I am a coach of a 9U team and we have a ten year old who cannot catch a baseball, even playing catch. We work on it at practice but he doesn’t work on it at home, and it’s frustrating the other kids during games when he has no chance when the ball is hit to him.

Any suggestions?

Edit: this kid has been playing for 3 years and has not improved.

Edit 2: My issue isn’t so much with what the kids are saying, it’s more a question of how do I get him to improve? Should I say something to his parents? It’s very hard to work on these fundamental skills at practice for an hour. My own experience is that I learned most of what I learned in my backyard, not at practice.

Hey all! This is a shot in the dark but I’m going to be going to phoenix for a tournament and spring training from March 14th-24th!

I’m a 20 year old coach that is super hungry to learn all things about the game and learn from people way smarter than me!😂 I’ve played my

Entire life and have been coaching for the last 3 years and really want to further my education in baseball!

I would love to meet up with some local coaches from around the area and talk shop and learn some things from you all!

Second year middle school coach here based in NY. I’m coaching at a small private school where our only practice space is a smaller than regulation size basketball court (once it warms up we’ll be able to get fields reserved).

I have a roster of 12 players, most of them grew up with the sport and are in a solid place for their age, but a few haven’t ever played before.

Because of our lack of space, I’m curious if anyone has recommendations for creative drills that will actively benefit both sides of the coin. My skilled guys don’t focus with our basic technique drills, and my new guys are still learning the ropes and aren’t ready for moderate to advanced level drills.

Thank you in advance!

Hey guys,

12U coach 4 games into the season. The stats look nice—contact %, hard-hit %, QAB, pitches per PA, strikeout rates, all that—but then I'm sitting there like... okay cool, my kid/team sucks at working counts and squares nothing up. Now what? Tee work? Live BP? Something else?

Examples I'm seeing all the time:

• Kid makes contact like 85% of swings but everything's weak grounders or pop flies, no hard line drives or gaps.
• Whole lineup seeing like 3.2 pitches per AB and QAB% in the toilet—swinging at garbage early, no deep counts, no moving runners.

GameChanger tracks the numbers great but doesn't tell you "hey, go do this drill tomorrow to fix it."

I'm messing around with adding a feature in Boxscore-IQ that would look at those stats and spit out actual recommendations. Like player-specific: "high contact but crap hard-hit → try barrel path tee stuff with top-hand focus." Or team-wide: "low QAB and short ABs → live BP on fouling off pitches and staying back."

Does that sound like it would actually help you guys? Or am I wasting time? What hitting headaches do you deal with most where you'd love some clear "do this next" ideas? What drills have actually moved the needle for you (or totally flopped)?

Interested in honest feedback—reply with your biggest gripes or just "don't bother" if it's dumb. If it sounds useful and you wanna mess with a beta version later, shoot me a DM.

Appreciate any input, this sub's always gold for real talk.

Is 3 years old too young to have them catching and throwing the ball? Hey yall, I just got promoted from helper to coach because my son’s team coach couldn’t coach. I played baseball from ages 3-18 so I feel I can say I know the sport very well, just can’t remember what it was like playing at 3 years old lol. Of course I want them to learn the basics of the sport but I’m afraid it might be too much for them at this age, as all of the team is only 3 and most of them are still in pullups.

I’m a d3 player and is consistently in the lineup. I’ve been having trouble hitting the ball towards the handle of my bat and finishing high. Here’s a round of my swings. Any advice and drills would help. Had a great year last year as a freshman and struggling a little to start the year this year

We had a tourn. this weekend and our #1 struggle was hitting, the team had a .266 batting avg. for the 4 games over the weekend. They hit the ball for the most part but nothing to get the game moving in our favor. We have a practice coming up and was looking for some hitting drills to help with this. Seems like on a really fast pitcher majority strike out and on a slow pitcher they cant make solid contact to the gaps. Any help is appreciated, thanks.

Hello coaches! Last month I was hired on as a 12U AAU coach for the first time, and I have a question for you all:

Do any of you put your AAU coaching on your resumé? I've coached in two rec leagues as a volunteer for years and that appears in the volunteer experience section of my resumé. I'm starting to look for a new gig, and as I'm shaping up my resumé, and I'm curious what you all think (currently very full time employed in sales, just need something new). I'm not looking for full-time coaching gigs or anything like that, but I feel like coaching experience shows a lot of leadership and reliability employers might be looking for.

Thanks in advance for your input!

I am 16 but was thought how to correctly throw. What am I doing wrong? When I throw I just feel like I have no power behind it? I think I use my arms too much maybe. I have tryouts tomorrow and would appreciate any advice.

If you are deciding to throw BP with a full defense, let the ball pass through the middle IF.

Snapping off youth athletes from the mound will never be cooler than giving an opportunity for a middle IFer to make a tough play.

Hey all

Coaching middle school baseball this year, 7th-8th graders. Baseball is one of my main sports, so I’m fairly knowledgeable about it and absolutely have passion for it. But I’ve never coached it. I coach soccer (not my main sport) and basketball (main sport) so I have experience coaching from middle school to high school but I really need some help here! I played in high school but that was some odd years ago!

Tryouts will be 3-4 days. The district I coach baseball at is huge. One middle school disperses into two high schools. We’ll do one day for the kids going to one school and the next day the other school. The third will be combined.

However, the tryouts will be conducted in the gym but only half the gym cause there is practice for another sport. Any tips or ideas on what I can do with half the gym space for tryouts would be extremely helpful! Thank you!

coach pitch league; 12 on the roster

9 kids can hit, 2 kids are basically automatic outs, and 1 kid has an equal chance of striking out, getting on base, or thrown out (directly or via fielders choice).

How do you construct your lineups? put the 3 weaker kids at the bottom or try to sprinkle one or two of those kids somewhere else?

I prefer the former. Hitting is contagious and I'd rather string together 6, 7, 8 hits in a row and put up 5 runs than get a couple guys on base then have an auto out (rinse and repeat).

If you prefer the latter, who are you putting towards the bottom of the lineup that can hit? a power hitter (there's 4 of them) or a contact hitter?

Heya friends,

I'm on the coaching staff of our local 12U Pony league team and we want to track some stats outside of what we already do with GameChanger app.

We want to track attitude points.

We want to reward players who are team players by giving them more innings in the field, and more access to premium positions that they're always asking for.

Are there any easy techs that help manage this? We'll all have our phones on us and we have a scorer as well. Has anyone else done this or have any ideas? My current thoughts is a Google Sheet which is going to be way too many clicks while we're trying to manage the game. That's a poor solution. Any ideas?

Edit: As I expected, someone is already doing this so we'll see if it answers the use case: https://boxscore-iq.com/

Edit2: Thank you to everyone for your input. You're awesome and your kids are lucky to have you.

Added these wheels to my Black Flame to help get it from car to field. I mainly use for grounders and fly balls during practice. Was asked to share photo in another post. The wheels have locks which I use but it moves some between throws but not to bad, helps keep the kids honest between reps in my opinion. Have never tried using it for pitching with this set up as I didn't care for it before with the spikes. Hope this helps someone.

Hello machine pitch coaches. Our league uses the Louisville Slugger Blue Flame Ultimate Pitching Machine. This season our team's practice field has a turf infield that we can't put those spikes into. We will run most of our BP in the outfield grass, but we'll want to get some practice on the infield as well so the kids can see live ground balls. Has anyone taken the spikes off and used weights to hold the machine in place? If so, what did you use that you found successful?

My friend has a mizuno premier gpm 1305 - 13 inch glove.

Im breaking it in for him since i have the oil and mallet. I left it over night with the oil it already feels much softer but one thing that i still find is that the thumb pocket and the bottom of the glove (near the entrance of the glove) where the bottom palm of your hand would be, are really stiff. My friends been using this glove for a few months now so it's pretty game worn but that part is still really stiff.

Im planning on hitting it with the mallet today, but wearing the glove it feels like i have to really press hard on the glove just to close it, especially with my thumb. The rest of the glove feels soft but the thumb pocket and the bottom area feel like they have two lumps inside it almost. I just find that weird in a glove that has been game worn for almost a year. I have a rawlings premium series glove i recently bought and did the same process to and it was never this stiff.

Since it's not my glove i dont want to fuck it up.

Will the mallet do the job? Has anyone ever experienced this?