By: Bruce Smith
Submitted: 2009-06-16 07:19:02 | Word Count: 717
To maximize your hitting practice with your team and develop funamentally correct swings to develop proper muscle memory, you need to organize your practice to give the players the most swings in the shortest amount of time. With a little organization, this is very easy do.
It is important to realize that perfect practice makes perfect play. If the players are not swinging correctly then all they are doing is reinforcing bad muscle memory. Bad hitting mechanics means there will be "holes" in the swing, which translates into offensive outs and player frustration. Perfect practice creates proper muscle memory that means more hard hit balls.
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What we do is set up many unique hitting stations around the field and divide the team into six groups (try to keep only two or three players per group). To get 400 swings in one hour, using six batting stations, will give the players 10 minutes at each station. The pitching machine station can only provide about 40 swings in the allotted time. This leaves us with 360 swings for 5 stations; therefore, you must average 72 perfect swings per station per player.
Here are some example hitting stations:
1. Underload and Overload practice swings: 5 sets of 10 underload and 10 overload = 100 swings concentrating on bat speed. Practice swings without a ball develops a good fundamental swing with good balance.
2. Ball location hitting tee work: 2 sets of 10 inside, 10 middle, and 10 outside = 60 swings concentrating on hitting location and driving the ball in all directions. Working with a tee adds the element of hitting the ball without ball movement so the batter can focus on another element, in this case driving the ball to all fields. By removing the ball movement a batter can develop good balance and contact point location to be able to hit to all fields.
3. Circular soft toss drill: coach soft tosses 15 balls from behind, 15 balls from the side, and 20 balls from the front = 50 swings focused on hitting the center of the ball. Coach soft toss adds the element of a slowly moving ball with the batter focusing on hitting the middle of the ball at the bat-ball contact point for line drives into the outfield.
4. One arm tee work: 3 sets of 10 back hand only and 10 front hand only = 60 swings concentrating on hand movement through the strike zone. The front hand guides the bat through the hitting zone while the back hand provides the power to the swing. This drill isolates the hand movement through the hitting zone.
5. Wiffle ball short toss: 3 sets of 10 outside, 10 middle, and 10 inside = 90 swings concentrating on putting the whole swing together but with the ball moving at a slower speed than during the game. At a short distance, the coach can locate the pitch at different locations within the strike zone to provide additional batting practice for hitting to all fields.
6. Hitting practice off a pitching machine: 40 swings focusing on timing the swing. By mixing up dimple balls from different manufactures, provides variation in speed and pitch location to simulate different pitcher's ball movement. It is very difficult to teach batting mechanics with a machine, but is very effective with hitter timing.
There is nothing special about this set of stations other than you can get a lot of swings very quickly and isolate the individual hitting mechanics. We will use different station drills throughout the season to provide variety and work on specific skills.
What I want to encourage is that you, as a coach, think about how to maximize the number of swings per practice by sub-dividing the players into smaller groups and use multiple hitting stations. What drills do you know that fall into these broad categories? Okay, switch them in for variety.
Author Resource:-Softball @ Youth-Athlete provides helpful instruction for parents, coaches, and young athletes around the world. Youth-Athlete also provides tournament listings, suggestions to parents and coaches that enable a successful season, more on hitting mechanics, and a community for open questions.
