Why your daughter's rise ball doesn't rise

If your daughter has been working on a rise ball for a season and it still travels flat, the problem is almost never effort. It is that a softball will not lift until three separate things are true at the same time, and nobody tells you what the numbers behind them are.

The three components

A ball rises because air moves differently over the top of it than under it, and that only happens under specific conditions. There are three, and they are worth naming plainly because coaching usually collapses them into one instruction, which is to throw harder.

• Speed of spin. How many times the ball turns over per second on its way to the plate.
• Direction of spin. It has to be backspin, on four seams, turning backwards rather than sideways or in a wobble.
• Speed of the pitch. The ball has to be travelling fast enough for the spin to do anything at all.

Miss any one of those and the ball goes straight. A pitcher can be spinning it beautifully and still get nothing, because the pitch is not fast enough. She can be throwing hard and get nothing, because the spin is sideways.

The numbers nobody quotes

Here is where it gets discouraging for a young pitcher. A regular softball needs to be spinning at roughly 20 to 25 revolutions per second before the rise starts to show. That is twenty full rotations in the time it takes you to say the word. On top of that it needs to be leaving the hand at a minimum somewhere in the mid fifties, and it really wants to be nearer 65 mph.

A twelve year old is not throwing 55 mph. Many high school pitchers are not either. So she can do everything correctly, in good mechanics, with genuine backspin, and the ball will still refuse to move, because the third condition is not met and there is nothing she can do about it this season.

That is the trap. She practises a pitch that cannot work yet, gets no feedback that she is doing it right, and concludes she cannot throw a rise ball. The mechanics were never the problem. The physics were.

Changing what the ball needs

The other way to solve it is to stop asking the pitcher to reach the ball's threshold and lower the threshold instead. That is what the eight moulded wings on an EZ-Riseball do. The ball catches air the way a regular softball cannot, so it lifts at around 10 revolutions per second, at a minimum of about 30 mph.

Put those two sets of numbers next to each other and the gap is the whole point. Half the spin rate. A little over half the release speed. Both of those are inside what a developing pitcher can already do on a Tuesday evening in the back garden.

Why seeing it matters more than being told

There is a second thing going on, and it matters as much as the arithmetic. When a pitch does nothing, a pitcher has no way of knowing which of the three components she got wrong. Was the spin too slow? Was it sideways? Was the pitch short? A flat ball looks identical in all three cases.

A ball that lifts at 30 mph answers the question on every single throw. Good spin, it climbs. Sideways spin, it does not. Slow spin, it does not. She stops guessing and starts adjusting, which is the difference between practising and just repeating.

The Advance Ball takes this further with a two colour stripe that makes the rotation readable in the air. You can see four seam backspin happening rather than inferring it from where the ball ended up.

What to do this week

Before changing her mechanics, work out which component is actually missing. Stand behind her and watch the ball rather than her arm. If the ball is wobbling or turning sideways, the problem is direction, and that is a grip and release issue. If it is spinning cleanly backwards and still going flat, the spin rate or the pitch speed is short, and that is what a training ball is for.

Fix the direction first. It is the only one of the three that does not depend on how strong she is yet, and it is the one that carries into every other pitch she will ever throw.