One of the hardest ideas for coaches to let go of: decontextualized, isolated practice is not the best way to use time. Intuitively it totally makes sense when you read this quote. It is actually quite crazy how much of coaching is built on this premise. But practically it is extremely hard to implement. We see pro/college teams do it ("if it's good enough for them it should be good enough for us!"). Or we face an uphill battle because we are going against the mainstream idea of what coaching is. It takes as much (if not more) faith to believe that practicing something that barely looks like the sport will transfer compared to trying something new and practicing in a way that looks, feels and acts more like the real sport.

You would do well to pick up Coaching the Problem-Solving Athlete by @MovementMiyagi. Tons of rich quotes like this. This one stuck with me. I see tons of talented youth around who do all sorts of narrow movement patterning. It works...sometimes. But when it doesn't, all I can wonder is if we just trained them from the get-go to be more adaptable, how good could they be?

There is an assumption in our sport of baseball that telling at athlete what to do/focus on mechanically will show up when we transfer it to different contexts that don't have the same perceptual and cognitive demands (particularly if we work on it long enough and linearly introduce complexity). And it is incredibly tempting to do because we aren't coaching a running back who is constantly shifting based on the holes opening and closing. We can sort of "fool" ourselves into thinking that because the pitcher is focused on keeping his front side closed, that movement will be there when he has to execute a 1-2 slider in the dirt with runners on 2nd/3rd, up by 1 in the last inning. I absolutely think there is value in the exploration of moving in different ways based on the data we have and our experience as coaches. But the assumptions made about what transfers shows a coaches hand - he doesn't believe perception, cognition and action are coupled based on the practice environment he sets up. He believes movement lives in the brain and if the athlete does enough reps it will "stick". He has his athletes spend the majority of their throwing volume on things that quite frankly, don't look, feel and act like the game at all.