The Youth Baseball Edge Podcast with Rob Tong: Coaching | Drills | Strategy · Rob Tong: Youth Baseball Coach, Consultant and Training & Development Leade

Help For Parents Helping Kids with Grant Cowan

·41 min·2 clips

Grant Cowan says parents should build radar-gun and exit-velocity numbers, not just chase travel-ball teams.

Rob Tong opens the show by saying it is meant to separate misinformation from true information in youth baseball and give listeners practical, usable content. He tells listeners his guest will join him to talk about how parents can better support their players. He also tees up the question of the week on 10- and 11U pitchers and the move to 60 feet. Before the interview, he gives a few shout-outs to listeners who left five-star reviews. The main conversation centers on what parents think the next step should be and what the player actually needs. The discussion keeps coming back to honesty about the player's current stage. A lot of the talk is about development, especially learning to throw hard and hit the ball hard. Rob uses a simple weekend math problem to make the point. Tournament baseball can eat up hours while giving a kid very few real swings or chances to play. He contrasts that with a rec league setup built around more live at-bats. That example leads into a broader case for maximizing actual reps. Rob says his thinking shifted during the COVID year. He points to how major league organizations used offsite camps and extra player pools. He compares that model to a Dominican academy-style approach to development. The point is not glamour. It is repetition, opportunity, and doing the work that actually moves a player forward. Rob keeps the conversation anchored in practical coaching language rather than abstract theory. Near the end, he returns to the pitching question and shares good news about the app and beta testing. He closes by asking coaches what makes practice planning hardest, because that is the problem he wants to solve.

As heard by us

A blunt, useful check on whether the next baseball step is really the right one.

It stays focused on a familiar problem for youth baseball parents: how to help a player without mistaking motion for progress. The strongest stretch is the practical one, where it compares travel-ball assumptions with the small number of at-bats and real field time a kid may…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You need a saner yardstick for your kid's next baseball step.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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