baseball practices

Question
i need some help on running my practices. kids seem to get boerd. 9 & 10 year olds. if you have a format or plan please let me know. drills etc....

Answer
I usually recommend focusing on defensive skills rather than batting practice. The reason is twofold: First, kids can work on hitting at the batting cages (but see below for further info on that point). Second, defense requires the whole team to be there, which of course is the case at practices.

You can split your players into groups depending on their primary positions, and if you have more than one coach, one can hit fly balls to the outfielders, one can hit to the infielders, and pitchers/catchers can get together to work on their skills.

One drill that's good is to put all the players in their positions, call out a scenario, then randomly hit the ball to different parts of the field and have the kids play it out. This keeps them all involved since they don't know where the ball will be hit, and also works on their mental skills as well (if the ball is hit to me, what do I do?).

Back to the idea of team batting practice. The problem with the way most coached run this is that all the players stand around in the field, while one kid tries to hit lollipop pitches to see how far he can hit it. There's a couple of problems with this approach. The kids in the field get bored out of their minds, especially if they don't happen to be standing where the ball is being hit (IF it's being hit). And the batter doesn't get much out of it either, because even if he can hit slow batting practice style pitches, he then gets into a game and is often surprised when he sees full speed pitching. For these reasons, if you're going to run team batting practice (and you should from time to time), make it live pitching against one of your pitchers. That way both get used to game situations. Also, have the player take a limited number of swings, and the last one they should play it out.

Of course, there are lots of other things to work on as well, but hopefully this will give you some ideas to work with.

Mike F.