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Written By: JK Whited
Top 5 Ways Player's Get Worse From Team Practice
With the season about to kick off here in the southern states. We wanted to highlight a few things about team practice.
The way team hitting / batting practice is organized, and the culture that is created during practice can be either very helpful or damaging to your baseball/softball player's ability to take quality swings and not feel afraid to take them.
How Do They Get Worse in Practice?
Here are just a handful of situations or batting routines that might be happening to your player at practice. If you are a coach, let's take some time to perhaps rethink how your baseball/softball team's hitting time is being used.
1. Too Much Defensive Work
Yes, this does happen! Before I get too critical on coaches and their practice plans here, it should be said that I love defense. I was a catcher my whole career and loved making defensive plays and stopping runs from scoring.
It's crucial for the outfield and infield to be able to communicate and work well together, but do we really need to skip hitting so that there can be 3 hours of bunt coverage? Especially on a play that gets ran once a year! Every baseball and softball player in the lineup will get at least two at-bats in a game. The one secret play, that never works, is not worth the time. Do the math, get some swings in.
2. Throwing Bad BP or Front Toss
One of the more frustrating things for us to see is a player that has a good swing but gets worse because his coach can't throw front toss or batting practice. It is even more frustrating when the coach who just bounced five balls in a row gets mad at the hitter for not swinging. Most young players are afraid of their coaches already and don't want to"talk back."
What Happens Next?
The player will undoubtedly start taking awful swings at awful pitches just to appease the coach. Which ruins his own practice time. Every time the coach throws a bad pitch, the player should take it. Which can even be used to the hitter and coaches benefit. If the coach continues to throw poorly, the player should then be allowed to go work off the tee. Or they can go through dry swings where they can practice good movements.
3. Batting / Pitching Machines
If you are not currently an in-person or online client of the Baseball Rebellion, it's challenging to visualize practicing a baseball/softball swing without hitting a ball. All of our clients know how to train at home with no bat, and no-ball. While having huge gains in their swing. Taking your team or player to a batting cage or even bringing in a "portable" batting machine to practice seems like a good idea in theory.
The Machine Problem
The problem with certain machines and creating a good swing occurs in the timing of the pitch. Especially if your swing has a good loading phase. For the hitter to properly execute the start of this move, they must use the load phase of the pitcher as a visual to know when to start. Since most pitching machines have zero to very little pre-release action, the hitter can struggle at getting started. Therefore throwing off their entire swing pattern. This is especially difficult for baseball and softball hitters who have just started to learn this type of movement.
We have talked about pitching machines that we like and the best ways to use them in training. Any machine that shoots the ball out without any warning is one to watch out for. These can be extremely frustrating to a hitter with movement. The ball will suddenly appear which gives it the perception as fast. However, the speed of the ball is normal to slow, causing the hitter to suddenly jump forward but then realize they are super early getting their front foot down. Unless you are very in-tuned with your body and timing, there is very little hope for consistent or powerful contact.
Keep it Simple
No baseball or softball player out there wants to look bad in front of his teammates and coaches. So they will begin to strip away movement from their swing. Ultimately the once good swing is now sliced down to a panic-induced wrist snap. Months of training and money has been wasted.
4. Situational Batting Practice ONLY
A lot like bunt coverage practice, there is a definite time and place for situation hitting practice. But often baseball and softball teams spend countless hours of hitting/batting practice time on nothing but hit-and-runs, slashes, bunting, two-strike approaches, etc. Again these are times that may only happen one or two times a game, hence the name situational.
Now if you are dedicating the opening round of batting practice to a few bunts and one or two hit-and-runs. That is one thing, but making entire rounds dedicated to hitting the ball backside on the ground can be detrimental to a good swing.
The 'Backside' Approach
In rounds like those, the hitter is forced by the demands of the coach to hit every pitch, even inside pitches, to the backside of the field. Again, the hitter, being afraid to disappoint the coach, will adopt a weak backside mentality. This is creating a slower delayed turn of the barrel to flick the ball that way. Then when the game comes around, the coach wonders why his team can't drive the ball.
The "backside approach" round can work for very specific cases of timing issues but usually not for the whole team.
5. Quick Pitching the Hitter
I chose this topic to close because it seems to be what all of my clients have in common. We spend months before the season getting their swings to be powerful and consistent. During this process, they are allowed to move freely through the entire swing then reset before the next pitch.
In this resetting time, they have they can regain their composure, think about and make adjustments, and then take another good swing.
Coaches have to remember that practice time is the hitter's time to get better. Not their time to see how many swings they can take in two minutes.
Too many of our hitters will see us during the season, after months of training, and all of a sudden they have a shorter yet weaker swings with no finish. Before they even finish their swing, they are slowing down and hopping back into their stances.
They cut out their rhythm, their forward motion, and their finish to get ready for the next pitch. Time and time again they fall victim to the "practice culture" in baseball and softball.
When they finally do take a full and aggressive swing at practice, the coach will already be throwing the next pitch before the player has a chance to reset. So when the player decides not to swing because they are not ready, they get yelled at. Now fear has been installed in the young player, and they cut down their swing to make the coach happy.
It's the Players Career, Not the Coaches
To sum it all up, I understand how difficult it is to be a coach at any level. Every level of baseball and softball has its obstacles to hurdle when it comes to practice.
Things like field time, coaching assistance, even balls can be hard to come by. I don't want this article to bash on all coaches, everywhere, who try hard to do it right. But trying hard and not knowing, are two different things. We have tons of FREE articles on here that can help you become a better coach. If more coaches took the time to improve upon some of this issue, everybody and the sports of baseball and softball would benefit.
Lastly, if one of your parents is taking a player on your team to see a professional instructor, please respect their choice to outsource their information and invest their money. Let their players focus on his or her specific goals and work on their swing regardless if you think it's right.
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Bad Drill | Batting Practice | College | High School | In-Season | Off-Season | Practice | Practice Plan | Proving Improvement | Softball | Team | Youth
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The Hack Attack and Hack Attack Jr. have an extended chute to prevent the timing issue with their pitching machines. The stock chute was simply too short. At my suggestion and request, they constructed a chute that was about 18 inches long. This chute was originally designed for cricket machines. That chute was not quite long enough. The company then constructed a 24 inch chute. That one works quite well and allows hitters to have a slower load.
The extended chute is not listed on their website, but is available for about $120.