Boggles my mind how a team could have that many players.
High School coaches
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Boggles my mind how a team could have that many players.
small town America, we have to consolidated sports with 3 area school, 2 small Public schools, and a Christian School with total enrollment of 160 (9-12). Plus the grade schools to get the 7-8th grade junior high levels. So of the 30 kids last year we had 14 varsity maybe 16 JH. I'm not too familiar with the junior high kids but on the 14 kid varsity lineup I would have maybe 5-6 that could play on our summer travel team, you try to bring the others up to a level that can help you more than hurt you. Of the 3 schools only one has historically pushed their kids to a decent summer program. in small town America you work with what ya got. 4.0 kids I have lots of, but All Stars not so much.
These "last minute changes" are why we always scheduled our pitching lessons on Sunday afternoons during HS season...
Sorry for being so naive. I am spoiled by living in a high population suburban area.
- Sep 29, 2014
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Did not plow through whole thread but I did notice big theme in OP was base running and honestly this is probably the biggest thing that is not taught well at any level followed closely by OF play
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There's only so much you can teach with base running. A lot of it is instinct and experience. There are some general rules of thumb you can give, but I'm not sure you can really teach a team of players to read a sinking line drive off the bat and determine, based on outs, score, etc. how aggressive to be. This is especially true since individual player speeds make it impossible to say a player should always/never do something in many situations.
Or maybe all of that can be taught, but it would take many, many hours of practice, and teams just don't have the time to focus on more than the basics.
No excuse for not teaching OF play. It's not nearly as time consuming. There aren't that many different things to learn. It's mostly a matter of reps and reinforcing technique. And it should be easy to make OF work part of every fielding practice since, if you're running good practices, you'll have a coach working with outfielders while infielders (and pitchers/catchers) are doing their thing.
That seems a high level of base running. Seems to me something like a delayed steal of home can be taught. DD2 played on a 12u rec team for a year. These were far from highly skilled players with little of instinct for the game. Once they got the delayed steal concept they won a number of games, decisively, using it.
Oh, absolutely. That kind of stuff can certainly be taught. I assumed (perhaps wrongly) that djcarter was talking about more advanced base running. Doesn't everybody at least teach the basics and a "play" or two? (I shouldn't even ask this question. My best player didn't know how to slide even though she'd played baseball/softball for 4-5 years before coming to me. She said coaches just never bothered to teach it.)
I assume @djcarter is talking about elite level of players. It makes sense to me at that high a level instinct becomes dominant in executing great base running. What I have seen in rec and B level, even the best baserunners are not ready for, or maybe not capable of, what he is referring to.
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