Practice Report

After our win on Wednesday at dinner Steve and I discussed a few areas we’d like to focus on for our next practice, which was held yesterday. We came up with four major areas: throwing, sliding, bunting, and game awareness.

One good thing is that the practice field we were assigned to had another unused field and so rather than share the field with a team we went and used this unused field, which was nice because it gave us complete freedom to do whatever we wanted.

As I had discussed at our last practice we moved the starting time to 6 and went a full hour and a half. Jeremy Me’s phone number didn’t work for Steve and so he showed up expecting a 5:45 start time. This was great as it gave us some time to hang out with him and he’s finally coming out of his shell some. It was terrific. He expressed some interest to us about playing catcher so we’ll have to give him a shot there at some point.

We started off practice with a good jog. Steve let Jeremy F and Ma get out to a nice lead in front of them. I was bring up the rear and attempted to catch up. Steve proceeded to smoke me and Jeremy F, granted with his good head start, actually managed to beat Steve. The kid is fast.

Next we played some speed catch. People partner up, try and get the most round trip catches in 30 seconds. This went well. As did our next activity. We introduced something called “5 and 10” which is basically competitive catch. You play about 50 or so feet away from your partner. If you throw at eye level you get 10 points, at chest level 5. First player to 50 wins. We did a second round of this as well which was fun. Starting off practice with a couple of games never hurts.

Next we lined people up on the third baseline and went over the bunting mechanics. Next we divided them into two groups and one group went with Steve and did whiffle ball hitting, while the other group worked on bunting with me. Nof proved to be our best bunter, but of course he said he doesn’t want to bunt and was pretty adamant about it. I’m going to try and wear him down though because he’s not a great hitter and having him be a good bunter would be terrific. Sean was a pretty good bunter, as was Matt S. One thing I had forgotten from last year: travel players aren’t really that much better bunters than non-travel players. They just haven’t worked on the skill either so everyone’s at a somewhat level playing field.

Next we did a quick sliding lesson. Everyone did really well on it except for Jeremy Me, who couldn’t do it at all or even come close. We’ll have to do some 1 on 1 work cause he needs to learn how to slide.

Finally, we closed practice with our 2-1 game. Count starts at 2 and 1 and then it’s baseball. The team struggled the first go round with the concept but as they did their second at bats seemed to get the concept down. During this time we saw Jeremy Me, Nick, and Sean pitch. Sean didn’t do so well, though he wasn’t terrible. Instead he was overly self critical of himself and after expressing some interest in pitching in a game now doesn’t want to pitch. That’s ok. It’s too bad we only have one more practice since I think this drill would be good in the long run to play.

Anyhow, I feel like this was one of the better, if not the best, practices Steve and I have run. There was a lot of fundamentals work done (sliding, bunting, and hitting). There was fun had. The team was on task, worked hard, and was eager to learn. I’m so pleased and hopefully we go out and win again tonight.