The best baseball story you’ll ever hear -turned the page tonight on his final chapter before heading off to college 📖👓⬇️ We’ve had WPIAL Champions, State Champions, NCAA All Americans, Major League Draft Picks, 2 Major Leaguers Of all the stories we’ve been able to tell- 1 stands out… Because this story is so rare and so special… it’s hard to believe. But the best stories sit somewhere between unbelievable and impossible. This is the story of Matthew Hughes There have been players who had better High School careers than Matthew There have been players who had better stats than Matthew Plenty of players had better metrics than Matthew But nobody- in the history of our gym or anywhere that I’ve ever heard of - came as far as Matthew From unwanted by travel teams and cut from his freshman team - to headed to Division 1 Baseball tomorrow at 5 AM. How did he get there? He made a choice to do the little things that are in front of us every day. Choice after choice after choice. And when you add all those choices up, it leads to something special that just might border on maniacal. So when we tell all the stories about PVS - 1 always stands out. No It’s not the undrafted free agent who rewrote the @washwildthings record book and ultimately toed the rubber for the Milwaukee Brewers. And no it’s not the left-handed Lebo kid that went to go work at a bakery before re-finding his love for baseball again & making HIS way to a Major League mound No it’s about a different Lefty… a Lefty from Bethel Park. Cut from the team.. who made a decision one day that he was going to do everything he could to make that Bethel Park team & pitch in College. Anytime you tell a kid that anything is possible. You can point to Matthew Hughes as an example. You can tell them about his story. Because he truly came out of nowhere to pull off the impossible. And if there’s one person whose story will only grow grander- It’s his Matthew - Thank you for all the time at PVS. For all the people you helped (some you’ll never know about)… The lives you have changed- including your own- will forever be your legacy here. Because you showed… you proved… that somebody no matter how gifted they are- if they decide to do something- TRULY DO SOMETHING- you can accomplish great things. You’ve got a chance kid. You most definitely have a chance. Many people will tell you it’s impossible over the next few years. …But you’ve been told that many times before. 🎥🗣️ Astro, Mace, Ari, Honz, Steiny, Carter, Gabe, Noah 🎥✍️ R. Cruz 🎥 📺 C. Moreno @bp_hawks @KDPomp @RichieWalsh @BREAL412 @coppin_baseball @M_Hughes33 @CShimatzki2 @jjosemoreno42 @TGarbs3

3/ Learning how to use the lower half and decelerate over a longer range of motion considerably lowers shoulder stress- which is the number one injury in softball throwing. In The game of baseball, we see a lot of elbow trouble- but in softball….. The culprit is usually the labrum.  We theorize this to be a decel problem throughout the game that is a borderline epidemic. So while we may not be able to tell you exactly all the reasons why your daughter throws like a girl. We do know how to get her to stop doing it if she already does. Quite simply we rearrange the chairs…..we make the Legos fit, and we do it by paying attention to when things happen! Timing: the hardest thing to teach and even harder to master.   If you liked this article, please consider sharing it. If you’re tired of watching your daughter, throw like a girl give us a call 📞 We would love the opportunity to have you join PVS girls from 27 different states who throw hard and healthy.  It won’t be easy and no two programs are the same. But you will stand out in a metric and ability that is being increasingly coveted by college coaches: arm strength. @CoachBrandon24 @CoachNealPT @LAtlasCoaching @SangilloJohn @Tpleasants17 @mysha_sataraka

2/ they employ they are entirely disconnected from the lower half and their order of operations is incorrect .  Why?   Well… We’ve seen some very strange flipping warm-ups that really drive home and hardwire this move.  We’ve also seen a lot of warm-up techniques that don’t help fix this,  in fact, they make it worse.. Girls tend to rotate their hips and shoulders together. Boys are almost always better at this.    Many people have theorized why.  The size of the ball, the size of the field, the emphasis on getting rid of the ball faster at an early age.   There’s even a theory out there that girls see how their father’s throw to them (which is usually a more measured and cautious pushy throw so as to not hurt the girl if she happens to miss it). The girl sees this and replicates what she sees from her father when she throws the ball back.  Whereas while playing catch with Johnny- dad often just whips it at the boy and says “here catch it.”  whichever of these or other root causes you agree with , I’m gonna come down hard on coaching.  Because we are teaching these girls how to push the ball. And the reason I have such conviction on this is because I’ve seen the warm-up drills.  I’ve seen the back spin enforcing dart throw. I’ve seen the feet wide apart rotating around the trunk rather than the dominant leg. I’ve seen all kinds of drills like this locally and across the country.    Girls from Georgia, Virginia and Ohio came to see me in the last 48 hours. They don’t know each other.   They didn’t collaborate on what they were gonna do when I watched them warm-up. But they all warmed up in a very similar fashion, using some combination of what I described above.  So Yeah- the coaching needs to be challenged and we need coaches to create rather than replicate. In the crude image below- The green line is the pelvis, red is the torso, blue is the shoulder/ arm and yellow is the elbow to the hand.  Ideally, they accelerate in that order from left to right. In this crude diagram, you can see that the elbow/ hand, pelvis, and shoulder accelerate before the torso. This causes the racing elbow. When a softball players comes to PVS from out of state or locally, we seek to re-order that timeline.  It’s almost always a problem.   Better than 70% of the girls who walk in here have a timeline that is off.   What do we do?  We start with what we affectionately call Lego Bag 1.  Lego back one is our way of explaining something that they understand. Legos coming back with instructions. The first bag is the foundation. When you’re in the act of assembling back one. It’s neither exciting nor pretty. But without it, we don’t get to bags 2,3,4 and so on to make the Harry Potter Castle or Han Solo Millennium Falcon.   We hammer the girls on lower half control, stability, and timing.  We do this with things they’ve never done before so we can get them to adopt more easily to these new concepts. Because if we ask them just to throw a softball, they’re gonna organize their body and throw the softball the way they know how- which is wrong.   We employ things like slide boards, water bags, Vertimax Raptors and Mozingo Screws.   But what we do most often is address the source of the power, how it sequences, and when things should happen.   An early handbrake or an early abandoned heel🦶will lead to a quad push & set the dominoes to fall incorrectly.  So we employ creative tactics based on the individual to address these first moves.   In doing so, the larger segments of the body will efficiently slingshot the arm into layback riding rotation below…instead of being pushed.   This is a force multiplier that consistently helps the girls that travel to Pittsburgh not only throw harder-  but often with lower arm stress scores.

Why your Daughter throws like a girl A Coach’s post from founder @KingFish626 We didn’t seek to become the #1 destination for softball players to learn how to throw better. We didn’t seek to become the first data driven baseball facility in Pennsylvania either. They happened though.    Both were accidents.   For one, I just wanted to create a place that My son could become better at baseball in a meaningful way. Not just reps… meaningful total body development driven by unbiased data points to map where we were and where we needed to go.  Other area players and parents wanted the same: Hello PVS Baseball (est 2015) For the second, 10 years ago we had an older sister (Rylee😉) of one of our early baseball athletes(Colton). She needed help hitting. We watched her play in a game and saw how all the girls threw.  We decided to help her with that. After a few years, a few more girls came… then around 2023 there were 12.  Just like our beginnings in baseball- we were the only game in town. What we’ve started to notice recently though-  is we’re really the only game in the country that does what we do for girls.  And that’s to somehow just treat them like boys.  And no, we don’t give them the same five drills Everybody else gets like a very popular softball throwing program.   But why?  Why do girls throw like this?  There isn’t one good all-inclusive answer.   But there is some data to support that this isn’t just a theory.  “Throwing like a girl” is backed by some studies that go back at least a decade.  Yet in that time- nobody has really stepped in to fill that hole in a meaningful way. Sure people have filled that hole to make money, but nobody’s really helping every girl throw better.    Janet Hyde, a professor of psychology and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin once studied the gender gap across a broad spectrum of skills. She believed that men and women aren’t as different as they are often portrayed.  She mined data on social, psychological, communication and physical traits, skills and behaviors to quantify the gap. After looking at 46 meta-analyses, Hyde found what she defined as a “very large” difference in only two skills: 1. throwing velocity 2. throwing distance Hello PVS Softball Jerry Thomas, Dean of the College of Education at the University of North Texas…has done extensive research publications in kinesiology and motor skills.  Thomas did the throwing research Hyde cites in her paper.  His findings: “The overhand throwing gap, beginning at 4 years of age, is three times the difference of any other motor task, and it just gets bigger as they age. By 18, there’s hardly any overlap in the distribution: Nearly every boy by age 15 throws better than the best girl.”  Studies of overhand ball throwing across different cultures has found that pre-pubescent girls throw 51 to 69 percent of the distance that boys do, at 51 to 78 percent of the velocity. As they get older, the differences increase; one U.S. study found that girls age 14 to 18 threw only 39 percent as far as boys (an average of about 75 feet vs. about 192 feet). To understand why a girl “throws like a girl,” it’s necessary to define just what throwing like a girl is. According to Thomas, a girl throwing overhand looks more like she’s throwing a dart than a ball. This is a phenomenon we call “The Racing Elbow” at PVS….And we have helped athletes at some of the biggest and best softball programs in the world such as UCLA and LSU convert the racing elbow into a more mechanically sound process which I will discuss later.   What is the racing elbow? Well it kind of resembles your average dart player at a local pub. It starts with disconnecting from  anything below the waist and pushing the ball with the chest shoulders and triceps.  there’s all kinds of ways girls do this. Sometimes they’ll pick up their arm over their head and push down ….sometimes they’ll lower their shoulder and push out, but no matter what mechanism