End of practice conditioning

We don't do cardio/conditioing/agility at the beginning or end - we do it throughout and it is built into the softball skills/drills/scrimmages we have set in our practices.

This is pretty simple to me - if your skills and fundamental drills are not incorporating enough conditioning to get their HR up, then you should be rethinking your practice plans. That means there is a LOT of standing around and waiting. My team is MOVING through practice - there will be drills that really get them cardio and agility and other things while they are fielding/pitching/catching/base running/etc. I don't have to take them to the breaking point, but I really want the blood flowing and the feeling of having to focus and move under stress.

As a coach I have X amount of time with my travel team. If I am going to waste X amount of it on pure conditioning then that is at the expense of other softball related things I should be doing. I don't have that time to spare.

Pure conditioning is an outside practice responsibility. The ones that want it, will do it. Give them a program to follow if you want to.

CoachJD said:

Curious to know the rationale behind this.

This is typically not a sport where you have to persevere when tired (I realize this is the case for some travel teams that play a thousand games in terrible heat all weekend long). So I do understand from that standpoint, but otherwise, it just seems like making fatigued players try skills that require precision is going to lead to sloppy mechanics and potentially injury.

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We are a travel team, so not a thousand games, but five games on a hot day certainly can and has happened. Like I said, we are not doing serious cardio work for cardio purposes. We start with a dynamic warm-up, go into a plyometric period based on the PEP program https://la84.org/a-practical-guide-to-the-pep-program/, then some ladder, rope, and hurdles footwork, then some speed work like 5-10-5 or relay races. They are tired at the end, but not to the point we can't have an effective practice.