Youth Softball Coaching Clinic: Softball Coaching Tips on How to Have Effective Practice Sessions

By Marc Dagenais

Coaching a softball team, whether women's softball team or youth softball team even, can be pretty overwhelming at times as you take charge of practices, knowing your players inside and out, familiarizing yourself with the dynamics of the team as well as keeping your players enthusiastic and committed. And there would be times wherein you just want to sit back, relax and watch your players doing their thing on the field.

Nevertheless, here are some softball coaching tips that you can take in order to help keep these practice sessions fun and exciting, avoiding player boredom and increasing the number of players who would be wanting to attend practice sessions more than twice a week even when game season has arrived.

You must note that attendance is one challenge that a coach faces during practice sessions. You need to make sure that your players arrive on time so, that they can participate in the whole activity including warm up and cool down exercises. Most players, especially kids, have not firmly grasped the effect of regular tardiness, which conveys disrespect. But do not blame them too much as at times, it may not be their fault that they are late.
You must also understand that female players and young players are different in a way that women players value camaraderie with their teammates. Therefore, they need time to socialize with one another before they actually start with the practice sessions. On the other hand, for young players, you need to teach them the mechanics of softball in sections because they would not surely understand it if you given them the information in one go.

Other than ensuring attendance and learning about the idiosyncrasies of the team, you need to have good organizational skills. For instance, it would be good if you can assign numbers to your players based on the order they have arrived for practice. This way, all of you would know the order for the batting practice, which is usually the favorite part of most players during a practice session. And this creates an incentive for players to arrive early for practice.

Every once in a while, have a scaled-down version of batting practice even before your players do the warm-up exercises because doing so would enforce player's keenness for batting and when you keep this spontaneous, your player would be left anticipating it. Thus, this would further motivate the team to be on time for the practice.

Once all your players are present, ensure that they start with warm up exercises to prepare them for the practice. But instead of sticking to boring exercises like stretching and running around the bases, get creative with it. You can have your players play freeze tag or a relay race, which fosters a competitive spirit, get their hearts pumping and their muscles warmed up.
So, there you have it, softball coaching tips on how to have effective practice sessions. Good luck!

Marc Dagenais is a Softball Peak Performance Coach that helps softball players turn their athletic talent into extraordinary performances and help coaches get more out of their players, turn their struggling team around or get an edge over their opponents. Visit us to sign-up to get our FREE softball pitching tips!
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