Practice Planning

[oneeye78]

I am an assistant on a 12U travel team. I am not happy with our head coach's practice plans. They tend to be quite loose and not very time bound. We often spend most of practice doing activities in lines where girls are waiting more than they are active. We get mired in drills and can spend 20-25% of practice on a very niche skill like base stealing. I want to make an alternative proposal, but I wanted to get input from people more experienced than me.

A few questions for the group:
1) Do you use small groups across stations to reduce wait time? Or move as a team?
2) How long do you stick with an activity?
3) How consistent are you with drills? Do you change a lot or stay consistent practice to practice?
4) What is the right mix between fundamentals and applied skills for intermediate players?

Any input on the questions above or example practice plans would be much appreciated.

 

[CoachJD]

I am an assistant on a 12U travel team. I am not happy with our head coach's practice plans. They tend to be quite loose and not very time bound. We often spend most of practice doing activities in lines where girls are waiting more than they are active. We get mired in drills and can spend 20-25% of practice on a very niche skill like base stealing. I want to make an alternative proposal, but I wanted to get input from people more experienced than me.

A few questions for the group:
1) Do you use small groups across stations to reduce wait time? Or move as a team?
2) How long do you stick with an activity?
3) How consistent are you with drills? Do you change a lot or stay consistent practice to practice?
4) What is the right mix between fundamentals and applied skills for intermediate players?

Any input on the questions above or example practice plans would be much appreciated.

1) Smaller groups when possible, but this does depend on the number of coaches available. Sometimes those groups do different things, sometimes the same thing, but with an opportunity for more reps. Some stuff we do as a full team, and some things are slower than others. You're limited by a lot of things: field, equipment, coaches, etc. Can't always be as efficient as we'd like.

2) At 12u, you probably want to keep things to around 15 minutes before you mix it up. Doesn't have to be a totally different thing, but they'll lose interest if you're just hitting infield for 45 minutes (sometimes I hit infield because it bores me to death, so I know it won't last too long because I'll just move on when I'm sick of it).

3) We have Infield/Outfield Everydays. With warmup, the first 30 or so minutes of our practice is the same every day. Sometimes I have to be creative in the cold months when we're sharing our gym/indoors and the everydays could be switched around to maximize the time we're doing stuff, but we do them every practice. Everything else can change. There is a fielding component to practice 95% of the time. We don't always hit. We probably don't hit enough, but 1) they can more easily hit on their own and 2) I'd rather lose 2-1 because the defense was great but we couldn't hit than lose 12-11 because we gave up 10 unearned runs.

4) Depends on your players, but look at it this way: Does it matter if they know all the rules, where to throw, which base to cover, where to backup in every possible situation if they can't catch a ground ball or make an accurate throw when they do catch it? A 12u team that never makes an error but knows only "throw to first after fielding ground ball" and nothing else is probably going to win almost every game. So, like, fundamentals most of the time. Another way to look at it: We criticize the pitching coaches who teach 11 year olds 7 different pitches when they can't even locate the fastball. Same idea. Why are we teaching Softball 401 when they haven't mastered 101?

 

[GIMNEPIWO]

I try to keep any activity /drill to a 15-20 minute max ... After that you start losing their attention and its counter productive ... The exception would be hitting stations where overall we spend about a half hour but there are 6 or 7 stations that they rotate through with a hitting partner.

It depends on the activity, sometimes we do smaller groups and then come together as a team, sometimes there is no need to come together and sometimes the entire team will run through it together.

A lot of time can be lost between drills if your not careful which causes more standing around... What I do is make them take everything they need for practice out of their bat bag prior to starting practice ... Hair is already up, cleats are double knotted, bat, water bottle, batting gloves, glove or mitt is all out of the bag sitting against the outside of the dugout fence ... Phone is in the bag in the dugout and turned off ... If you do a water cooler, place it so you are not creating a line in the dugout ... Between drills they have 1 minute to switch gear, hydrate and be ready to go. (Yes, I do a stop watch and whistle)

Have your basics but always throw in some new drill or activity ... Always have something fun ... If no one makes an error, if no one learns a new skill, if no one laughs during a practice; you're doing it wrong.

My 2 cents.

 

[Westwind]

I like the previous comments. Except @CoachJD blasphemy about not hitting much in practice, lol!

-Warmups should be mini-practices with plenty of hitting. Use your imagination and look for opportunities when a cage or open field presents itself. This can help expand what you have time to do at your actual practices.

-There is time between games sometimes to work on fielding stuff that keeps players busy and doesn’t run them into the ground.

-Coaches talk too much at practice. Shut up and practice. If you have something to say, say it and move on. They aren’t listening if you are talking in paragraph size sound bites.

 

[CoachJD]

I like the previous comments. Except @CoachJD blasphemy about not hitting much in practice, lol!

I would like to hit a little bit more than we do, but not that much. It's not that I don't think it's important. We just play at a level where the pitching is rarely dominant and most of our losses happen because of bad defense. Our hitters are not great hitters, but they're good enough. The defense (and base running) often is not.

I am also the only coach who can pitch front toss. So those hitting days have to be days I don't need to be available to do anything else. I don't have our pitchers pitch BP to our hitters.

But a lot of it is what offends my softball sensibilities. I don't get upset watching bad hitting. Watching our defense can make blood shoot out of my eyes sometimes.

 

[radness]

I would like to hit a little bit more than we do, but not that much. It's not that I don't think it's important. We just play at a level where the pitching is rarely dominant and most of our losses happen because of bad defense. Our hitters are not great hitters, but they're good enough. The defense (and base running) often is not.

I am also the only coach who can pitch front toss.

sad coaches need a skills clinic LOL

So those hitting days have to be days I don't need to be available to do anything else. I don't have our pitchers pitch BP to our hitters.

But a lot of it is what offends my softball sensibilities. I don't get upset watching bad hitting. Watching our defense can make blood shoot out of my eyes sometimes.

What is the errors count vs. Runs scored?

 

[Sparky Guy]

I am an assistant on a 12U travel team. I am not happy with our head coach's practice plans. They tend to be quite loose and not very time bound. We often spend most of practice doing activities in lines where girls are waiting more than they are active. We get mired in drills and can spend 20-25% of practice on a very niche skill like base stealing. I want to make an alternative proposal, but I wanted to get input from people more experienced than me.

A few questions for the group:
1) Do you use small groups across stations to reduce wait time? Or move as a team?
2) How long do you stick with an activity?
3) How consistent are you with drills? Do you change a lot or stay consistent practice to practice?
4) What is the right mix between fundamentals and applied skills for intermediate players?

Any input on the questions above or example practice plans would be much appreciated.

It sounds like your HC knows what they're doing. At 12U with an intermediate team you need to work on fundamentals. You can not schedule how much time is needed for a team to learn a particular skill.
I have a list of about 75-80 different and individual skills needed to play the game of softball. When I plan a practice I pick 3 things to work on at practice. We work on a skill until all the kids are performing it correctly. There are some days when we'll only work 2 things depending on the kids and how fast they pick things up. You can not teach kids to correctly play the game while looking at your watch. If they don't have the fundamentals down then it makes for very poor full-team integrated activities. An ideal practice is when we get 3 things covered and then have time to work on team related things as well.

If I do hitting. The entire practice is devoted to hitting. If you're going to teach team things such as bunt coverage, cutoffs and run downs you need to devote practices to those activities.

Pitchers need to work on their own away from the team. They work with the team when you're doing live hitting. You don't send a pitcher to a cage to become a human pitching machine. Hitters don't see 15 pitches from the pitcher. Hitters get an at bat. Just like in a game.

Catching skills need to be worked on separately as well.

There are no "niche" skills in the game.

Try to simulate game conditions in as many activities as you can during practice. Put pressure on them so the get comfortable with it at practice and it's second nature in a game.

 

[GunnerShotgun]

I like the previous comments. Except @CoachJD blasphemy about not hitting much in practice, lol!

Team hitting is one of the worst ROI in all of sports practices that I can think of. Spend more time on baserunning and defending baserunning if you want to win at a high level.

 

[CoachJD]

sad coaches need a skills clinic LOL



What is the errors count vs. Runs scored?

I have tried to teach my DW the basics of pitching just so she can pitch effective front toss. It didn't take.

For last year, our offense scored 181 runs in 17 games. The quality of pitching can be suspect. We had 122 hits and 101 walks. I don't track how many of the runs we scored on offense were earned vs unearned, but we certainly benefit from the other teams' bad defense plenty.

We gave up 152 runs, but only 76 earned. And that doesn't include the earned runs on plays that should've been made, mental mistakes, etc. All those plays we've discussed where you think they should be errors (and they ARE bad plays, but not technically errors from a scoring standpoint).

 

[CoachJD]

Team hitting is one of the worst ROI in all of sports practices that I can think of. Spend more time on baserunning and defending baserunning if you want to win at a high level.

Depends what you mean by "team hitting." Indoors we'll do team hitting where we have a bunch of stations so players stay busy, but I think you mean the "one person hits, everybody else stands around in the field" kind. We never do that. I did it once or twice early on when I coached, but I remembered that I hated those practices when I was a kid. They were boring. We didn't learn anything. We didn't do anything.

When we hit outdoors, I take 2-3 players and pitch to them. The rest of the team works on something else with the other coaches. And we rotate through until I get to everyone