Sports Product Review

I hear it every year as a board member of my local Little League. When parents of six year-olds find out that their son has to play tee ball his first year in the league we hear them whine that he’s already hitting live pitching in the backyard and he’ll be bored hitting off the tee.

The tee gets a bad rap. Consider this quote from Hall-of-Famer, Tony Gwinn, arguably the finest pure hitter of his generation: “For me the most effective way to practice hitting is to use a batting tee and a bag of wiffle balls. Tee it up and start hacking. Even after 18 years in the big leagues, every winter I go home and break out the tee and wiffle balls. It's not the most exciting thing, so you have to be creative. I put my headphones on and listen to my favorite music while I concentrate on my hitting technique.”

So, if it’s good enough for Tony Gwynn, I’d say it’s good enough for your player. But when Tony said “It’s not the most exciting thing, so you have to be creative,” he probably didn’t know about the Multi-Tee (www.multi-tee.com).

What makes the Multi-Tee better than an average tee? It’s hard to know where to start. Until now, most batting tees have used only one upright tee – good for practicing those pitches down the middle. But what about getting help on the other 90 % of the pitches you’ll see from a good hurler? The majority of amateur baseball and softball players have not been taught the correct position of ball and bat contact for pitches in the other two hitting zones, (inside and outside). When you use the Mult-Tee, you can easily rotate the swing arm to the proper position for proper bat and ball contact. This is why the Multi-Tee is especially useful to those who don’t fully understand basic hitting techniques. Not only can this training device be set up to hit a ball in the three primary positions, you can vary it in dozens of increments in between, creating nearly unlimited practice scenarios.

I talked my kids into trying the tee out, in the garage, using wiffle balls. I tasked them with hitting twenty-five inside, twenty-five outside and twenty-five down the pipe. Before long, on their own, they were adding cuts to the twenty-five I’d suggested because the variety the tee offers breaks up the monotony of ordinary practice. Plus the unique double tee feature allows them to work a unique “High Hands Drill” and a “Hands-Through-the-Ball Drill,” both of which teach proper fundamentals and can only be accomplished with the Multi-Tee.

So don’t be in such a big hurry to get “beyond” the tee. In fact, if you take Tony’s advice, the tee will always be part of your training regimen. And if that’s the case, why not use the only device that teaches the proper swing, in the proper zone, and that takes an activity that used to be a chore, and turns it into a challenging and skill-enhancing exercise for kids from Tee Ball to the Hall-of-Fame.

Source: Multi-Tee