Have You Met Our Neighbors, 360U Softball?
A little bit different than your typical blog post format, but we wanted to brag about our neighbors right down the street (literally they are down the road from us) who have been absolutely killing it and empowering their athletes through positive mental and physical softball preparation. You guessed it, we’re talking about 360U! We recognize 360U serves a similar population as Motus Rx by helping individuals become more confident in the activities they love to do. With that being said, we asked 360U a few questions about their main goals, values, philosophy, success stories, how the business started, and more. See what they have to say:
1. Could you tell us about you, 360U as a company, and how you got to where you are today?
My name is Maria Stave (Van Abel) and my sister is Laura Beyer (Van Abel) and we are Co-Founders of 360U Softball in Appleton.
After growing up playing softball on our local rec/travel teams and throughout high school, both Laura and I had the opportunity to continue our career into college where we both were 4 year starters at our respective colleges – Laura as a shortstop at UW-Stevens Point and myself at UW-Madison as a centerfielder. We both graduated from our University’s Business Schools – Laura majored in Finance while I majored in HR and Management.
We both had several years of experience in administering private softball instruction during high school and college at area facilities. After I graduated from Madison, Laura left her 7 year career in personal finance and banking after she had her son, Will, and we decided to officially form an LLC around empowering young women through softball instruction and life skills. We saw there was a great need for softball-specific instruction in the area, specifically from female instructors. Very quickly, we found that the grand opportunity in front of us was not just to teach mechanics, but far more importantly, was to help these young women understand how talented, capable and amazing each of them are.
Today, we’ve been in business for 6 years and this past March we made the move to our current facility on Calumet Street in Appleton, tripling our usable training space to include three 20’x70’ batting cages, a HitTrax training system, a full pitching lane, two athlete-development rooms, a fitness room, and two parent lounges. Our Team of Instructors has grown to a team of 10 women, composed of all current and former NCAA DI-DIII softball athletes. We see approximately 150 athletes per week and our primary mission is to continue empowering as many young women as we can to find their most confident self on and off the diamond!
2. What do you think are the top 2-3 things you do for your junior athletes that make the biggest difference in their game and in their life?
The biggest thing we do for our junior athletes from a physical/mechanical standpoint is slowing the game down by diving deeper into advanced film review and using data/analytics to improve their exit velocity, launch angels and average distance on our HitTrax system. From a mental standpoint, the #1 focus we have with our juniors is to help them become more aware of their mentality as an athlete by listening closer to their self-talk, to their response to failure and their approach to pressure situations. Our 360U Team uses their own experiences to help them re-think and develop a more positive, pro-active way of approaching and responding to failure and pressure. Ironically, these are the same skills we want them to be able to transfer to life after softball.
3. What is the biggest challenge for the athletes you work with in today’s competitive atmosphere?
The biggest challenge we encounter with athletes today is helping them manage pressures they feel around the sport. This includes pressure they are putting on themselves along with pressure they are feeling from coaches, parents and peers. Today’s softball environment has become increasingly cut-throat and intense with winning as the #1 priority. This approach leads to athletes being afraid to leave their comfort zone for fear of failure, therefore never giving themselves the ability to leave their comfort zone to try something new or different. We see this issue snowballing into a number of other problems such as lack of self-confidence, poor self-image, and athlete burnout. It is because of this that we focus so heavily on the mental side of the game, including a ‘word of the week’ at our facility to help them build mental toughness and give them increased perspective that the game is about more than base hits and strike outs.
4. How big of a difference does the physical preparedness of your athletes make in their development?
Physical preparedness plays a huge role in the sport of softball. Both Laura and I were exposed to this type of training in college and it elevated our game to a new level – things such as strength training, speed and agility, injury-prevention exercises pre and post practice and games, etc. With a high volume of games young athletes are playing prior to high school, the need for injury prevention and safe training are at an all-time high. Companies like Motus RX are an incredible resource for athletes to train better and smarter to keep their most important piece of equipment, their body, in the best shape possible.
5. What is one thing you wish the general public understood about softball and/or its demands that maybe they currently don’t?
One thing the general public may not fully understand is how much athletes ask of their bodies day in and day out. Whether it be throwing, swinging, pitching or catching, we are asking so much out of these young women and their developing/changing bodies. Proper emphasis needs to be placed on injury prevention as well as preparing our bodies to be able to sustain the long term competing we are asking them to withstand. Again, this is where Motus Rx could be beneficial as athletes could engage in sport specific strength and injury prevention training. Additionally, Motus Rx can help fine-tune and keep athlete’s bodies recovered through cupping, sports massage, dry-needling, recovery boots, and GameReady. Not only on the physical side, but the mental wear and tear of the game also must be considered. A strong focus on mental health and confidence building through their sport is so important for these young athletes to ensure they have the confidence in themselves to avoid issues like negative body-image, eating disorders, sports-anxiety, depression and other serious issues young females are faced with everyday.
6. Where can we that are reading this learn more about you and your company? (website, social, etc)
You can lean more about us at the links below!
Website: https://www.the360u.com/
Facebook: 360U Softball
Instagram: @360u_softball
Email: the360u@yahoo.com
We hope you all enjoyed learning more about 360U as much as we did and if you are interested, stop by and see their new facility in action.