The cold weather outside isn’t putting a stop to baseball in Estevan.
After a successful November to December winter session, the Inside Pitch Baseball Academy winter training program will continue to help develop the pitching mechanics of kids aged 14 and over beginning with its first spring session Jan. 18 at Westview Elementary School. The spring session, which is run by Southeast Legacy midget AAA Twins coach Blaine Kovach with help from Inside Pitch owner/director of player development Morgan Reiter, focuses on giving its students the proper skills they need for pitching through a weighted ball program that lets kids graduate from one ball weight to another in an effort to develop arm strength and durability.
“For the first go-round, we actually had 12 kids out, which I was surprised to get,” said Kovach, who noted kids interested in signing up for the spring session can contact him at [email protected]. “Every single kid who we had (came) from not much baseball experience and not much coaching to having the mechanics that we worked on nailed down.”
Kovach said the spring sessions are an opportunity for ball players to get ahead of the game and by the time the program wraps up in April the kids who participated will go into their training camps having been throwing for three months already. He said the mandate of Inside Pitch Baseball Academy is to help kids learn the proper way to pitch as well as make their arms stronger, so they don’t run into any injury problems later on in life.
“It’s really fun to see that (improvement) from the kids,” he said. “It’s fun for them because they can see a lot of the changes, but it’s good for the parents to see that the program is actually working. That’s what they want to see. Their kid wants to get better and we want your kids to get better and they are getting better.”
