Every coach will have their own approach to running baseball practice and it will evolve the more practices you run. If you are just getting started here are some things to consider:
- Make a plan – kids will respond to consistency and a little bit of structure. Try to coordinate with your assistant coaches before practice to make sure there is some semblance of a plan and each coach knows how they can help. Here is a template you can download to outline a given practice and share with coaches in advance of practice.
- Warm-up – Try to incorporate some sort of warm-up or stretches particularly for kids throwing arms, to get things started.
- Keep Your Players Busy – Throwing BP to one player while the rest watch doesn’t keep kids engaged and doesn’t maximize your time to make them better. Break up into stations when you can and have assistant coaches help so each kid is getting more reps and work.
- Make it Fun – Create competitions around drills. You can find examples here in the post on Mojo Curriculum from MLB.
- Positive reinforcement – give kids at all skills levels an equal balance of constructive coaching with positive reinforcement. The goal is to make every kid better regardless of skill level.
Here is a good video that goes through many of these concepts of running an effective baseball practice….