What's coming for 2024-25

This is what happens when you get busy with in-season coaching and chasing your kids around.... you neglect the blog! (And the lawn, and the dishes, and the laundry...) We're back!

It's been a fun summer so far of coaching 11u baseball and 12u softball with some great kids and great families. I've got about a month left with the 11u baseball kids, and a couple weeks for softball ending with the NAFA Northern tournament up here in Eagan. Definitely as the seasons get over, it will lead to a "This is what we learned" blog post too. There is and should be learning as a youth coach every year.

For Big Fish, we're gearing up for an expansion of what we do in 2024-25. We have a rented facility space in the works we're planning to open in September - two cages, fully turfed, a game changer in terms of the level of service we can provide. The space is still working its way through the approval processes with the City of River Falls, so we'll be looking forward to sharing more details when we can.

Here's a summary of what's coming up and planned for Big Fish in the next year:

Tryout Prep Camps - Mid-July (softball) and mid-August (baseball) - a piece of feedback we received was about filling the gap between the end of the competitive seasons and tryout evaluations for 2025 association teams. These fun practices are meant to fit that need - we're planning an hour of skills and drills and then a half hour of fun scrimmage. 

Fall Baseball League - A developmental league on Wednesdays and Sundays from the end of August to end of September that we will host at RFHS with an assist from the new facility in case of rain. As with everything we do, the goals of this are fun and development - it is more of an in house league than traveling for doubleheaders, but that allows kids to get lots of repetitions, play multiple positions, and have fun playing the game in what I consider some of the best weather of the year. And maybe the best part is that it won't conflict with flag football season!

"Off Season Academy" Winter Training - starting in October, we'll be running our winter training program similar to last year. An important difference will be more of a general skills focus - our space will allow us a good opportunity to work on defense and glove work as well as hitting and throwing. We are also working on some potential collaboration to add some age-appropriate strength training as well... stay tuned on that.

Off Season Teams - we are going to dip our toes into our first team or two this winter. The foundation of these teams are not Ws and Ls, but providing some additional competition games to test out winter training as we go along. Valley Sports Academy in Hallie, which is an absolute gem of a facility, offers some one-day tournaments throughout the winter. We'll be navigating winter sports schedules and everything else, but we're really excited about the possibilities here.

That's a high overview of what's planned for now as we get this new space off the ground. If you have feedback and ideas, or maybe a need for us to meet that we're not covering, please don't hesitate to reach out at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you!