When to focus on Velo?

Mechanics come first. After that I taught kids to throw with intent starting with kid pitch at 9/10’s and 9u travel.

When the kids hit puberty we got into baseball oriented  strength building to throw with intent.

Agreed.  For my 2025 it was very much Mechanics, Mechanics, Mechanics.  Around 13 yrs old put more focus in the strength and conditioning and nutrition/weight gain.  We are fortunate to have a few superb baseball focused strength and conditioning facilities near us in the northeast.  Those were the biggest factors that I believe led to his strong velo development.

According to goals.  P5 Righty better have velo or be ready to bullpen guy.  Lefty can have decent velo and great control to start.  Lefty with great 4-5 pitches can be bullpen P5 with medium velo.

P5 Great velo = 96 good velo 93 medium velo 90 Subtract 3 mph per level below P5

jmo and what I've seen.  SEC may give me a construed velo.

Mechanics first, arm health/care second and velocity third from what I saw with my son. He strove for balance in both acceleration and deceleration. There are a lot of good programs that can help with that and increase velocity, but I think like the hit tool, there are genetics at play to get to the upper end.

All training is velo training.  You can't build velo  unless you build strong body stabilization.  Your body won't unlock itself and allow you to throw hard if it has to protect itself when in the positions you need to get to transfer energy effectively.  It's very important to have an evaluation done of your movement patterns and core body strength to know what to work on, to make sure things like scaps and t-spine move correctly because they are properly supported by the right muscles, etc.  to throw as an overhead athlete.  Building raw strength without these things is a recipe for problems and frustration.

So to answer you questions, I would say you start (in I think your terms) velo specific training, when you establish that you've addressed any and all movement pattern issues due to weaknesses in specific important muscle groups.

My son was always the smallest/youngest kid on every team he played for.  He had very good control from the start at 6 or 7....and because of that he could throw harder than other kids as he wasn't worried about where it was going.  He could just throw strikes.   As he got older he never really did any weight training at all.  Starting when he was about 5th or 6th grade he became a huge fan of long toss.   And by long toss....I mean a lot of long toss.  Sometimes 4 or 5 days a week depending on when he could find someone to throw with.   His velo increased constantly after that.   By the first time he threw with a gun (7th grade I think) he was in the low 70's.  By his sophomore year (5'4 and maybe 100 lbs) he was 82-83....and hit 90 for the first time the end of his junior year of HS baseball.  He went to college as a PO...and even then did as little lifting as he could get away with....and continued long tossing.  He was up to 93 his sophomore year in college.   He swears that the long toss was what allowed him to throw that hard.  He always thought that the weights were making him "tight" and actually hurting his velo.

@JucoDad posted:

Mechanics first, arm health/care second and velocity third from what I saw with my son. He strove for balance in both acceleration and deceleration. There are a lot of good programs that can help with that and increase velocity, but I think like the hit tool, there are genetics at play to get to the upper end.

Bingo.  Yatzee.  Nailed it!

I never replied to this to say thanks for the replies.  So thanks!  Summer season is over and the plan is to work on mechanics and strength/conditioning through the fall and winter.  The velo has started to show up as he has grown quite a bit and has been doing baseball specific workouts since May (after HS season ended).