# data[].attributes.body
As a child, I was always very intrigued by sports and once I was able to get involved, I was. Learning new techniques of swinging a baseball bat and catching a softball were both very new movements that took a long time to master. The rate of improvement was a continued process that did not come overnight. One of methods that a lot of coaches will have athletes to do while they are still learning is start by swinging the baseball off a tee and progressing into an underhand pitch being thrown by a coach, to a peer pitching the ball, to eventually the speed increasing. From the tee to a peer throwing it at you is a huge rate of improvement that is required to make contact with the ball. This follows closely with the power law that says we will systematically see smaller improvement in performance as practice continues because there is less room for improvement. This is why in high school, it was more challenging to improve my batting average after I had been swinging at fast pitch softballs for 3 years.

# data[].attributes.body
Continuing with the idea of my bat swing and batting stance, keeping a tight, rigid posture is never helpful. "Loosen up", "light on your feet", "relax", were all thing I heard when I was in the batter's box but never understood the reason behind the phrases. Of course, I made contact with the ball a lot more often when I was relaxed and wasn't so tense but I was never sure why. Limb segment coordination was the explanation for this. When your joints are free to move, the continuum of motion becomes one rather than segments. When learning to bat a young age, the motion is very chopped due to wanting to get all of the mechanics of a good swing down, but once you have mastered all these small movements, they become easier to string together. My most vivid memory of this was watching my coach swing a bat and knowing how my swing felt. I asked, why doesn't my swing look like yours, and he responded, "stop thinking about it so much", and this was the feedback I needed to remember it was okay to relax.

# data[].attributes.headline
Altering an old or preferred coordination pattern

# data[].attributes.subject
Altering an old or preferred coordination pattern

# data[].attributes.body
I grew up being a softball player and was always very passionate about it. The swing became like a habit to me that I had mastered. After ten or more years of softball, I decided to give golfing a try. I remember the first few swings I took, I would swing but would miss the ball by a couple inches. My swing was too high, and when I tried to make a conscious effort to swing lower, I would hit the ground. My friends would say, "you have a softball swing, not a golf swing". I never thought this could be a thing, but because I had developed such a pattern to swinging more in the level between my shoulders to knees, it was a new pattern that I had to complete in order to hit the golf ball. After only playing golf for a couple weeks during the summer, I went back to swinging a softball bat, and I could not believe the quick new pattern I had learned affected my old softball swing pattern. From that moment on, I decided I would not swing a golf club during my competitive softball career. I preferred to have my softball swing over a average golf swing.

# data[].attributes.body
Stealing bases was one of my greatest attributes to the high school varsity team. Getting a quick leadoff the base, sprinting to second or third and having to slide into the base to avoid being tagged out was something I was very good at. I had mastered the lowering of my body with one leg extended and one leg tucked to reach the base, and once reached I could prop my body back up into a standing position. The muscles involved to get this movement down perfectly were several and all used at different times during the slide. The first day we got to learn to slide, we were in the grass with long pants on and the coach instructed us to run and fall to our bottoms with one leg extended and one folded. As you can imagine, it was not pretty for the first couple. The issue was involving too many muscles for the movement. As mentioned, each part of the slide needed different coordination of muscles, but involving too many slowed down the motion and made it inefficient.

# data[].attributes.body
Continuing with the many parts that are involved in stealing a base, the most important is leaving the initial base to run to the next at the right time. If you leave too soon (before the ball leaves the pitcher's hand), the umpire will call you out, but if you leave too late, you will not reach the base before the catcher throws the ball to get you out. Developing the skill to watch the ball leave the hand and get your body off the base is a spatial sequence while doing this in a quick fashion to reduce time is a temporal sequence. The combination of these two make athletes successful at stealing bases, while if you only have one or the other, you will not have enough time. I remember learning to leave the base first and then the speed of leaving followed.

# data[].attributes.body
Playing third base was known as the "hot corner". I actually had to wear a facemark during my high school career because the hitters who could rotate their hips correctly could hit a line drive right at me. Slap bunting also became popular, where the batter fakes a bunt (causing the first and third basement to run in to get the bunt, a short hit) but could pull the bat back and hit the ball. This made it dangerous because the ball would come quickly and with less time to react because of the shortened distance.  Visual attention was extremely important to make sure that I was focused on the batter and the ball that could possibly be hit my way. Any error of getting distracted by another player in the dugout, a fan getting rowdy on the bleachers, or a bird causing a scene above would distract my visual attention from the most important factor. My reactions were completely based off what the batter did, therefore all my attention was directed that way.

# data[].attributes.body
Relating back to the idea of learning to swing a softball bat, all of the small movements seemed like a large amount to learn at once. "Elbow high", "relaxed shoulders", "squashing the bug", "soft knees", "follow through", were all the commands that would run through my head as a young child wanting to make sure I got every part of the correct swing down. I did not want to miss anything, but in turn my swing was very slow. As I got more practice and swung more times, these motions became automatic and I had to focus less on the mechanics, and could focus on the adaptations I needed to make to my swing based off the pitch. It was my conscious attention that improved. Pitches ranged from fast ball, curve ball, drop ball, and many others. When I was able to devote more cognitive resources to the incoming pitch and less to the mechanics of my swing, I became a better batter.

# data[].attributes.body
Playing third base, I got very good at reading a bunt, crashing in the corners to retrieve the bunt and throwing it to first base before the runner was able to get there. As mentioned before, slap bunting was also something a batter could do, where after reacting to a bunt when I would run in, I would have to react again when the bat was pulled back to hit the softball at a higher speed. My error dectection and correction  was slow at first where once I was running in and realized I needed to stop in place to prepare for a hit rather than continuing forward was slow and delayed at first. With practice I was able to improve my detection and correction to become a very efficient third baseman, making a lot of plays from this corner.