So, I've been getting the question a lot about practice plans for baseball and I guess it's
because the season is right around the corner and coaches are trying to get some ideas of
how to structure a practice for the upcoming season and I guess it really depends on the
age of the players you're coaching as well as how much time you have to schedule.
You know, for some younger players, I'm sure you're going to be staying under the two hour
limit and a lot of you have field restrictions anyway so you're going to have to figure out
something for that age group, but at the high school level you're going to have usually
a typical practice is going to be about 3 hours and you should be able to get in everything
that you need to do in under three hours if you're running an efficient practice.
So, I'm just going to go over a sample practice plan of how you can structure high school
aged practice and give you some examples and you can obviously add more in there, take
some out, and reorganize it in the manner in which you want to do, but this is just
my experience, you know, playing high school, college, and professional baseball and how
a lot of the good practices were scheduled.
So, first, you're going to start with like a meeting and explaining the practice so everyone
on the team can have the same mind set and what they're trying to accomplish that day.
So, that's only going to take about five minutes.
Then you want to warm up and stretch and get your throwing in so all of this with a dynamic
stretch and a good warm up and getting your throwing in, your long tossing, or whatever
your throwing program has for that day, is going to take about 20 minutes.
Next what we would do is break down into individual work.
So, the pitchers would go do their thing, infielders go do their thing, outfielders
do their thing, and catchers doing their thing.
You know, catchers could work on blocking, or receiving, whatever the individual work
held for them that day.
You can implement many different things.
Pitchers could be doing pick offs, or doing their PFPs at that time.
Infielders could be working on footwork, or short hops, or whatever you have planned for
them that day, you could do that there, and outfielders can take reads off the fungo,
or maybe working on ground balls coming to them and working on their crow hop as they're
coming through.
So, that individual work part of the practice plan should be about 30 minutes.
Then from there we're going to break it down and go into a team defense.
Now you can do many different things for team defense.
Some of them include, and you can switch these up every other practice or however you want
to structure it, but here's just some ideas.
You can take infield outfield one time.
You could do pop up priorities.
Cut offs, work on cut offs, up in the middle, where everyone is supposed to be in different
situations.
Work on your bunt defenses and how you're going to call them, relay them in, and then
perform them on the field as a team.
You could do 14 outs where your having coach hit the ball to different positions and just
play the situation as is and if you get it correct you get a point, you get an out for
it, and when you get to 14 without any mistakes then you're done there.
Usually, you structure team defense for about 30 minutes as well.
And then from there you're going to go into batting practice.
Now if you've got a team of about 20 guys, you could break it down into 4 groups of 5
guys, and what you're going to do in these 4 different groups is, one group is going
to be taking balls at their position so wherever they're at in the field they can be taking
ground balls, fly balls, whatever it is.
The next group is going to be hitting in the cage, so getting ready, getting warmed up
to go hit on the field.
Group 3 can be hitting on the field, live BP, taking swings.
Usually you can go 2 or 3 rounds of 8 pitches, you get some bunts in, you get some get em
on, get em over, get em in, do some hit and runs, and then do a base hit round.
You know, however you want to structure that, but usually 2 or 3 rounds of 8 or so pitches
per guy.
And then the last group is going to be running bases.
So after you hit live on the field, you'll get on each base and read the balls hit off
the batter's bat and run on the base path as if you were reacting to that hit.
So those are your 4 groups and that's what you can do do with those 4 groups and that
will take about 15 minutes each group to go through all 4 stations.
So, it's going to take an hour in total right there.
And then at the end of practice, you know, you're going to have to get your conditioning
in so you can all come together as a team.
Sometimes the pitchers will get their conditioning done in their individual work whatever they
have, maybe they have bullpens that day, but whatever it is you can get together as a team
at the end and get some conditioning in and then you of course you want to break it down,
talk about how the practice went, how you're going to go the rest of the week, what you're
plans and goals are as a team for the rest of the week, and then you've got to clean
your position.
You know, do the field maintenance, rake up around your bases, at the catcher's plate,
pitcher's mound, whatever it is, make sure your field is real nice and you know conditioning
takes about 20 minutes and the break down, the meeting, and the field maintenance will
take about 15 minutes.
So, that's 3 hours right there for you.
That's a little sample practice plan.
I hope that answers your questions for you guys who were asking about practice plans
for baseball and let me know if you have any other questions specifically about this and
I would love to help you guys.
Alright, talk to you soon.
Bye.
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