Building a U14 team from scratch

Fall Ball Recap

From my recap with coaches:

Strengths:
Pitching – Solid 1,2 & 3 plus development candidates
Hitting leaders – Our 2 experienced select players Avg .667
Speed - 2 players
Good team chemistry
Coaches (female )
Families
Athletic team with big upside

Weaknesses:
Batting – Discipline, reaction, bat speed, bat choice
Throwing – improving - 2 CS in week 4!
Infield – Glove down, left and right
Outfield – Angles, drop step
Catchers – blocking, throws, field leadership, Drops (inc 3rd K)
1B – Ball then bag, 2 hand catches, glove position
Coaches learning select “on-the-fly”

Errors that allowed batters to get on where as follows for 10 games:
Catcher - 4 (all drop 3rd strikes)
1B - 4
P - 4
3B - 3
CF - 2
SS - 2
2B - 1

Current Update

We added 1 player to get back to 11. We had some inquires and some outreach so we decided to have a mini-tryout at one of our practices before the last Fall Ball game. The addition is another LL player from the summer, we will look to develop her as a pitcher, infielder and catcher as she has skills for both.

We started practicing indoors 1 day per week in early November. Our indoor progression is as follows:
Dynamic warm-up
Throwing progression
Hitting stations (100 swings each)
Pitchers and Catchers

Starting in January we will add time in the GYM, I have some thoughts and would be interested in feedback.

Out in Left Field said:

Karch:

In stead of counting errors, do fielding percentage, as the way you present it is distorted to the negative side (which can come out in your coaching), and please don't put any names in the post. Further if a really good pitcher can't field, have her stay in the circle and only field forward. If a 1B can't field but is a great receiver, then have the pitcher or 2B go that way. Perhaps in your case she is not catching throws. If that is the case, have her get her eyes checked, and add drills (not many have 1B drills and expect the 1B to be good without them). Same with catcher drills, do you do them? The pitcher can work with the catcher on these drills to create more teamwork, over P against C on dropped 3K.


Please remember it is a team sport.

Click to expand...

Thanks for your feedback. Our team data is on Page 1, this is just a breakdown between coaches to see where we spend time. We view our results as positive, given where we have come from (Little League to select in 2 months). We are working on drills for Pitchers and Catchers currently but not specifically for 1B yet but we want to be there once we get time and space (we add some GYM time starting in January). Do you have drills for 1B that you would recommend?

Since I'm in posting, I'll share what we are doing now and what we are planning at a 30,000ft level. I welcome any feedback but please keep in mind we are not a seasoned 14U team, we are some very good athletes that each excelled at Little League but now 2.5 months together as a new select team (2 players, both pitchers, are very good select players).

Currently:
Practicing 1x/week 1.5 hours Wednesday
- This practice is normally for Pitchers and Catchers but we extended it and after full warm up we throw and then do 4 hitting stations that focus on arm strength, timing, foot work, & strength (each girls get ~100 swings)
1. Dynamic Warm up
2. Throwing progression
3. Hitting stations
4. Pitcher and catcher specific drills and practice

In January we will add Sundays (1.5 hours) in a GYM (with batting cage in back room). When we get to January I'm proposing the following to our coaches:

Wed
1. Dynamic Warm up
2. Throwing progression
3. Pitcher and catcher focused, removing hitting to add more pitcher and catcher time here as suggested by our pitching coach
3. I would like to do some 1-on-1 hitting, pulling 1-2 players at a time, but may not win this one. We do have the room.

Sun -
1. Dynamic Warm up
2. Throwing progression
3. Fielding work (like Carol Bruggeman fielding progression) in parallel work specifically with a few girls at a time on hitting. The fielding progression starts with Fundamentals, then base coverage, where to go with ball, base coverage, etc. I'm thinking we will do some fundamentals every practice and start to work through the progression.
3. Hitting in parallel - pull 2-4 girls at a time to work on hitting, one-on-one coaching, individualized progressive training, and in parallel, stations to continue building strength, reaction, fundamentals, etc.

Update

I was in here looking at some other stuff and found my first thread (this one) and thought I'd give an update as we finished the season really well, again with the theme that if you are starting a 14U team from scratch this may help you.

So my last post was Dec 2014. Over the Winter we continued to focus on Throwing & Catching (Throwing progression every practice), we also created progressions for many things including; fielding, outfield, bunting, sliding, slapping, etc. Starting in March I asked our 2 fastest girls if they were interested in slapping, both said yes so with the help of the book "High Scoring Softball" every video possible and a DVR set to the SEC channel, we started on a slapping progression to get them going. Since we had a mix of ages, our 3 older girls joined their HS teams and got lots of reps.

With the arrival of Spring we started getting outdoors on a real diamond, our 2 slappers and I would arrive 30 minutes early to every practice (Sunday & Wed) to do our progression and reps, we also did 1x/week of supplement, just our 2 slappers. We participated in a 3 game scrimmage with some local teams in mid May (borrowed a few players because our 3 HS players could not play due to HS rules), we finished 1-2 but these games really helped us focus our efforts, highly recommend you seek out some scrimmage games. Winter and Spring we struggled with where to spend our time, we spent a lot of time especially at the end of spring on the diamond learning the standard HS defense, in hindsight I wish we would have started this a bit earlier.

Most of the summer was tough for our team, mostly younger girls with no select experience. We took 2nd place in the consolation bracket of our first tournament but struggled until the end of July. We continued to work hard and practice as often as possible. We finally came together at the end of July at the ASA State Class C tournament where we took 2nd place. We played unbelievable! We had a theme going in "Unfinished Business" knowing that we'd be facing a few teams we should have beaten. After a 1-2 record in pool, we fought our way back first on Saturday with a 4-3 victory, then beat the #2 seeded team 5-4 to end play on Saturday. Sunday we played the #3 seeded team and won 10-2 (one of our "unfinished business" teams) to advance to the final game. The team we played in the finals was ranked #1, were all older 14s, had played together and in select for years, and had run ruled 4 out of 5 teams they faced in this tournament (not to mention they were all 5'8" tall). We played to the bottom of the 7th inning and lost 6-5 on catcher interference at home plate, it was a great game and I was so proud of our girls and coaches on how far we'd come from 1 year earlier playing little league! We celebrated on the field longer than the winners, I think they expected to win, we were thrilled to have 2nd at that point. I talked with their coach after the game and he just couldn't believe we came out of Little League last summer.

Some take-aways (again for someone that might be in our position):
- Stay positive (it's not always easy)
- Have coaches meetings. Plan out practices and use your time wisely, adjust as needed. We ran a tight efficient practice & would have 2 parents sign up to help with hitting stations on Sundays to keep us moving and the parents got to know the girls, it was a win/win.
- Have a philosophy, write it down and live with it. Mine consisted of 3 things;
1. Progressions. We struggled early with this as coaches, I wanted to go back to basic movements and master them when we struggled with say fielding grounders. The default is to do reps in the field but yelling "butt down" or "good throws" and having them do 50 reps each with bad form doesn't help. So we mixed in progressions with time on the field and that really worked, it takes time and patience and repeating the "right way" in smaller movements to learn. We developed progressions for almost everything.
2. Build off successes. For Example, Start your grounders with slow easy bounces so the girls have successes. Everything we do we set them up for success and then gradually add speed; every practice and over time. Sounds simple but important to me when dealing with 14yr old girls.
3. Money Ball. I live for statistics, I see numbers in my sleep, I add numbers I see in addresses, etc. I actually taught statistics at a local engineering college. So how did this help our team. First, I recognized early that we had some hitting potential but knew we'd be in trouble if we didn't get on base more often (Data showed our D gave up 5 runs/game, errors added 3/game, and we were only scoring 6 per game average), so we moved our 2 fastest to slappers with great success, adjusted lineups based on data over time, and focused on eliminating specific error & placing athletes at specific positions. Second, I looked at what won games and adjusted our helmet stickers to those few but important items in our offense/defense. The girls loved them and we talked about them before and handed out stickers after games/tournaments. These will vary for your team but for us they were;
Pitching; No walks, >7 strikeouts
Offense; Sac bunt/fly, 2 out RBI, Extra base hit, On base every AB
Defense; Successful relay/cutoff out, Diving catch/Web gem, Double play, Throw out runner stealing
Team; <5 runs allowed, Hardware or sweep, No K's looking
We also did an Offensive and Defensive player of the week and posted pics of them on FB with stats.
Third, we use an offense plan/wrist card system specific for us. If our lead-off slapper gets on base, we steal 2nd immediately (We never ever swing!) she's never been thrown out at 2nd. What that means is that we try to keep the same 2nd hitter, one that has a good average, knows not to swing, and isn't phased by starting with 1 strike (or even 2). Another example is to setup our lineup to turn over. Don't try to steal your #10 hitter with 2 outs & #11 at the plate, instead see what happens and/or let your lineup turnover, start your next inning with #1 not #11. These are 2 examples from our plan based on our team but you get a feel for "our plan", 80% of our offense came from 4-5 hitters.

Things I'd do differently/regrets;
1. Talk with parents early and often. Positions are earned at practice and girls that missed practices struggled to catch up to what we were building, this caused lots of conversations after we started playing, this year the conversations are starting now. At State ASA we played DP/Flex but I did not tell the parents ahead of time specifically which caused some minor confusion as well.
2. Different approach to hitting. I'm doing it now but teaching rotational hitting is very difficult.
3. More progressive approach to practice over the winter. Doing it now. For example we are working on strength movements at the end of weeknight practice in Jan/Feb/Mar, then we'll move to speed movements in April/May/Jun. Adding in some conditioning to prep for the season.
4. Pregame warmup is like 45 min of practice, adding that to 2 games took some time to get used to. We will start it earlier and condition for it earlier.
5. We were late to pick starting positions which impacted learning team defense. Given we came from LL this was understandable but still something I would have done differently. Only a few of these girls came in with positions they played exclusively before.

Karchify said:

We finally came together at the end of July at the ASA State Class C tournament

I talked with their coach after the game and he just couldn't believe we came out of Little League last summer.

Click to expand...

Then clearly he doesn't understand what "Class C" means.