PGStaff,
I agree with most of what you say, especially about throwing harder and it not coming by accident. It reminds me of a funny story that happened last year in a game. My son in addition to his trveling team also played city ball. At the start of the season,our head coach had no idea how hard my son threw. His kid was the catcher on the team. He was small for an 11 year old just under 5 feet tall and weighing about 80 pounds.
Anyway, we breezed through the first few games winning 2 and losing 1 and my son had still not thrown. The next game after that we were matched against a few of my sons old traveling team-mates on the opposing team. We put my son in to pitch with the coaches kid as the catcher. After a few semi-hard balls and two outs later one of the old team-mates came up to bat. My son now in his rythm reared back drove his leg way up in the air and threw the ball so hard into the catchers glove that it caused the glove to smack against his chest and knock him over- no joke ( I think he was partially off balance too). I yelled out casually to the mound- "hey now your getting it warmed up!" That was all she wrote for that team. Every pitch after that was a hard fastball and the catcher falling over helped fuel the intimidation and made it seem like he was throwing lightning bolts out there. It seemed to fuel my son too because after the game he told me that he didn't realize how hard he could actually throw.
It is true, if you want to throw harder it is only going to come by practicing to throw harder. After that game, it was like my son reached a new bar in velocity. In all of travel ball the rest of the year there was only one kid I seen throw noticably harder in his age group with quite a few around his same velocity. That other kid threw true lightning bolts! It was the first time I had ever seen a 12 year old kid throwing fastballs approaching 80 mph! That kid propelled hi Cal Ripken team to the state finals, winning, going to regionals, winning and then making an appearance at the Cal Ripken world series back east. They lost in that tournament, but man could that kid throw! He was also of coarse 5'11". He didn't need any curveball or change-up! In a game once I saw him throw a change-up really slow- more like a lob ball (about 40 mph). It totally buckled the batters knees- so unexpected. That too was funny!