Fun Hitting Drills For Youth Baseball

If your job is to coach young people to play several centuries-old baseball games, and you are wondering how to make the coaching drills fun and at the same time educative, you are at the right place because this article would do justice to telling you about those drills. If you are the captain of a youth baseball team or a team member, you can also learn about these drills and introduce them to your teammates. Ready to learn about these baseball fun and educative drills? Let’s get right to it. In this article, we will see about ‘Fun Hitting Drills For Youth Baseball’.

Fun Hitting Drills For Youth Baseball

If you check baseball training and tutorial websites and YouTube videos, you would see several drills for youth baseball teams, but not many of them are fun and educative at the same time.

Amongst the very few baseball training drills for youth teams that are both fun and educative are Pinball drills, Bunting competitions, Home run derby, and golf games. We would be discussing these drills shortly, all you need to do is to read on to find out more.

The Pinball drills: Fun Hitting Drills For Youth Baseball

A pinball drill aims to help baseball players to improve their ability to hit balls while under pressure from the opponent. This drill is fun as well as educative as it would make your players better at hitting balls. Here are a few steps for you to set up the pinball drill for your baseball team:

– Put three buckets on top of each other, forming a triangular shape, with each of them facing downwards. Also, place a tee a distance of 20  away from the three buckets. If you cannot find buckets, you can still use anything that is lying around as targets.

– The next thing for you to do is to divide your baseball team into two groups and make them line up in twos behind the tee.

Here’s how the drill would go:

-The first player on one line steps up and attempts to hit the baseball off a tee and into the target.

– The first player on the second line would take a swing at the ball.

-Then the second player on the first line would step up and attempt to hit the ball off the tee and into the target.

– The second player on the second line would again take a swing.

Each ball that hit the target would count as a point, and the first team to successfully hit five targets would be the winner of the drill. You can motivate the losers to try harder by telling them to do pushups after the drill. You can also make the pinball drill harder by making the players try to hit just one target. Making the drill harder would help your team to be pros at hitting balls under pressure, and would consequently make them a good team.

Bunting competitions

In baseball, bunting makes balls difficult to field. A bunt involves gently tapping a ball toit very difficult to field. Bunts can be used to help baserunners advance towards the home plate since it requires fielders to run long distances to the field. Organizing bunting competitions for your team would help those players who are or tend to be weak hitters. A bunting competition aims to help players to be able to bunt balls into specific parts of the field, the competition part gives the bunting drill a fun side.

Here are steps for setting up and organizing bunting competitions:

– Mark a rectangular area of the infield. The marked area would be the target for the bunting competition. This marked-out area can either be down the first baseline or the third baseline. Successful bunts into the marked-out area would count as a point.

– Divide your team into four groups.

– Each player in a group gets to bunt three times.

– When a player successfully bunts a ball into the marked-out area, they score a point.

– At the end of the bunting competition, the team with the highest number of successful bunts would be the winner.

Home run derby

Home run derby drills are similar to home runs seen on tv, with a focus to hit the ball as far as the player can. A home run derby aims to help batters to create a mindset of hitting the baseball as hard as they can. Making it competitive gives a fun side to home run derbies.

How to set up and organize home run derbies:

– Each player gets a swing at the ball.

– Each player is given ten outs. When a player swings ten balls that do not result in a home run, the player is out of the competition.

– The player with the highest amount of home runs wins the home run derby competition.

Golf game drills

In golf games, each player picks a targeted spot, throws the ball up to himself, and tries to hit the targeted spot or object in as few turns as he possibly can. The purpose of the golf game drills is to teach youth baseball players accuracy in their ball hitting.

How to set up golf game drills:

-Players pick an object or spot as their target.

-They then throw the ball up to themselves and hit the ball in the direction of their chosen target.

-The player whose ball hits the target with the least amount of hits would be the winner of the golf drill.

Conclusion

Now We’ve learnt about ‘Fun Hitting Drills For Youth Baseball’, Baseball drills are very important for team development and it is the key to building a very good baseball team. As the popular saying goes, the consistent practice would make your team get better and when fun is added to the practice drills you organize for your teams, your players are very more likely to learn faster and get very much better in their games. You should try organizing one or all of these drills in your next training session to improve your youth baseball team.