The Truth About Which Pitches are Necessary for College

You’ve probably heard a lot about what pitches you absolutely need to be able to throw in order to make a college softball team. If you’ve bounced around between different pitching coaches or different travel teams, you’ve probably even heard a lot of conflicting information—that college coaches never call fastballs, that you absolutely must have a rise ball, blah blah blah. Well, today I’m going to tell you the truth!

What Pitches Do You Need For College?

There’s a very simple answer to this question: the ones that will let you get batters out.

Every pitcher’s hand size, finger and wrist flexibility, body type, strength, weakness, pitching motion, etc. is a little different, and because of this every pitcher will find that some pitches come more easily to her than others. And that’s OK! Instead of fighting something your body doesn’t want to do, use your strengths. Rattling off a list of the pitches you’ve learned is much less impressive than actually getting on the field and GETTING BATTERS OUT. If you can do that, and you can do it consistently, and you can do it better than most pitchers, college coaches will take notice… even if you’re only doing it with two pitches.

What If You Don’t Know What Your Strongest Pitches Are Yet?

This is the part that’s a bit tricky if you’re a young pitcher and still learning different pitches. When you don’t feel like one particular pitch is stronger than another, it can be very overwhelming. It’s possible that you will have to learn every movement pitch and experiment a bit to determine which ones agree the most with your body.

A Model Pitch Repertoire

Here is a model pitch repertoire. Notice that I am not mandating specific pitches. You can achieve this repertoire with any combination of different pitches.

PITCH ONE: a pitch you can put wherever you want, whenever you want. This is the pitch you go to when you’re in a 3-0 count, and it’s the pitch you go to when you ABSOLUTELY need to hit an exact spot to get a particular batter out. It’s a pitch you must have absolute confidence in. For a lot of pitchers, this is a fastball. For many pitchers, it’s NOT a fastball. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you’re confident in it and you can throw it with pinpoint command and effectiveness. This may not be your best pitch, or your out pitch, but it can be.

PITCH TWO: an off-speed pitch. This is typically a change-up. There are lots of different change ups out there, and it doesn’t matter which you throw. Again, it matters that you can command it.

PITCH THREE (and optionally pitch four): a pitch that can move around the strike zone. You need to be able to command both corners of the plate as well as change the batter’s eye level, preferably with pitches that have late movement. I like to tell my students to shoot for one pitch that moves in or out, and one that moves up or down (a pitch that does both—like a drop-curve—is fine too). If pitch one is good enough, it can serve one of these roles, but probably not both.

In short, if you have three truly outstanding pitches, you’re in good shape. Remember, it doesn’t matter what those pitches are as long as they’re GREAT and, hopefully, different from each other.

If you have four truly outstanding pitches, you’re in better shape. If you have four pitches at the expense of them being outstanding, bring it back down to three. If you have five or six pitches, you’d be better off focusing on making four of them really really good.