Practices

Yes! It’s the first day of practice and you are pumped! You’re going to meet a bunch of 6-9 year olds, learn all of their names the first time around, and proceed to have a perfect practice like you’ve been imagining for the last few weeks. Right? Hell no! Your sense of time will be completely off, all these new kids will have a wide array of attention spans and baseball knowledge (some won’t know a single thing about baseball, evidenced by wearing their glove on their wrong hand). Just to get them in a group meeting will take longer than you expected and they will tell you what they did in class because, well, they’re kids! The first routine will not go as planned. You’ll do more running around than you’re used to and at the very end you’ll be questioning your life’s decisions.

These things will most likely happen for a new coach. There are things that I learned and want to pass along to you so that you have a good set of expectations for your first practice.

Be patient

12-16 kids on your youth baseball team can be overwhelming especially if you’ve never been in a space like that before. So be patient. Before every practice, just tell yourself to take your time and adapt to the environment. They won’t listen the first time, almost guaranteed. But that’s not a good reason to bring the smackdown on them. The quickest way for kids to drop out of anything is if their coach or mentor is frustrated with them. Often times, a good warm up is what it takes to get a lot of the jiggles out.

Pro tip: you can do a warm up at any point during practice to get the kids doing something in unison.

Have a plan

Come to practice ready for what the players have in store for you. They might be all over the place or razor sharp with attention spans. They might be tired or super full of energy. These scenarios might be hard to manage, but if you’re patient and have a practice plan, you will be able to get through practice while keeping yourself sane and the players enjoying themselves.

Creating a practice plan will allow you to quickly organize your players on the field. Go over this plan with your assistant coaches so that they can help you transition. Keep in mind how much time you’re spending on each activity and make sure not to rush.

Pro tip: plan water breaks between activities so that you and your coaches can set up the field and go over any last minute details. When the players are ready, you will be too.

Have a few practice stations

I want to point out that we need to teach our young players how to play baseball and part of baseball is the game between pitches. So DON’T cater to their short attention spans, and also don’t have them standing in right field waiting for the ball to come to them while doing infield practice. Break the players up into small groups so they can do a lot of the same thing while not waiting too long between turns. Think many reps in a long period of time.

Establish groups that can rotate within a practice. If you have 12 players, then you can have three sets of 4 of two sets of 6. I like using 4, 4 and 4 because the the infield has 4 (not including pitcher/catcher) and the outfield will have 4. The other set of 4 can be base runners, or go over pitching. Now you have a practice where 4 kids are doing infield for 15 minutes, outfield for 15 minutes, pitching for 15 minutes, then you rotate them 3 times. That’s half of your practice right there and the players would have done a lot.

You can do the same for offense. 4, 4 and 4:

• 4 kids hitting a ball into the net. You can do T practice here. T allows you to position the ball where you want it to be. Or let them throw the ball up and hit it into the net. This particular hitting helps with timing, quickness and hand/eye coordination.
• 4 kids with coach pitching batting practice. Make sure you are not throwing from too high (if you’re a tall coach). Let the kids have about 20 good swings each.
• 4 players in the field to recover the ball. Have them throw to first or turn two if you are at that point in the season.

There are plenty of other scenarios to dream up, but getting them to play like this keeps them interested for long periods of time which is fun and lets them feel like they’re working on a lot of things.

Conclusion

So being prepared with a practice plan, giving yourself space to be patient, and creating small group yet long periods of practice will allow your practice to run as smoothly as possible while keeping everyone interested. Your first day might feel like a disaster (or not), but keeping to these ideals will allow your practice to be fun for all who are there.