Parents often bring in a player who "suddenly can't time the ball anymore" — a technique that worked reliably for two years apparently falling apart in a few months. Nine times out of ten, the explanation isn't a lost skill. It's a growth spurt.

Why height changes break timing first

A fast increase in height shifts a player's centre of gravity, limb length and reach almost overnight from a movement-pattern point of view — even though it feels gradual to the player living through it. Trigger movements calibrated to an old body no longer land the bat or the front foot in the same place. The technique isn't wrong; the body underneath it has changed.

What it looks like on the lane

  • A bat swing that arrives slightly early or late compared to bat-speed data from a few months earlier
  • A trigger step that overshoots or undershoots the crease
  • Bowlers losing their usual release point, often bowling a foot or more different in seam position
  • General frustration — the player knows something's off but can't identify what

How we approach a reset

Rather than re-teaching from scratch, we re-baseline: a session on the biomechanics lane compares current bat speed, footwork timing and release height against the player's own data from before the growth spurt. That comparison — their own numbers, not a generic age benchmark — usually shows exactly which part of the sequence has drifted.

From there it's targeted repetition on the specific gap, not a full technical rebuild. Most resets take three to six sessions before timing returns to where it was.

What helps at home

Patience, mostly. A player mid-growth-spurt is not regressing — their proprioception is playing catch-up with a body that's changed faster than their brain has adjusted to. Avoid comparing current form to "how they played last season," since that comparison is measuring two different bodies. A short technical check-in on the lane is more useful than extra unsupervised practice reinforcing a now-mismatched movement pattern.

If your child's form has dipped sharply alongside a visible growth spurt, a single 1-to-1 Pro Performance Analytics session is usually enough to diagnose exactly what's shifted.