It is spring, and that means baseball season is around the corner. Millions of children, teenagers, young adults, and older adults will participate in baseball. Done right, for many this can be an extremely fun, positive, and rewarding experience. However, if practices are not done right, this can be a boring, grinding process. This article will talk about how to make baseball practices fun and effective.

Baseball Practice Principles:

1. You need help
2. Nobody likes lectures
3. You won’t master skills or situations in one Session
4. If you let them, kids will waste time

You Need Help

This is a fundamental principle to make baseball practices fun and effective. Regardless of the level that you coach at, you need the help of several adults to help you run practices. This means you have to be willing to give up control over some things because this is the only way you can get someone else to be enthusiastic about helping.

When I coach baseball, I script out the practices and I communicate this to all the coaches and players. I outline what each position group needs to cover today in terms of situations or skills. At the beginning of practice I will also teach any new skills or situations to the entire group. But from there I let the other coaches coach their areas.

I focus on the pitchers and catchers as this is the area that will either sink us or help us do really well. It also appeals to my background and experience. I let the other coaches focus on the outfield and infield when we have practice. For reasons that we’ll cover in a minute, it’s important to break practices up into groups and keep everyone moving and active throughout practice.

Nobody Likes Lectures

Find me an adult that enjoys sitting through long work meetings where someone is lecturing them. Young athletes are unable to benefit from lectures, they only hear about 10% of what a coach says if the coach is long winded. This means short, concise instructions and then you need to let the athletes learn by doing and making mistakes. If you spend 10-15 minutes lecturing about a skill or situation you’ve lost your team and you are going to need to reteach all through practice. Coach in sound bites.

You Won’t Master a Skill or Situation in One Session

Young athletes are not going to master a skill or a situation in one Session, it’s unrealistic to expect this. Understanding this, though, frees you up as a coach. This means you can spend 15-20 minutes covering something, knowing it will have to be seen a few more times before the athletes are good at it, and it allows you to expose athletes to several things during practice. This is much better than spending an entire practice on one skill or one situation because you’ve ignored the rest of the game.

If You Let Them, Kids Will Goof Off

If young athletes are bored or unchallenged, they will began grouping together and talking. This will lead to goofing off. This will lead to you losing the focus of your entire team. The worst thing you can do in any sports practice is to have athletes stand around while only one athlete is practicing a skill – and this happens a lot in baseball practices. Here’s an example, today we’re going to work on catching pop flies in the outfield. The entire team lines up while the coach hits pop flies to the athlete in the front of the line. So one athlete is practicing and the other eleven have nothing to do.

To avoid this, break the team up into three or four groups. For example, have an infield group that is practicing a situation. Have an outfield group, the pitchers doing work and the catchers work on their skills. After 10-15 minutes, rotate the groups. This way everyone stays busy, everyone practices skills, and everyone has a positive experience and can get better at baseball. This is also why you need help. You need someone to run each group.

So, with all of this, let’s look at how you can organize a practice to keep it fun and challenging for young athletes. Below is an outline of one of my 90 minute practices:

• I. Warm-up
  • a. Exercises (5 minutes)
  • b. Team meeting (1 minute)
• II. Situations (30 minutes)
  • a. Defending the bunt (1B, C, P)
  • b. Ground ball/pop flies in crowded situations (SS, 2B, CF)
  • c. Pop flies in foul territory (3B)
• III. Skills (30 minutes)
  • a. Catchers: throw downs, blocking drills
  • b. Pitchers: inside/outside pitches, change-ups
  • c. Outfield: pop flies and cut-offs
• IV. Hitting (20 minutes)
  • a. Pitchers pitch, catchers call the pitches
  • b. 10 pitches per batter
  • c. Scored, loser does flutter kicks
• V. Cooldown/team meeting (5 minutes)

We start off every practice warming up. We do the same exercises each Session so that eventually the team can do this without me. I then have a short meeting (“These are the things we will work today…”), I always like to explain why.

Next, we go to situations, these are three stations that run simultaneously. Since most young athletes play more than one position, we rotate between the stations every ten minutes. If something came up in a game we’ll address it here. After this we focus on skills, again we rotate the stations each ten minutes.

Finally, baseball players need to hit every practice. As a coach though, I need them used to having their peers throw to them – I also need to let the catchers and pitchers practice working together to get hitters out. So we train both things simultaneously and make it competitive, because that’s what we do in games. So, in this example we score the ten pitches:

• A walk equals a point for the batter
• A hit equals two points for the batter
• A strikeout equals three points for the pitcher

After ten pitches, the winner is the one with the most points. The loser does ten flutter kicks while the winner counts them. If the pitcher loses both the pitcher and catcher (who is calling the pitches) do the flutter kicks. This makes the entire Session competitive.

As you can see, there’s a lot going on even in 90 minutes. I don’t expect that we’ll master things in this Session, but we’ll learn, we’ll improve, we’ll be active, and we’ll have fun. If we do this, the team will get better and we’ll keep these young athletes interested in the sport for a long time!