By Lorraine Berry
Lorraine Berry is an Assistant Editor at Coaching Management.
Coaching Management, 9.1, February 2001, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/cm/cm0901/blahs.htm
In a perfect world, kids would show up for baseball practice every day as if they were getting ready to play in the World Series—prepared to give 110 percent, no questions asked. It would make your job as coach a lot easier. You would simply tick off a list of drills to the assembled players and then sit back and watch as they put themselves through their paces.
Instead, what you see before you today is a group of players who are down in the mouth about getting beat yesterday. They need some practice drills that will reignite their appreciation for the game and restore confidence in their abilities. In other words, today, what these kids need is to have some fun.
Does that mean that you now have to spend two hours doing a bunch of goofy activities designed to get smiles out of your players? Not according to a number of coaches who have found ways to liven up practice. A fun drill, they say, is one where the athletes are motivated and learning. And a whole host of techniques can be used to get them engaged.
What Makes Practice Boring?
According to these coaches, the key to making baseball practice more fun is to eliminate the boring drills. That seems obvious. But, it’s important to understand that what makes a drill boring is not its repetition or its simplicity. It is, rather, when a player does not feel that he is getting anything out of the drill.
“Athletes have fun when they see their time spent as worthwhile,” says Bernie Walter, Head Coach and Athletic Director at Arundel High School in Gambrills, Md. “It’s only worth it to spend time with you if they can learn what they need to learn. If not, they’re not going to do it.”
Consequently, Walter suggests evaluating practice to determine what it is you’re trying to teach in each situation. By doing so, a coach may discover that some common components of practice are unlikely to ever come up in a game, and as a result, are a waste of an athlete’s time.
“For example, think about a simple thing like working on infield-outfield practice by hitting the ground ball to the left fielder and having him throw to second base,” says Walter. “The reason that you throw to second base is to keep the batter from getting to second base. But, if the ball is hit directly to the left fielder, the batter is never going to run to second base anyway. So, hitting that ball directly to the left fielder is a waste of that kid’s time. But, if you hit it down the line, where a runner might try to run to second base and make a double off a play, it is challenging and worthwhile for the outfielder to work hard to quickly make the accurate throw to second.”
Another problem that contributes to boring practices is not accounting for the various skill levels on a team. Lower-skilled players and higher-skilled players need to have drills tailored to their abilities so that they’re challenged. What this means, according to Walter, is that a coach has to spend time before practice determining the needs of each of his players.
“A coach diagnoses a problem just like a doctor diagnoses a problem,” Walter says. “You don’t treat everybody with an aspirin.
“If you have kids working on hitting skills, and they’re low-skilled,” Walter continues, “you might have to go back and give them 10 minutes of dry swings, while other kids might be given more difficult batting situations. But, you don’t teach everyone the same thing. If you do that, you’re doing your players an injustice.”
Not In the Mood?
Another contributing factor to ineffective practices can simply be the mood of a team when it shows up. Coaches recommend altering practice plans if players seem lackluster that day. For example, Brian Priebe, former Assistant Coach at the University of California-San Diego, says that there may be several occasions where throwing in some fun drills may be necessary. “I wouldn’t use these drills at every practice,” he says. “Some of the more special fun drills should be used selectively so they remain special, otherwise they lose their magic.
“But, there are some situations where I would recommend fun drills,” he continues. “One is to reward a great performance—fun drills are an excellent way to pat the players on the back for a job well done. Or, I would use fun drills to help forget a bad loss—they can help players snap out of their funk and put the loss behind them.”
Inventive drills can also be used on those days when players are either mentally or physically tired. Mike Napoleon, Head Coach at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill., says that such low days are normal. “Everybody has those days,” he says. “It’s just human nature: People can’t be energetic all the time.” To lift his team’s mood, Napoleon spends a great deal of time designing practices that will engage his players—catering to individual skills and appealing to his players’ love of competition.
That love of competition among his players is also how Rich Hofman, Head Coach at Westminster Academy in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., livens up his practices. “My athletes certainly like competitive exercises that make practice more interesting for them,” he says. “So what we try to do in our practices is put a competitive edge to drills, and that gets their juices flowing.”
Drills You Can Use
A number of coaches were willing to share some of the drills that make their practices more lively. Some involve teaching fundamentals, while others focus on game situations. Most have a competitive component to them to keep players interested.
Hitting Practice
• Round of Eight. Hofman likes to challenge his players’ hitting skills by attaching a point value to every swing. “During batting practice, we do a round of eight different things,” he says. “Let’s say the first round is a bunting situation. If the player executes the bunt properly, he gets a point. If he doesn’t bunt the runner over, or if he fails one way or the other, he gets a minus one. Each minus at the end of the day results in running the foul poles—one foul pole to the other—which has to be done in 20 seconds or they have to run extra lengths.”
• Directed Batting Drill. Napoleon has two versions of this drill, which feeds off his players’ love for taking as many swings as possible. “We’ll start out each player with two simple sacrifice bunts—one down the first base line and one down the third base line,” Napoleon says. “If he gets two successful bunts in two pitches, he gets an extra two swings. If he doesn’t, he just gets his normal five swings.
“In the second version,” he continues, “each player has 10 swings, but each swing is a situation dictated by the coach. For example, when the situation calls for a hit-and-run to the right side, if the player hits the ball successfully that way, he gets an extra swing in batting practice. If he misses, he needs to keep repeating that particular swing until he gets it. Some players will take up their entire 10 swings trying to get there, which lets them know they need to go into the cage and work on something specific.”
• Sacrifice Fly Derby. Priebe likes this drill because it reinforces the sometimes-overlooked skill of scoring a runner with a fly ball. “Conduct a home run derby on a field with a short fence,” he says. “This hones players’ talents for hitting sacrifice flies to drive in a runner from third base.”
• The Continuation Drill. Coach Marty Schupak, author of “The 59-Minute Baseball Practice” video and a veteran youth coach, relies on this fast-moving drill to teach his players that ground balls and line drives produce hits, not pop ups. “Divide the players in half, and put one team at bat,” he says. “The first batter stays up if he hits a ground ball, a line drive, or fly that drops before being caught. The batter continues hitting until he has hit five ground balls, then his team gets a run. This goes quickly so we play four outs a game, but coaches can adjust this drill any way they want.
“The biggest benefit is evident in a game when a batter has two strikes on him. I yell from the third base coaching box, ‘Come on, John—Continuation Drill!’ And the batter is really conditioned from the drill just to make contact. It really works wonders.”
Bunting Drills
• Egg Bunting. Schupak uses a common food item to help hone his players’ bunting skills. “Put a clear plastic tarp around home plate,” he explains. “Take two dozen eggs, placing each egg where a coach would expect a player to lay down a bunt. Each player takes three bunts. For each egg he breaks, he gets an extra swing in batting practice. This was one of the most successful drills I did—the players couldn’t care less about the extra swings, they just wanted to scramble the eggs. Our bunting picked up from that point on.”
• Four Corner Bunting. Napoleon has two versions of this drill, which can be done during indoor practice in a gym. “This works the drag bunt, push bunt, sacrifice bunt, and suicide bunt—each at a separate station,” he says. “We break our position players into four groups of four and put a group into each corner of the gym. One kid pitchers, one hits, one plays ‘catcher,’ and the fourth fields. To start, each pitcher lobs it to his batter; after he gets the bunt down, he sprints to the next station with the bat. But now that group’s pitcher is trying to get out the hitter by throwing a strike. If the hitter gets down the bunt or doesn’t swing at a ball, his team gets a point. After he gets down the bunt, he runs to the next station. They keep track of how many times they’re successful at it.”
The second version adds the wrinkle of having the players trying to bunt the ball into a bucket laid down on the floor. “They get two points if they put it in the bucket, two points if they hit the back end of the bucket, one point if it’s just outside where the fielder is— whether it’s fair or foul doesn’t matter, since on the field it will probably stay fair. Each player can get a total of eight points if he successfully makes all four types of bunts. The winners continue to bunt, the losers do 25 up-down sprints.”
Fielding and Running Drills
• Throwing Accuracy Drill. Working with a partner, Napoleon has each player throw the ball at a specific target, which is usually the partner’s mitt placed in front of his face. “He gets five points if he hits his partner in the hat—that is, if his partner doesn’t have to move his mitt to catch the ball,” says Napoleon. “He gets three points if it’s in the chest; one point if his partner just has to move his mitt from an arm’s distance away. So, in this way, we have a throwing contest to see who gets the most points.”
• Competition Running. Priebe splits the team into two groups to hone base-running speed. “Divide up your team evenly, with half at second base and half at home plate,” he explains. “A player from each group races at the same time halfway around the bases. The first player to reach the other group scores a point for his team.”
• Glove Hacky-Sack. Priebe builds his players’ eye-hand coordination with this fun drill. “Divide the team into groups of four or five,” he says. “Arrange each group in a circle facing inward and give each a baseball. The object is to see which group can keep the ball suspended off the ground for as long as possible. No player can catch or hold the ball; the ball must be passed back and forth among the players in the circle. The player can only touch the ball with his glove.”
• Circuit Training Practice. Napoleon likes to make practices as entertaining and informative as possible, which means keeping everyone busy. “I can’t stand watching kids not doing something,” he says. “So if we have 25 kids on our team, we’ll have 25 stations.
“When we do our hitting, we involve hitting, base running, fielding, tossing the ball so your partner can hit—each skill has a station. So we’ll say ‘25 station hitting, Go!’ and they’ll all run to their stations. They have to set them up first, but they always set up on the same spot—usually the juniors have to get the screens out, the seniors go to hit first. We’ll have one kid hitting and another pitching to him—that would be a station where the thrower has to learn to be accurate. After he hits, he goes to the next station, which would be base running from first to second, and then from second to third, third to home. Then he’d grab his mitt and go to the outfield for three spots, so he’s always doing something.
“Sometimes, we’ll go two-and-a-half minutes a station, sometimes we’ll go 90 seconds. It’s a giant circuit training.”
A copy of Marty Schupak’s video on drills can be ordered at . For a look at an article by Coach Priebe published in Baseball Parent magazine, go to http://members.aol.com/coachprieb/fun.htm.