Team going to a big event- Discussing a Plan May 18 2015, 0 Comments

Good morning Coach,


I was selected to manage a tournament/travel team of 12 year old players who are now training for our Big week long tourney and experience at Cooperstown in July 2015. Starting this Sat nite for the next 10 weeks I landed an indoor facility for which we can have indoor workouts for 90 minutes each week....I was hoping that you could provide me with some guidance in regards to how to best utilize the 90 minutes each week or provide a possible "game plan" as to what drills, how many kids in a group and how many stations I should setup.
You expert knowledge is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Coach Steve
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Dear Steve

I understand your question very much. The answer is really too long to go through here but you already have the concept of what we need to do is set up stations for hitting (soft toss, front toss, tee work, live plastic ball, live or machine pitch hitting.  Hopefully you can created of hitting drills have the first half hour to 45 minutes be the hitting. Then we need to move on to fielding drills (take away the gloves and do soft grounders, put a net at first base put everybody at shortstop take grounders to have them throw into the net like it was the first baseman, spread out all over the field have them take grounders from each other and/or their coaches, learn to throw through the target and not to it- this throwing to a target in set up short hopping everybody you have to learn to throw through it).  Then about 15 minutes spent some time on middle work how to approach the batter's box (think about your last bat think about the battered front of you think about the situation all those kinds of things before you reenter the batter's box, if your picture how you going to take to this guy that you faced take a look at how he stands, take a look at his first couple swings, make sure you know the situation with your batter and people on base. Did physically work on situations with runners on base when you do this you can accomplish two things in a time coaching the defense against runners and then coaching the runners to be aware of the situation.  This is a big deal to have runners understand- runner on third what I do, runners at first and second what do I do runners at second only what do I do, -- they have to make a decision when the balls hit in the air, when the balls it on the ground, the line drives, past balls, anything else you can think of.

This will get them ready to go to Cooperstown, which by the way is a good experience I had the privilege of umpiring there and found it quite satisfying.

Best of luck and let me know how that all works out.

Coach Arnald Swift