Baseball League Development

Players can develop better athletic skills with every baseball or softball practice. These fundamental human movement skills are the base of every skill in baseball.

Give your players progressions and regressions. Assess where they are now. Give them repetitions at their current skill level. Give them something slightly harder that what they can currently do. Push them.

When kids have mastery of fundamental human movements they usually find a lot of success with any activity they try. 

Often when a young player struggles to learn the skills of the game, they also struggle with fundamental human movements. 

To catch a ball with a glove, you first have to be able to catch a tennis ball with the barehand.

To sprint over and catch a fly ball. first you have to be able to get into a loaded up athletic position, accelerate and run towards where the ball will be.

To swing a bat with speed, first you must be able to efficiently put force into the ground to do various strength activities.  

Hip Hinge

Always start your athletic development with learning a great hip hinge.  Without the hip hinge it’s impossible to load up the body and do anything athletic.

Drill

  1. Stand facing away from a wall of fence, have your heels about 1 foot aways from the wall.
  2. Push your hips back while slightly bending your knees until your butt touches the wall. 
  3. When it touches the wall extend back up to a tall standing position.
  4. When learning the hip hinge, most kids use faulty movement patterns and simply go down.  This bends the knees but does not load the 
  5. hips properly.  They will also compensate by rounding their back in an effort to get lower.
  6. Make sure the back stays in a neutral position.  Watch for flexing and extending the back.

Athletic Position

Once they can hip hinge well they can start learning the athletic position. 

From the athletic position we hit, throw and field. It is important for anything we do on the field. If kids get themselves into a great athletic position every part of their game will improve.

Drill

  1. Feet double shoulder width apart
  2. feet straight ahead, not pointed out.  If you say “feet straight” about 1000 times per practice thats great coaching.
  3. hips hinged, butt pushed back, NOT down
  4. knees slightly bent, not a squat 
  5. spine neutral and chest up
  6. hands up in front of the chest and ready

Spinal Posture    

Teach and talk about spinal posture every day. Everything athletic starts at the spine and works out.

  1. Flexion —  rounded over back
  2. Extension — chest up extended back
  3. Neutral —  good posture not extended or flexed

In the warm-up they can wok on many of these athletic skills

  1. Jumping
    • one leg
    • two leg.
  2. Crawling:
    • bear crawl
      • forward
      • backward
      • lateral
  3. Skipping        
    • forward
    • backward
    • long jump skill
    • high knee skip
    • high jump skip
  4. Lateral movement
    • Heiden jumps
    • shuffling
  5. Pushing
    • sled push
    • football blocking 
  6. Pulling
    • think tug of war
  7. Hip hinge
    • push the butt back not down
  8. Squat
    • feet straight ahead, knees pushed out
  9. Lunge
    • front
    • side (lateral)
    • reverse
  10. Catching
    • catch many different balls in many different positions
  11. Throwing
    • throw all kinds of objects
  12. Running
    • have them race other teammates multiple times per practice
  13. Decelerating