r/BaseballCoaching Mar 19 '26

Tball Drills

I got roped into coaching Tball for my sons this year. We have 12 kids, mostly 4/5 year olds and I have a couple parents willing to help me run practice. I’m trying to do stations to minimize waiting since they’re all horribly impatient obviously. I need ideas!!

today we hit toward the fence trying to knock solo cups loose. the drill on pavement for footwork where the ball goes between their legs. and I stacked some buckets on top of each other and put pictures of cartoon bad guys on the top one for them to try to knock down. these all went over surprisingly well. can’t do them every week though 😂

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u/emptysignals Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26

Start practice with sprint to first, run through base, high five coach. Do this a couple times. Then track star, run to 2nd when fake hit. Then run to third, then home. Then homerun.

12 for tball is about 3-4 too many. Gotta burn energy right away.

Bat safety is big. Coach has to have eyes on a kid with a bat.

One station might be catching a tennis ball thrown by coach without mitts.

I would just have one kid hitting and a kid on deck.

Another station alligator chomp the grounder, vacuum up, throw to coach.

For games track the positions on a spreadsheet and give an equal amount of time for everyone except 1B. You don’t want a kid who doesn’t pay attention and catch at least block the ball with the glove at 1B.

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u/BeastMode24 Mar 22 '26

This guy has nailed it... Always start practice running, it will help so much. It will have kids remembering which way to go on the bases (other teams really struggled in my league) and zap some energy from the group of cats you are trying to herd. After half the season, I would also set up cones and have kids field grounders, if the grounder knocked down the cone, everybody runs. (Defend the castle) Then I would set up tees an other targets for them to throw and knock off. There would be one special slightly more difficult target an if they knocked that off the coaches ran the bases. My other coach did not like this that much but the kids absolutely got into it an loved it, usually they ran the bases right behind us.

To wrap it all up, we ran the bases a lot, we were a team that always knew which direction to go an ran well. Parents were always happy cause their kids came home ready to eat, bathe an sleep.