Mike Brooks (Skip)
Pro Series Hitters
Pro Series Hitters was created by ex-professional player and longtime coach Mike Brooks to provide players, coaches, and parents with a comprehensive, in-depth Hitting Development System.
The Pro Series Hitters Skipper was drafted as a shortstop by the Minnesota Twins out of West Covina (CA) High School in 1968, where he was honored as San Gabriel Valley High School Player of the Year. Mike enjoyed an eight-year professional career with the Twins and Indians organizations and earned a spot on the Twins Major League Roster in 1970 and 1972.
Mike has coached at the professional, college, and high school levels and has worked as an associate NW scout for the Arizona Diamondbacks.
He established the NW Timberjacks Baseball Club in 2000. For 18 years the Tjacks were one of the premier select team programs in the Northwest region with over 95% of graduating players moving on to college programs.
He has been coaching teams at USA Baseball, Perfect Game and Arizona Fall Classic national events since 2000 and started Team Northwest Baseball in 2011 to offer deserving players in the Northwest an opportunity to perform nationally before college recruiters and professional scouts.
In 2019, Mike became managing director for Fastpitch Northwest. FPNW evaluates high school fastpitch players in the Northwest states and brings them together to compete before college coaches at regional and national events. Since 2010, over 300 FPNW alumni have gone on to play in college programs.
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
My approach to teaching hitting skills has changed dramatically since the advent of exciting new technology and the scientific research now dedicated to analyzing what makes professional players excel. We all had our pet "theories" about what makes a player successful. Even the best professional hitting instructors had a difficult time agreeing on what actually happened in those split seconds. We taught what we thought we saw or what we had heard by other coaches. We now know that terms like "keep your weight back", "squish the bug", "extend your arms", "swing down at the ball", "throw your hands" are all misleading and, though well meant, do not happen in a professional swing.
We now have the ability to show students successful professional players using high-speed computer analysis, frame-by-frame sequences of motion mechanics, and how timing and rhythm are incorporated. We no longer need to teach players our own opinions or theories.
As a coach, you know you have come full circle when the passion you had as a player, leaving it all on the field each day to achieve your dreams, has now become an intense desire to help young ballplayers reach their own goals and know that they became the best that they could be.
After all these years it seems that this quote from Jim Bouton especially rings true - "You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball; and in the end, it turns out that it was the other way around all the time"