I got hurt as a pitcher. Career-ending injury. And the hardest part wasn't the pain — it was realizing that nobody around me, not my coaches, not my trainers, had any idea how to develop velocity without destroying the arm in the process.

That experience became my obsession.

When I started coaching, I made one promise: nobody I train will go through what I went through. I spent years learning from orthopedic surgeons, D1 pitching coaches, certified athletic trainers, and some of the top private instructors in the country. I built a system at The Texas Pitching Institute that has added 10-20 MPH for players from 8 years old through college — without the injuries that ended my own career.

Then came the day at Lamar University that changed everything I thought I knew about running a bullpen.

I was running a standard session — one pitcher throwing, everyone waiting their turn. Nothing unusual. Until one pitcher got tired of waiting on a teammate who wouldn't stop talking, stepped on the mound, and started throwing at the same time.

Two pitchers. One bullpen. Simultaneously.

My first instinct was to stop it. That's not how you run a bullpen.

But I watched what happened instead. Both guys were locked in. Competitive. Engaged in a way I had never seen in a traditional session. When it was over they were buzzing — asking if we could do it again, begging for more.

That was the lightbulb.

The traditional bullpen — one pitcher, everyone watches and waits, same prescribed pitches, coach with a clipboard — wasn't the only way. It wasn't even the best way. There were more effective variations. More engaging formats. Methods that built competitive fire, sharpened focus, and accelerated development all at the same time.

We started building them. More formats, more variations. The pitchers loved every one.

Then I connected with Jim Lawler — one of the most legendary pitching coaches in the history of college baseball. He had spent decades developing his own revolutionary bullpen formats. He shared them with me. They went straight into the system.

That system became Bullpen Secrets.

After interviewing over 2,500 pitching coaches across every level of baseball, the same problem kept surfacing — coaches running the same outdated bullpens they learned as players, pitchers disengaged, arms breaking down, and nobody questioning whether there was a better way.

There is. It's in this book.

​— Andy Powers Founder, The Texas Pitching Institute & Bayou Nation