Really fun to type coaching little league into Google and you get an AI response. I thought it’d be fun to sort of give my thoughts on the whole response.
Essential Coaching Strategies — Use Station Work:
Divide players into small groups of three or four instead of full-field drills to keep everyone active and reduce behavioral downtime.
Thoughts: This one is great and for younger kids like T-ball think about stations with just 1-2 players. The more stations the better. Note that this requires you to do useful work on a patch of grass or the area around a base. This means you have to really think about drills instead of just sort of coming up with a light version of baseball that takes the whole field. I have a bunch of drills on this site that work fine with a small patch of grass — or just portions of the infield.
Enlist Parent Volunteers: “Voluntell” parents to help supervise stations so you can run multiple activities simultaneously.
Thoughts: I’m not sure I like Voluntell — I think it’s more like “sell them on why it’s important.” Ordering parents to show up won’t make for a great coach-parent experience. They have to WANT to come, but tell them how helpful they will be and how much better practice will be if they come and help.
Keep It Simple: Focus on basic fundamentals like the four-seam grip, athletic stances, and making routine plays rather than overloading players with complex mechanics.
Thoughts: Well some kids don’t have fingers long enough to even do a four seam grip. I vote for showing fundamentals that cover the whole game. Like being BALANCED — you need that for EVERYTHING in baseball. Routine plays are critical advice — you don’t need to do anything fancy to win LOTS of games. Throw strikes, don’t make errors — the wins will pile up. Do trick plays, lose your focus sweating about edge cases — weird occurrences — and you’ll lose more than you win and your players won’t learn what’s important. The best part of all this advice was to FOCUS on FUNDAMENTALS.
Prioritize Fun: Turn drills into friendly competitions and end every practice with a game to keep players engaged and excited to return.
Thoughts: Well sure if it’s fun kids will do it. The hard part is that baseball isn’t much fun until you succeed at things. Missing every ball thrown to you is NOT FUN. So start with tennis balls from close up — start with giant balls — do anything to generate success. Celebrate it and move on. Same for hitting — live off the T — as kids can always hit a non-moving ball and it’s FUN. Competitions? Well sure, but be careful. A lot of competitions mean losers sit out and miss reps, which is a bad idea. Also kids get irked if you don’t score everything perfectly and then you are the great judge in some silly game where you were just trying to have fun and some kid is in tears because he/she lost the competition that you didn’t care about anyway. So be careful when you do this, but it can be a good thing.
So what else? Hmmmmm, the advice didn’t cover how to COMMUNICATE with PLAYERS. Get on one knee so you aren’t towering over them, tire them out a little before you talk — do some running drill — I always like wide receiver to start a LOT of practices (see the web site under drills) so then they are a little tired and that sort of helps them focus. If you are trying to talk to elementary school kids after a long day of sitting down in school and being told what to do and which end is up all day —- well good luck. They’ll lose attention and nothing is gonna go well. So let them run some, do some stretches and then maybe 30 seconds of speech. So what’s the speech — well you can talk about how EFFORT is the one thing the players can always control. And how the ones who give real effort in practice are the ones who are going to be pitching and all that. Tell them you aren’t judging them by talent, but you are judging by effort and you want to see it all the time. Effort means working at home — throwing a ball to yourself, doing everything you can to get better all by yourself. My best kids in my mind are the ones who gave the effort.
If any of this struck a chord with you, sign up for the newsletter — I go deeper on all of it, from station drills to that wide receiver drill, every week.
