We want to build a hitting culture where great hitters thrive. A good hitting coach teaches good hitting principles every day.
Take 3-5 minutes each day to talk about and demonstrate good hitting principles Teach good hitting and give them super fun drills. Then they will go home and want to hit more.
Make hitting so much fun that your player goes home and BEGS his parents to pitch to them.
Make hitting so much fun that they go home and practice on their own.
Encourage them to videotape their swing and critique it themselves.
Tell parents what you are teaching so they can have intelligent hitting conversations with their child.
This plan engages players and helps them develop passion for the game. Passion means it’s fun for them.
They want to do it more because it’s fun and rewarding.
Coaches must demonstrate a good swing.
As a coach, hitters need to see you demonstrate good hitting mechanics every day.
Learn about what movement all good hitters do, then practice them yourself.
If you cant show them, how will they learn? Many kids are primarily visual learners.
Visual learning is very important. If you not only talk about good hitting, but model it for them every day, they will improve much faster.
Hitters need repetition. Have a number of swings in mind for your practices. 100 or 150 are good goals to shoot for daily.
Have drills planned for your practice to reach the repetition goals.
100 swings doesn’t take as long as you think.
If you take a swing every 6 seconds you can get 100 swings in 10 minutes. We want this broken up throughout a practice but you get the idea
Hitters need ability appropriate drills where they can have success.
Do NOT let them fail 50 times in a row. No one learns like that. Get them in a drill where they can have success. Then build on it.
The formula for building good hitters is success, success, success, failure. The 3 successes give them confidence. The one failure gives them humility to keep learning and improving.
Hitting Basics
- Approach — what you are trying to accomplish, the plan.
- Timing — the skill of being on time with your swing to hit the ball.
- Mechanics — the necessary knowledge of what body part does what in a good swing.
Always in that order. Approach is most important. It’s the goal, the end destination. Something to aim for.
Timing is next because without it you will never hit the ball. A perfect mechanical swing is worthless with poor timing.
Mechanics is last, but still very important. Hitters need to learn proper mechanics of the swing so they can make good adjustments.
How to improve timing
Batters need to see hundreds of pitches from many different sources to develop great timing. Live pitching is good but we are often limited on how much a pitcher can pitch live to a hitter.
The calculation in a hitters brain about how to be on time with the bat is something you can’t teach. However you can put them into many different situations where they can learn it faster.
Anytime there is a ball coming at the hitter in the air he is working on the timing of the swing.
When the ball is on the tee they are not working on timing.
Make good adjustments at the plate
Everything we teach players about hitting needs to have the goal of teaching them to make better adjustments. All the necessary clutter is about hitting mechanics and the mental game is about giving them tools to hit.
Things go wrong for hitters no matter what. Every hitter will strike out, pop up or ground out. If they know their swing inside and out, they will know exactly what went wrong and make a great adjustment for the next at-bat.
If they don’t know their swing they will still make an adjustment. But it probably won’t be a good adjustment. They will make a bad correction and things will start to go down hill. This is how slumps start.
Hitters that make great adjustments are rarely in any sort of slump. They might have slight ups and downs but with great adjustments come consistent swings at good pitches to hit.
Vision— to hit the ball you have to see it
In the stance we want a level head that is squared up to the pitcher. This will feel awkward to the hitter at first. Many hitters will want to tilt their head and have it turned toward home plate.
We want the head PERFECTLY squared up with the pitcher and the incoming ball. Your best vision is straight in front of your head, not your peripheral vision and eyes level.
Ear drill- have a coach or pitcher stand where the pitcher would be. For a right handed batter we want the pitcher to see the batters right ear. If you can see the back ear his head it turned. The eyes will always be level if you can see the back ear.
Have hitters get into this stance with many different drills like tee hitting, soft toss and short toss.
Have a plan for teaching hitters to hit to all fields
- teach them what opposite field and pull side are
- always start drills with opposite field hitting, its the hardest
Make a list of at least 10 guest batting practice throwers you can invite to a practice. Kids need to hit live pitches. The more bp throwers you can have the better. Encourage parents and assistant coaches to develop their bp throwing skills.
When helping your athletes learn to hit, having access to a great bp thrower is very important.
Hitting is timing, Pitching is upsetting timing.
Talk about Clutter and Clarity
The clutter is all of the little things hitters need to know to make good adjustments as a hitter.
The clarity is when you are hitting a pitch, you ONLY think about see the ball, hit the ball. No mechanics.
The clutter is becomes instinct or muscle memory when hitting a pitch.
Get good at flipping the switch from clutter to clarity when hitting a pitch.
Intent swings: hitters need to work on faster bat swings every time they hit.
Efficient swings come somewhat naturally as bat speed increases.
Teach players where the sweet spot is on the bat.
Teach the 3 goals of every swing. Have every player memorize these 3 goals. This is the basis for every hitting approach
- hit the ball on the sweet spot of the bat.
- the fastest bat possible in that situation
- low to high line drives to all fields
Hitting is about putting face into the ground efficiently to produce force with the bat.
Put hitters into drills where they need to use their bodies efficiently to produce maximum force. This makes them more efficient movers and gets them stronger.
- Medicine ball throws
- bat tug of war
- Jumping
- sprinting
- partner pushing contests
- long toss
Hitting Drills for power development
- tee hitting for distance. measure how far the hitter can hit the ball over the outfield fence from a tee. Improve on that number throughout the year.
- hit sand filled heavy balls off the tee and pitch.
- hit basketballs off the tee.
- Underweight bat hitting drills for speed. Wiffle ball bat or a lighter metal bat.
- Radar gun tee hitting. measure the speed of the ball off the tee and look to improve that number throughout the year
- Daily intent swings. Don’t worry about perfect mechanics, only try to swing faster
Hitting Drills
Soft Toss
- recruit parents and assistant coaches to get really good at soft toss
- throw outside tosses that are deeper on the plate where the hitter drives the ball to opposite field
- throw middle tosses that are in the middle to slightly out front of the plate where the hitter drives the ball up the middle
- throw inside tosses where the hitter drives the ball to the pull side
Short Toss
- with an L screen, toss the hitter pitches underhand or overhand
- throw the ball to specific locations and have the hitter go with the pitch
- hit inside pitches to pull side
- hit middle pithes up the middle
- hit outside pitches to the opposite field
Field Hitting Drills
- Tee Home Run Hitting
- set up a tee in the outfield and hit a ball over the fence
- keep moving back until the hitter cant hit the ball over the fence
- measure and record the farthest distance and try to improve throughout the season
- PVC pipe on the shoulders
- set up with the PVC higher on the back shoulder
- load, stride making sure the back shoulder is still higher at front foot landing
- turn the back shoulder in sequence with the stride and load to the contact point
- Wiffle ball home run hitting with the big bat
- in the outfield have a home plate, several buckets of wiffle balls and different sizes of wiffle ball bats
- using soft toss and pitches, hit home runs over the fence to all fields, Pull side, middle and opposite field
- Basketball Tee hitting
- hit basketballs off the tee to all fields
- Weighted ball hitting
- using an underhand toss, pitch the hitters weighted balls
- Dry swing station
- have a hitting principle for the day that hitters can practice
- all hitters at this station will have a home plate to work from
- Batting Practice