Chris Turco - championshiphitting@gmail.com
About Coach Turco - @coachturco8
Coach Turco is the head baseball coach at Pope High School in Marietta, GA. and the former head fastpitch softball coach. (In Georgia softball is played in the fall)
In Coach Turco's 19 years at Pope, he has been fortunate enough to be involved in 12 state championship games, finishing victorious 7 of those times. (5 baseball championships 2 runner up, 2 softball championship, 3 runner up)
Coach Turco was named state assistant coach of the year by the Georgia Dugout Club in 2007 and 2017 for baseball and head coach of the year in 2022 for baseball as well as 2012, 2014, 2018, 2019 and 2020 in softball.
Between baseball and softball, Coach Turco has been blessed to coach over 75 athletes that have gone on to play collegiately, as well as 12 athletes that have gone on to play professional baseball and softball.
Coach Turco is an alumni of Pope High school where he graduated in 1998. Upon graduating, Coach Turco continued his playing career at Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC.
Coach Turco's 1st coaching stint was at Presbyterian where he served as an assistant coach for the 2003 South Atlantic conference champions. Coach Turco served a very short coaching stint at UNC-Pembroke in the fall of 2003 before accepting his current job at Pope High School. Coach Turco has coached baseball each of his 19 years and has coached softball 14 of those 19 years.
To experience the success I have enjoyed throughout my career, I have been blessed to have been handed down knowledge by more experienced coaches who sought nothing in return for the passage of their wisdom. This blog is intended for the same purpose because helping people is a passion of mine!
@championhitter
Background about this blog Coach Turco's story:
When I 1st started my coaching career, I had the AMAZING fortune to get to work Vanderbilt baseball camps during Coach Corbin's early years. I remember sitting down under the football stadium in their old batting cage where (now Clemson head coach) Coach Bakich had placed life size photos of MLB players on the wall with certain parts of the swing circled and highlighted. This really intrigued my obsession with hitting and although they were not as polished or slick looking as Vanderbilt's, I went back to Pope and made my own low budget version of these pictures to hang in our cage.
Armed with my pictures, boundless enthusiasm, and rudimentary knowledge, I preached and taught mechanics until I was blue in the face. Unfortunately, our teams during this time missed the playoffs.
It was during Barry Bonds' pursuit of 755 in 2007 that I realized that I needed to expand my knowledge base about hitting. Barry was on TV almost nightly and at about the same time, I got TIVO in my house. Every homerun Barry would hit I would record and watch them over and over again. I quickly realized that the swing Barry was taking was not the swing I was teaching.
Expanding my knowledge took incredible amounts of humility as all aspects of what I had been teaching had to be questioned. Often times I proved to myself that the way we had been going about things was not the best way.
After some time I came across the teachings of Coach Gary Ward. I really bought in to what Coach Ward was teaching in terms of approach, but some of the more technical parts of what he was saying I did not quite grasp. I tracked down Coach Ward's email prior to the 2013 baseball season and I emailed him some burning questions about his hitting plan that I needed to figure out. By a stroke of great fortune, Coach Ward emailed me back clarifying some hitting questions I had.
The 2013 baseball season was the 1st true implementation of the State Championship Hitting plan. Although the plan has evolved since, 2013 is the year that we put most of the aspects of the plan into practice. Since implementing this plan, we have only missed the state championship series 3 times with 2 of 3 times seeing our team finish in the state semi finals.
In softball we have had great success using elements of this plan as well winning 2 state championships (2014,2019) of our own with 3 runner up finishes. (2012, 2018, 2020)