The best way to increase your pitcher's success is to get them to practice specifically and effectively. Your pitchers shouldn't just go out there and throw the ball everyday without a goal for what they're trying to accomplish. Creating and using a Pitching Journal keeps pitchers focused and accountable.

Journaling is nothing more than simply writing down your thoughts about something you care about and creating a pitching journal is simply a way for pitchers to start tracking and talking about their pitching.

The actual journal can be as simple or as elaborate as the pitcher wants it to be and can be anything from a notebook to an actual hardbound journal. Encourage your pitchers to personalize their journal by making it their own in regards to color, stickers, artwork or even pictures.

The top 5 things a Pitching Journal will help a pitcher achieve include:

1. Setting Specific Goals - a pitching journal will help a pitcher get more specific in terms of her goals by seeing them written down and by forcing the pitcher to think about, and write down, her goals for each practice session. Have your pitcher use one page in her journal each time she practices and work with her to have a goal for each practice. Her goal should be specific but can also be something simple.
   Most pitchers aren't used to thinking about a goal for their practice so it will take some teaching on your part. Simply ask your pitcher what she wants to accomplish today in practice. She may not have a clue so ask her if there is anything in her last game that she could do better? There usually will be and this will end up being her goal. Practice goals can be things like; taking more speed off my change up, getting more break on my outside curve, bringing my dropball up a little bit, getting more control of my outside fastball...all of these are specific and really help a pitcher focus in on making this particular aspect better.
2. Creating Accountability - having to write down and rate how you do each day in practice really creates an accountability to performance that will help make your pitchers more mentally tough. Pitchers who learn to be more personally accountable for their performances are in much better position to be successful and a pitching journal is a great place for this accountability to start.
3. Remembering the Successes - pitchers can be extremely critical of themselves for any number of reasons from game-pressure, to coach or parent-pressure, to unrealistic expectations. The reason doesn't matter but what does is that if a pitcher is constantly noticing the negative and the failures then pretty soon she starts going after it. Pitching is hard enough in a positive environment that we don't need to allow pitchers to constantly criticize themselves. So how can a journal help? Have your pitcher always list the successes she had during each practice no matter how small they were. So pitchers should record anything they learned during that day's practice, anything they accomplished that was close to their goal for that day or anything they discovered that might have been unexpected. Simply writing down the successes is a very positive experience for pitchers that helps anchor those successes in the pitcher's brain.
4. Recording the Solutions - Pitchers who take their journaling seriously and do it after every-single practice will quickly accumulate a lot of information - all of which a pitcher can't possibly remember. That's where journaling helps. It's a record of all the things a pitcher has done over the years that have worked so when a pitcher is struggling she can simply thumb through her journal, read the solution and bang! - problem solved!
5. Showing the Progress - In order to help pitchers continually get better they need to see that they're making progress. This is especially true when a pitcher is struggling so a pitching journal helps a pitcher see her overall progress in a bigger-picture way instead of being focused on the struggling here- and-now.

When your pitchers use their journal, be sure to have them list the following:

• The Date
• Their Goal for that Practice
• Their Successes
• Their Workout - write down what they did and for how long
• Their Overall Practice Rating - rate the practice from 1-10 with 1 being horrible and 10 being awesome. This rating can even be broken down into 3 different rating scales: (1) mental performance (2) physical performance (3) overall performance

  Practicing with a plan and then evaluating the practice through a journal is a great way to help your pitchers get much more specific and more successful!