- Feb 15, 2017
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I love these. Good discount on Amazon for a dozen, too. Mine have lasted well for a few years.
Another vote - love TCB whiffles. Easy to throw, realistic feel/flight and no concerns about composite bat damage.
I love these. Good discount on Amazon for a dozen, too. Mine have lasted well for a few years.
Don’t spend good money on practice balls! (Not talking about the TCBs or specialized balls.)
Contact other teams or local programs ... they likely have buckets of balls coming out of their ears and they would gladly part with them at a reasonable price.
Update*** to wrap the thread.
The biggest issue we face as a high school program is that we only have one field and we have three teams... Freshman, JV and Varsity. One of our main goals this year is to group the players into positions and have a rotating station based practice. We pretty much need to reduce the number of players on the field at one time. With that in mind we submitted our order a week or so ago.
- We ended up buying one junior hack attack pitching machine. We have two one-wheel jugs pitching machines already. Have the hack attack will hopefully increase pace of infield and outfield practice. It also throws different pitch types which we will hopefully grow into recognizing as a program. It also allows the other machines to be used in different areas during practice.
- 3 batters box mats. This will help hitting stations move off the foul lines and off the field as we have gravel around the outside of the field and no grass.
- 6 Louisville Xeno X20 bats 30 and 29 inch. None of our players own their own bats and our AD and district athletic office have ordered 33 and 34 inch bats which only a few of the girls can swing.
- 15 dozen Dudley softballs. Since these are leather covered and not synthetic, we can use all of them in the machines after they make their way from being game and warm up balls. We have a ton of limited flight synthetic covered balls which we use for BP but we are still developing our pitchers so they aren't as accurate as a machine.
- 10 13 inch softball gloves. Just like bats, some of our athletes do not have the means of buying a glove, so now we can add these to our stock of gloves to borrow.
- 3 Designated Hitter dummies. These will be used as stand Ina for our pitchers while they develop their pitching skills. I have taken a lot of time to learn how to teach/coach girls that want to learn to pitch (Bill Hillhouse DVD's). After last year I knew our teams/program would not be competitive if we didn't have girls that could pitch to the glove instead of the backstop. We started back in early October, and we have a group of girls that have improved tons.
10 Jegur J-bands. We needed tension bands for player warms ups as well as some shoulder workouts.
- We also purchased our baseball program new bases, J-bands and hitting mats.
This grant from the Diamondbacks as well as district funding gave us a grand total near $20,000 in new equipment this year alone. The district funding purchased 3 power line pitching mats, 4 more Tanner tees, fencing sleeve upgrades as our current fence is not permanent, new bases for games, 8 new bats of the same model as I mentioned above, 2 wheeled ball carts so we don't need to refill 5 gallon buckets all the time, 3 batters box mats like above, 6 dozen standard and mini TCB wiffle ball style balls to add to our collection already and cosmetic yellow fence capping.
I'm sure there will be disagreement with how the funds were spent, but this will obviously improve our practice efficiency this year. Unfortunately we aren't able to pay other coaches, so we weren't able to 'save' any of the funds.
Thanks for all the advice.
drooling and jealous
how many baseball fields are there. if they have ore than one, fight them based on TITLE IX. if baseball has a varisty and JV field, then they need to do same for softballha. I don’t know if I’d be jealous. We do have a solid amount of equipment but having one field and limited space is very difficult.