Practice Plan Like a Big Fish

We had the great opportunity a few weeks ago on behalf of Big Fish to present to and work with the River Falls Youth Baseball Organization coaches about running effective practices and practice planning. Practice time for youth coaches continues to be a premium, whether that due to field constraints or the ever-increasing pressure to put the kids in uniform and play more games. Running fun, effective practices is so important to growing and maintaining a love for the game. In turn, that love for the game is a piece of what will drive athletes to put the work in away from practice that will give them a chance to make their high school teams.

The Philosophy of Effective Practice

Effective practice starts with a positive environment. At Big Fish, we have some foundational blocks of what that looks like:

• Taking the time to plan for practice - yes, it does take an ounce of planning to be effective. But we will have you covered in the next section below.
• Using games to compete - remember, you can add points to anything to make it game!

• Personal feedback and touch points - make sure players are getting timely and effective feedback - “I loved how you were on time for that fastball!” Is better than “Nice swing!”
• Modeling, modeling, and modeling - coaches should have fun with each other, and fun with their players, while still conducting practice in an organized way.
• Less talking and more doing - this can be the hardest because we all know so much in our big adult brains! But if we can get our talking down to 10% of a practice and have the kids experience what we are talking about about through various drills and constraints, that will be much more effective for almost of our players.

Practice planning

We have you covered here with a few resources:

Plan templates
This is a good place to start with organizing your practices. For each of these templates, activities are broken into blocks of time.
While we have read about 2 hour practices from other organizations, we advocate for about an hour and a half. We do have experience running one hour team practices, but in our experience that is too short to accomplish what you need.
Practice Template - Infield, Outfield, and Hitting Focus (2 or more coaches)
Practice Template - Pitchers and Catchers Focused (2 or more coaches)
Practice Template - the "One coach" template

Drill Library

This is the Information Age, so there are so many drills out there right at your fingertips. We have started building this drill library at Big Fish with some of our favorites. The drill library should help you complete your template.
Big Fish Drill Library
Make sure you are taking advantage of all hands on deck - assistant coaches, parents - to keep the lines short and the kids moving.

Don’t Forget Your Pitchers and Catchers...

This is a mistake I made as a beginning youth coach that we are catching my son’s group up on this year (no pun intended!) While your athletes will hold down the catching position well enough, if you want them to excel you do have to take the time to teach blocking and receiving at practice. My advice is to try and build 4-5 catchers, which we are doing more of this summer.

Please reach out!

​We are happy to work with individual youth coaches and associations on request as part of our mission at Big Fish. We are all in this together for the benefit of our kids and these great games of baseball and softball. Best of luck to everyone as you start your spring and summer seasons!

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