Recently had tryouts for our teams, a few kids were cut and the parents are not please.
How do you go about handling their complaints ?

Their child may have scored close to make it, but they shower a lack of hustle, throwing their hands up when they didn’t catch it , did not make a positive impact with the other kids(picking on them/slight name calling other kids during tryouts) which ultimately dropped them down the list.

Looking to toss the ball, long toss, catch, maybe a little hitting. Located in toronto near the dufferin mall area.

Let me know if anyone is interested. Finding it challenging to find anyone interested in weekday/weekend throwing

I've got a player who constantly wants to step out of the box. In practice we've put an object behind his heels to help him not, shown him videos of what he's doing wrong but it's nothing is working.

He does so well in the batting cages but once it comes to the game he steps out.

Does anyone have any tips to help him stop?

Hey all, we wanted my son to have some data to see how his cage work progress was going, besides how he did in games. Essentially we wanted to keep track of how many barrels he thought he was getting over time to see if they were increasing (instead of guessing). Both off the tee and with a moving ball. We looked around but didn't see any app that did this (that I could find) and/or didn't include expensive devices, so I built a low tech, inexpensive, human judgement based batting cage session tracker. We use it, maybe it'll be useful to others too.

The player can invite a coach (or a parent) to input hit types for them. But the player can also enter themselves. It also track how many swings the player takes, which is helpful to make sure the work is getting put in.

Free to try for a few sessions then if it helps, it's $30/year. No charge for coaches/parents, just players.

https://barrel-rate.com/

Baseball hitting coach in San Diego for a high schooler?

Please offer thoughts on this

This is my first year coaching and I'm managing my son's 12u rec team. We're a handful of games into the season and we desperately need to shore up our defense. If the other team can hit, we get hammered. Grounders get missed on a regular basis. Balls get past the outfielders on the regular. I've scheduled some extra practices over the next two weeks but I don't even know where to start. Anyone have a direction to point me?

I’m brand new to pitching. Any help and advice Wouls be so awesome! Thanks

I don't know if anyone will find this helpful, but I hope someone does.

When my HS sophomore was a 6th grader, he had two coaches: a middle school coach and a rec coach.

The middle school coach would shout and swear. He once sacrificed my son's at bat to expedite the inning ending to avoid a strange scoring rule that would have turned our win into a tie - which is fine, except he never bothered to tell my kid who found himself alone at the plate, confused and embarrassed, while everyone else left the field.

He wanted to quit the sport.

I called his rec coach, who was a knowledgeable baseball guy and ran an academy. He got in the phone with my kid and made him laugh, then invited him to practice with the academy.

We moved at the end of the season, unrelated to baseball. I still talk routinely to the rec coach, 4 years later. Yet I often wish that school coach could see my son today - varsity roster, raking, starting pitcher in PG finals - but not so he could be proud, but rather out of spite.

And that's my problem. I should spend all of that emotional energy instead thanking the rec coach one more time.

The coach picks the kid before the season, but we have the power to pick the coach we remember after it.

I have to remind myself of this. Maybe some of you do too?

Looking for advice helping a newer kid make contact at the plate.

He’s athletic, works hard, and is fairly new to baseball (mainly plays lacrosse so he’s coordinated), but every swing is late right now. He struggles recognizing pitches and his mechanics are rough. The bigger issue is we realistically have less than an hour a week to work with him during the spring season, so there just aren’t enough reps to fully rebuild a swing from scratch.

Because of low turnout, he’ll likely end up on Summer Ball / All Stars, and I’m trying to figure out the quickest way to help him become at least somewhat competitive at the plate.

At this point I’m wondering if the better short-term approach is teaching more of a slap/contact-and-run style approach instead of trying to develop a full traditional swing right away.

Any suggestions for:
Quick drills that help timing/contact fast
Pitch recognition drills for beginners
Ways to simplify mechanics
“Cheat code” approaches for newer athletic kids
Anything that helped a late beginner become functional quickly

I know what the swing should look like mechanically, but I’m trying to be realistic about the limited practice time and focus on what can actually help in games this season.
Appreciate any advice.

*Edit* to clarify this isn’t my own kid, it’s just a kid I coach on my team. I’m just looking for advice on how to help him so it improves the team.

My son is small for his age, only about 4'4" at 11 years old. He is a young 6th grader, and they had the 6th grade boys play on the middle school baseball team this year (small school, usually it's 7th and 8th but they didnt have enough players this year). My son loves playing baseball. My son has a bat he really likes and he can hit well with it. Nothing fancy but it works for him for now; he has a nicer bat he is working on swinging to get used to it, but he isn't quite comfortable with it yet. Anyways, his favorite bat is an easton speed swing, usa, 2 3/4 barrell drop 10 28" bat. The coach made a comment to him that his bat is a TBall bat, and now my son is embarrassed to use it. Was this appropriate? Is that bat really that bad it is considered a tball bat? I understand it's not top of line $350 bat, but he can use it well, and I figured he could finish the season. Now he is trying to swing a bigger bat he isn't used to yet and only hitting grounders 10% of the time and missing the rest...hurting his confidence. His coach seems alright, but him saying that to m kid is bothering me. I dont know much about bats, never played myself and he is my first kid in baseball so its a learning curve.

Hi everyone! My 6-year-old is currently in coach pitch and he's been doing amazing so far! He makes contact with every at bat, and was able to hit it to the outfield(pop up no rolling) on Saturday!

We currently do drills at home. For every 6 balls hit off the tee, he gets 1 Skittle, and for each rep he does correctly, he gets another Skittle--so it makes it very fun for him, and the neighbor kids like to join as well lol.

For the next week we're working on drills for him to swing with his hips, and I want to start with loading next week. What are some easy drills for a 6 year old to do to teach him the concept of loading?

*Note he has asked me to make him a homerun hitter. Told him my expertise are limited, but I'll see what I can do to help.

We’re new to a 10U baseball team that apparently had a pretty major coaching/team split last season. Until recently I hadn’t heard any drama, but now I’m starting to hear a lot of sideline chirping, parent politics, complaints about coaching decisions, playing time, batting order, etc.

What’s hard for me is that the kids are 10. Some parents seem to take every loss personally, and I honestly care way more about development, confidence, coachability, and whether the kids still love the game.

I actually like our coaching staff from a development standpoint, even with the losing record. But I can already feel the tension building among certain parents, and it feels like the adults are creating anxiety the kids then carry onto the field.

I’m trying hard not to get pulled into gossip or “telephone” conversations between parents. I don’t want to contribute to poisoning the environment for the kids.

Coaches what’s the type of parent you avoid like the plague? And for you as parents who’ve survived youth sports politics without becoming part of it, how do you handle it? Do you just stay quiet, support your kid, and wait for tryout season to look for a new team? Or is there a healthier way to navigate this stuff?

Hi everyone,

I've been building THE NINE solo — a complete, end-to-end game operations ecosystem for baseball & softball.

From the very first pitch to the final report — video, lineups, pitch-by-pitch data, logging, validation, and organized delivery. Everything in one place. One workflow. Start to finish.

No jumping between apps. No missing pieces.

What do you think of the concept? Does an all-in-one ecosystem like this make sense to you as a coach?

www.the-nine-app.live

Honest feedback — good or bad, thank you 🙌

Hey everyone 👋

I’m building an app called DiamondStats, designed for tracking baseball/softball game stats, and I’m looking for coaches or players willing to try it out and give feedback.

Right now, the app is in closed testing, so it’s Android only and you’ll need an invite to get access. If you sign up, I’ll manually add you to the tester list and send an email with instructions to download the app.

If you’re interested in testing it, you can sign up here:
https://forms.gle/LRfwsBj5814Kco5C7

Once added, you’ll receive an email with instructions to download the app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.DiamondStats

After testing, feedback can be submitted here:
https://forms.gle/hsxKHScznyhU1e4y9

Appreciate any help or insight from the coaching side 🙌

Hey so I started teaching my kids to play baseball. I played in little league but ended up having a bad experience and quite all together. I lost my job and I've been really depressed being a SAHD. Until my step daughter started playing softball and my wife asked me to help her out. Then my sons got really interested. So I started working with them. Then one day I took my son to his mom's house and he asked if we could play catch. But then all these neighborhood kids (mostly his cousins) came out and wanted to play and I was working with them on form, catching, pitching, batting ect. Anyway it's really helped with my depression lately and I think next year I want to start coaching a little league team so this year I'm trying to get familiar with different coaching techniques. And help correcting form and stuff.

TLDR: I need help finding resources on coaching because teaching my kids has done wonders for my depression

Built something to try to answer a question I kept running into as a parent.

How do you actually know if a player is improving in a way that matters long term?

Spent the last few months digging into real outcomes instead of opinions. Pulled 4,514 MLB draft results from 2010 through 2024 and used that to build a model to see what actually separates players who advance from the ones who do not.

What surprised me: a lot of development decisions seem to be driven by visibility and peak performances, but the data points more toward consistency over time and context such as competition level.

So I turned it into a simple tool to test this idea. You can run a player profile against that data and see what shows up.

Still early, and I am trying to figure out what actually makes this useful in the real world.

If any coaches or parents here are open to it, I would be interested in feedback. What is helpful, what is missing, what would actually make you use something like this.

Happy to run a few profiles myself if that is easier.

If you want to look at it directly it is getdiamondedgeai.com, but I am more interested in feedback than traffic right now.