I Had No Business
Playing D1.

In the late 1990s, I played on one of the most elite high school summer baseball teams in the country. Nine of my teammates were drafted into professional baseball. These guys could leave the yard at will — they had natural power I simply didn't have.

I was doing the same training they were. The difference was that it worked for them. Traditional hitting instruction is typically built by people with enough raw athleticism to succeed in spite of it — not because of it. For a kid like me, it wasn't enough.

If I wanted to stay on that roster, I needed to find a different way.

I'd watch smaller guys in the big leagues — players like Altuve hitting 25+ home runs a year with compact frames — and I knew there had to be an answer that traditional instruction wasn't giving me.

So I experimented. I started training with methods none of my coaches endorsed. Between my sophomore and junior year, those methods added over 100 feet to how far I could drive the ball.

I went from a kid who was never going to play college ball to winning my high school's MVP award senior year — and eventually making a Division 1 roster.

I'll be the first to say it — I was no star on that team. My defense was average. My arm wasn't great. I had ordinary speed. But because I'd trained differently, I could hit at a level that kept me on a roster I had no business being on.

Without those unconventional methods, I never would have been a D1 player. Period. And that experience — being the undersized, less-athletic kid who figured out how to compete anyway — is the foundation of everything I teach today.

Years later, the same problem resurfaced — this time with my own kids. I have five of them, and I started experimenting with how to apply what I'd learned to youth training. It worked.

But the real breakthrough came when my son was 10. I'd been taking him to a pitching instructor — a former major league player. One day the guy looked at me and said, "I can't take your money. Your son won't get value from pitching lessons because he's a bad mover. You need to find him a motor control coach."

At the time, I had no idea what that meant. So I started digging. It turned out to be the best advice anyone ever gave me.

Motor control training completely transformed my son's athleticism. Before, he had obvious mechanical problems in his swing — but those problems existed because his body couldn't coordinate the way a naturally athletic kid's could.

Once we fixed the underlying movement, the swing mechanics cleaned up almost on their own. He went from uncoordinated to a kid who can absolutely pound the ball.

I applied the same approach to his sister — who was undersized and didn't have the physical advantages of the bigger girls she competed against. Within weeks of adding movement training, she started hitting for more power than girls twice her size.

My two oldest have been on this program since they were 9 and 10. Now in high school, they rank in the top 1% nationally for how hard they hit a baseball and a softball.

The results led me to open a local hitting facility, where I refined the approach across thousands of hitters — mapping which movement corrections fix which mechanical problems. Over the years, that work became a system that is remarkably effective at unlocking power in undersized kids.

Now I help families do the same thing remotely, from anywhere in the country. Because every undersized kid deserves to know that their ceiling isn't determined by their size.