A Structured Guide For Youth Practices
For Athletes and Teams (9U+)
Baseball practice at the youth level should be fun
Fun baseball practices keep kids coming back. Developing skills that players need to grow in the game sets them up for success later in life.
This guide is designed to pair best with our Youth Baseball Development Certification course, as the concepts, drills and games mentioned in our guide here are explained in detail in our certification course.
Have A Plan
The best youth baseball coaches are typically also great schedulers. This guide will help that process of running a well structured, developmentally positive baseball practice.
By helping coaches think about their practices in terms of training blocks with a specific focus, you should be able to get the most bang for your buck with the limited amount of time you have to practice with your team. Generally, those training blocks at each practice will look like:
- Dynamic Warm-Up
- Throwing Warm-Up
- Throwing Block
- Hitting Warm-Up
- Hitting Block
- Competition Block
- Strength Block
Included Templates
This guide also includes two templates you can use, in practices and in games.
First is the Practice Template – you can print this out, note the specifics of each practice station you’ll be running, draw whatever stations you’re going to be running and either use the template yourself or hand it off to your other coaches. Additionally there is a scoring sheet you fill in for any games, giving your kids a gamified training environment that they will enjoy to play in.
Also, the last page of this document includes a Quality At Bat / Quality Pitching Appearance sheet for in-game tracking. Use this to track the stuff that doesn’t show up in the box score, and incentivize your youth players to value their output as much (or more) as their outcomes.
Your Free Practice Guide
Drill Details & Practice Games
Practice Design Templates and Quality At Bat / Quality Pitching Appearance tracking sheets