Sports Product Review

Receivers are taught every practice, “Catch it with your fingers, not your palms. Soft hands.” Yet when a hard leather object is being hurtled from ten yards away, the natural tendency is to flatten the hands and let the ball get into the palms, which is one of the reasons we see so many dropped balls on perfect passes.

A couple of innovative inventors, Mark Weber and Lance Strother, came up with GreatCatch, (www.thegreatcatch.com), a training aid that offers football players a way to practice catching with proper technique every time. The device is brilliantly simple: a couple of elastic bands attached to golf ball-sized tennis balls, which prevent the pass from getting into the palms. GreatCatch has recently been selected by ESPN as the next, best training aid for football, and Weber and Strother have partnered with Cutters Gloves, (www.cuttersgloves.com), the designers of cutting-edge sports gloves, which means you’ll soon be seeing the product everywhere.

I have three boys who play wide receiver from Pop Warner to high school and spent much of this weekend throwing passes, (even though football season is months away), and mediating arguments over whose turn it was to wear the GreatCatch. The amazing thing was that they caught nearly as many passes wearing the device as without it, but began utilizing the proper technique once they took it off. If you know someone who is an aspiring pass-catcher, you can’t go wrong if you get him GreatCatch. When you see that spiral nestled softly into his fingertips before being tucked away safely and taken down the sidelines, don’t forget to think Mark and Lance.

Source: Cutters Gloves