My daughter, the softball player, left two comments on a post about coaching her right out of her natural swing. In one, she said I was making fun of her. In the other, she expressed disappointment that I apologized in my blog but not in person.
Simply, she was stepping out and swinging up, both easy problems to fix – unless you start to worry about it. I showed her how to swing level, how to turn her wrists, how to follow through. Then I pitched some balls and watched her swing. If she did the loop, if she swung up, I would demonstrate with an exaggerated looping swing. I didn’t think twice about it, but she thought I was mocking her, making fun of her. Confusion and anger and hurt, added to the mental gymnastics of stance and swing, caused her to fail, to fail so quickly, in fact, that I should have realized something more was going on.
The next time we practiced, I told her I was sorry for messing her up, but she didn’t really hear me. She wasn’t bothered so much by that as she was that I would ridicule her – and that was the apology she was listening for.
