but the runner takes the leap of faith and sticks her right leg out, tucks her left leg under the right, and glides along the dirt right into the base. The short stop attempts to make the tag, but it was too late. The runner was safe, and got dirty rather than needing to “rub some dirt on it” because she practice she learned the most effective strategy, and gained control of the degrees of freedom necessary to produce a well-performed sliding movement.