BVSA Teaches: Load & Transfer (Stride Drill)

On this episode of BVSA Teaches, Frank Ramppen talks about the load & transfer (stride drill). One of the biggest issues with the transfer is the distance that you need to go to travel with your stride and the distribution of your weight. A lot of times, the kids don’t gain enough ground towards the pitcher and/or they don’t get their weight moving to their front side. They may have a long stride, but they really never transferred their weight. They’re still back here on their backside.

One really simple drill you can do is with no swings, drop swings, or on the tee. You can do it at every level of hitting. When they get ready to hit, line their foot up with this corner of the plate. Tell them they should stride to the front corner of the plate. That’s a good enough distance for most older kids. For 8 and 9-year-olds, it should be a little bit shorter, and if so, you could use a little foot fence.

Just give them an idea of when they do their load and transfer. then they could look down after their swing and see where their foot was. A lot of times, especially off the tee, we’ll be surprised that they’re barely moving their foot forward. It’s really hard to have a really efficient, effective transfer of weight when you’re not gaining any ground.

That’s a simple little one that you could use at the beginning, and you could do it throughout all their lessons or during the BAP’s to make sure team practices whatever to make sure that they’re gaining that ground. Then, obviously, work on the weight, which I’ll show you some other drills for.