West Coast ideas at work on the mound

6/24/10 Posted in Cover Story  |  0 Comments

Pitchers are the workhorse of a girls’ fastpitch softball team. Good pitching means a good chance of winning.

The trick though, is to find and train those good pitchers. Hurling  a softball at 60+ miles per hour and making it dance across the plate isn’t easy. Softball pitchers can make a ball go up, down and side to side while changing speeds. The underhanded motion is more complicated than a golf swing.

And that’s where Rob Dunham and his West Coast Fundamentals come in.

Dunham, with his staff of ex-college pitchers, has been helping area pitchers since 2005. Born and raised in West Covina, California, Dunham grew up around softball. His father, along with the help of friends, started a softball program in his hometown that helped several girls make it to college.

During his early coaching of western California girls, he saw that girls had several opportunities to learn and play softball. In mid-Michigan, that’s not necessarily the case.

“In this area, high schools struggle to field teams because it competes with soccer in the spring,” Dunham said. “And it’s too bad. Softball is a great sport. After playing college baseball college, I fell in love with fastpitch softball. Baseball is a lot of waiting. In softball, everyone is moving all the time.

“There is a lot more adversity, too, which teaches girls to make quick decisions and learn how to develop self-esteem. It’s a thinking game. Very mental. When the best hitters in the game are failing 60-70 percent of the time, it teaches them to work through adversity and that ability is lacking in a lot of kids these days.”

He learned from legendary softball players and coaches such as Don Sarno, a pitching coach and part of the American Softball Association Hall of Fame, as well as Ron Lefebvre who owns Lefebvre Pitching School in Orange County, Ca. He was enthralled by the strategy behind fastpitch softball games and quickly learned the mechanics of what made good pitchers great. Eventually moving to the mid-Michigan area, Dunham was the pitching coach on the very successful Lansing Community College softball team.

He’s now set his sights on younger pitchers and working to help them develop.

“I reevaluated my life when I went through some personal challenges. I wanted to give back, and it always came back to softball,” he explained. “One of the reasons I wanted to start teaching again after I saw a friend’s daughter play softball and saw the mechanics the pitcher used. I knew I could help. I attribute our success to our passion to teach the same mechanics that California pitchers use. We started with a couple of students over the summer from Grand Ledge and Eaton Rapids. We wound up with 10 students that  first year and, it kind of snowballed
after that.”

Located in west Lansing (check out www.westcoastfundamentals.com for more information) Dunham has a facility with three pitching lanes and a weight room. He employs a staff of ex-college pitchers and uses video tape and a variety of other tools to help students excel. He’s open year round. He offers one-on-one pitching lessons.

He also has a business partner, Matt Houseman, who is the coach at Muskegon Community College. Houseman runs a similar program in Muskegon. His team along with a WCF Pitcher Ashley White (from Lansing Everett) just won the NJCAA Div II National Championship. There is also a mid-Michigan school further north and another in Palm Beach, Florida.

In total, there are over 200 students and nine instructors in all four branches.

He said instructors like to see girls start taking lessons when they are between 8 and 12 years old. Size doesn’t matter, just the willingness to learn and to commit to a position that take a lot of practice and patience. Not only do the players receive the instruction on site, Dunham and his instructors watch
them play games during the summer to see them in action. “There are two things we look for in a potential pitcher,” he said. “You need a live arm, which means a strong arm—God given talent arm speed. We don’t have control over that. We also look for girls who can deal with the mental part of pitching. They have to be able to remain calm in difficult situations.”

How good is the teaching?

Since he opened the business, every girl taught by West Coast for at least two years who has wanted to go on to college to play softball, has had a scholarship offer. And, a West Coast student has been in the high school semi-finals the last three years.

“I think I can speak on behalf of all instructors when I say that our greatest accomplishment is working with a student and seeing them finally ‘get it,’”  he said. “Sometimes it takes four lessons, sometimes it takes four months, but when it clicks and they get it, the girl spins her arm faster and she picks up speed.
It’s priceless.”

written Tim Kissman, publisher of Healthy & Fit Magazine, and father of a 10-year-old pitcher.