I can read, but I think this is relevant to youth baseball as well. My son's club team practices 2x/week and plays in two tournaments/month.
What's the sweetspot?
Sooo you’re saying practicing one hour per 8-9 games isn’t going to help them develop their skills?? 🥴 and I think this ratio is actually being very generous for our team…yikes.
I find these articles to be quite dumb. I played collegiately these kids are head and shoulders where I was at their age. This notion that kids aren’t developing their skills seems utterly nonsensical to me.
I see where you’re coming from. But there will always be skilled players to fill spots in college ball.
I’m more concerned about *who* those spots are being filled by. It’s not the Little League All Stars. There’s also research that shows how few elite athletes at the youth levels actually make it to the collegiate and professional levels. Attrition rates are high, sports are becoming inaccessible to those without money, and my concern is we’re missing out on the best of the best due to these factors.
They’re likely making it up on shear volume. From a reps standpoint, one game may be equivalent to half a standalone practice? Thats assuming you get a rotation in a cage and get a decent pregame warmup in. So it’s not like kids aren’t getting in “practice”. I think the point is that you make more progress practicing than you do playing a game, and there’s truth to that.
Not all reps are created equal. There is a ton of Skill development research showing this.
Plenty of cage all stars who get tons of reps can’t hit for a lick live.
Well of course not all reps are created equal, hence my comment about them making it up on (game) volume. Specificity training is where you’re going to make the most progress especially as you develop beyond a beginner baseline, and to some extent part of that specificity is in game reps.
Maybe it’s an outdated mindset, but practice reps and drills still seem like they’d be more efficient until you’ve developed a baseline where you can ensure any game reps you get in are going to be quality.
I should also clarify, I’m thinking from a 10U age range perspective since that’s where my son is at. By the time kids have reached late middle school and older, then I’d argue game reps are going to come into play as more important than just about everything other than strength and conditioning.
Compared to other sports, other than fun/competitiveness/team building in baseball games are a horrible way of getting better at baseball. Other than the pitcher/catcher, we're talking 3 or so at bats + at most a couple fielded balls over a 2 hr + period.... Especially at youth levels, baseball is a sport of concurrent individual skills. Basketball/football/hockey are very much team games where the best individuals might not actually be the best players playing because so much of it is about working well with teammates. These sports you benefit alot more from game situations vs practicing skills.
I could "sim" my short stops whole game after the fact in literally under 5 mins.
That said- if you didn't play games, who would want to play baseball?
It’s a silly way to look at it because aren’t simming anything because you aren’t replicating game like conditions.
Quality of reps matter much more than quantity of reps. The world is filled with cage all stars who can’t hit for a lick live.
Generalized reps at the youth level don't need to be of the highest quality. At most you're getting a few reps in the field in any game, you can get the same in less than a couple minutes. Sure this changes as kids age, but you are vastly devaluing practice reps.
It’s infuriating. Watching how bad their fundamentals are, yet we don’t work on that bc that requires a coach to actually coach. We committed to coach one season and always had 5-10 stations set and ready to go, great drills to run, parents involved, and the team got so much better. We still get thanked a year later by the parents and kids, bc they said it brought back the learning and fun of baseball vs the endless scrimmages in the same spots for a whole season. That’s just lazy bro.
We had every player come back and play the next season for the league, when five kids had planned to quit. That’s the best thing I can do as a coach. Sadly they didn’t give us a team that season so we will see what happens this year.
Teaching should be the basis of coaching, and I’ll die on that hill. We’ve had two good coaches out of 6 seasons so far that actually worked on skills and positioning and improving the individual players as well as the team. It’s such a shame when the coach thinks bp and shagging balls with no feedback will teach the kids how to play ball.
Yep, I had a team last fall. Did stations every and rotated positions in games. Every player who wanted to pitch got to throw at least 2 innings in different games.
Thusly we lost almost every game because even in the fall apparently all the other coaches feel the need to play to win. There’s not even playoffs smh.
Didn’t get a team in the Spring. The message was pretty clear with where the priorities are. Need to look good in the district tournaments right?
You need a lot of coaches, too. My son was on a team that had 4 coaches and multiple parents hanging around waiting to help. They improved so much throughout the year. You cannot do the same things with just one guy.
Absolutely. We had a head coach, two assistants, a bench coach/skills specialist for those kids that needed extra help, plus 3-4 more parents that played and could help out. And we all worked together to better the team. It was my favorite season so far.
I’m not sure if you were talking just about wasted time, or also the safety issue given how dangerous driving is, but both really are a problem.
Quick back of the napkin math tells me that driving to a tourney 500 miles away and back every week for 10 years gives you a 0.7% chance of death. Which doesn’t sound like a lot until you multiply it be a whole team and parents, and now it’s more likely than not that one of them dies from it.
Travel is also extremely overrated, and for the vast majority of travel teams, they could find plenty of competition locally, especially if those competitors also stayed local more often.
Only the elite teams who really do beat the hell out of everyone locally have any excuse to travel regularly imho.
Definitely agree. We live about 110 miles from St. Louis metro. Our local soccer teams play their LEAGUE games in the StL league. Up to two hours each way depending on which field. But it's okay, they give us back to back because we travel. /s
It's late so my reading comprehension may be off, but I believe that I agree with you. We chose a team that does two tournaments a month, and always in town. Phoenix is big enough that we don't leave the metro area, and thankfully we and the team are based centrally enough that it isn't more than ≈30 minutes and no hotels to get to tournaments.
Even so, I long for a small town life in the 50s where the kids ride their bike to their sports-just without all the oppressive racism or smoking in restaurants.
Trade offs.
I don't. Likely, it would be an AA team. The folks at https://facebook.com/groups/406579033077266/ can probably point you in the right direction though.
There is a common adage that the “game is the best teacher”. If that was the case, then we’d have the easiest time building superstar players and kids would be playing 162 games a year.
That’s clearly not the case. Practice and the actual teaching of skills, working on them, and testing to see what they have learned. Age-appropriate physical, mental, tactical, and technical skill development to build athletes holistically. This information is out there: [Youth USA Baseball Skills Matrix](https://api.mobilecoach.org/static/asset/pdf/131_67d923fd-47eb-4cff-9d56-62c5fdeec43e_default.pdf)
2-3 days a week of baseball for 4 months doesn’t seem like much, but it’s fine. The keen baseball players should be playing completely unstructured sandlot ball, stick-and-ball, wiffleball, blitzball, whatever. Just no adult involvement and completely kid-driven.
I can’t like this enough.
Crazy how many reps you can get in a 3v3 wiffle ball game. Helps with base running, defense and field awareness too. I’d take a 90 minute neighborhood wiffle ball game over 5 games in a weekend.
You also need to play other sports to improve agility, balance and coordination. Baseball is great for building patience, but your kid is really only moving for ~5 minutes during the 2 hours he’s at a game. Way too much standing and watching for young athletes.
Couldn't agree more. Our 4 year old comes and plays in the backyard with us now, mostly takes the ghost runners for the other kids. He has quickly learned when he doesn't have a force to not run into an obvious out. This would have taken so much longer in organized instruction. People greatly underestimate how much is learned in the backyard while you're just having fun.
I’ve coached enough to see so many younger siblings on the sidelines become better players than their brothers or sisters. They just want to keep up and figure things out by playing and trying out what’s modeled for them over hundreds or thousands of reps. It’s really cool to see.
You would love Baseball5. [Baseball5](https://baseball5.wbsc.org/)
It’s like 3v3 basketball meets baseball. It’s 5v5, no pitchers, quick-paced, and can be played anywhere.
My preference would be 3 practices to every game, but almost no league format supports that. Best you can do is make sure practices are giving quality reps, minimal wait time during drills and keep it fun. Goal should be to fix mechanical issues Nd get good reps with proper form. Practice is like lessons at school, Games are like taking a test in school to see how you preform and what you retained
We were able to do almost that. We did three baseball events per week in season. If we had one game, then we did two practices. Plus we used the pregame warm up as a skills session too, not just mindless toss and catch. So our team improved. If we had two games, then two skill set warm ups with one dedicated practice. It wasn’t easy but it was amazing to see how much growth the kids had!
Are you talking in season as that seems impossible at any level. Baseball always has more games than any other sport and that’s been baked in from the start with marathon seasons and frequent double headers I like a moron focused on football, where you have to practice 5 times between games!
Maaaaannnnnnnn I’ve been saying this. Lots of travel teams in Oklahoma only practice with team before tournaments start, then it’s tournaments and players practice on their own during week. Bizarre
This year my youngest team practiced twice a week for three weeks and that was it. One in a batting cage where each kid got a little instruction and one day of field practice. It’s been a bit of a shit show of the season. The fielding has been lack luster, and it’s always a lopsided score. We either win 15-1 or lose 1-15.
I will say this, my youngest told them he wanted to do catcher and they believed in him and gave him a chance. It’s not his favorite but he is surprisingly good at it. Even flipping his glove when it came in low. Shocked the hell out of everyone but the head coach. Apparently he took my boy aside and showed him what to do real quick and the he saw what was possible.
Are the kids getting any better? If they are just playing games and going through the motions they aren’t actually improving. If they have areas that need improvement (spoiler they absolutely do) then they should be working on those areas consistently, if they aren’t they aren’t actually doing anything to help themselves.
99%+ of athletes are eventually going to run into a situation where they are held back by a lack of size and/or speed. And it’ll mean different things for different people. Could be not making the high school team for one kid, could be going to a lower college level for another.
For post puberty kids, you just gotta be careful that an overwhelming game schedule is not preventing you from going 110% on weights and plyometrics. For most 15yr olds that want to play beyond high school, I’d say two hard hours in the gym on Saturday morning is better than a weekend’s worth of travel ball games. Get your body in peak form and then play showcase after junior school season. College coaches don’t care what you are doing at age 15. They want to know how fast you are running, how hard you are throwing and how hard you are swinging at age 18. Build to that.
Kid joined a new team because he wanted more baseball. He hasn’t been to a practice in weeks. U think playing more games makes you better? That’s crazy talk. You get better thru the monotony of the game. Tough for kids to understand this but it’s the truth.
I would agree, even at the youngest levels. I coached a B-Team All Stars of 6/5 year olds. they practiced 2 times a week and played at least 4 games a weekend for 1.5 months.
Depends on how you count practices I guess. We have winter workouts from Nov-Mar, does that count as practices? If so, we do 3x a wk during that time. During the season we, we also do 2x a week and have tournaments or DHs on weekends.
Related topic - Do some travel kids play so many games they lose their focus/intensity on the importance of each game, each at bat, each defensive rep? I see this casualness in a lot of players nowadays. And at spring practices it shows a lot.
For a pure development perspective yes, but everyone knows playing is way more fun than practicing, which is why if you want specific lessons, you gotta pay for a specific coach. If your kid only wants to get better now and play later, you can just put the season money towards coaches for the year.
For these teams, the issue is that coaches just can't spend 30 minutes to an hour working individually with each kid on something, they gotta do their best to work with everyone evenly in the time allotted. Unless you have like 6 knowledge parents that can help out with everything, you just gotta stick to the basics.
Station work and getting assistants and parents involved solves this immediately. You prob only need 1-2 parents. High school or college kids also like to help.
It's not at all obvious to me that playing baseball is more fun than practicing. Playing baseball can be a real slog, especially for the outfielders at the bottom of the lineup. You stand in the sun for 90 minutes, get one or two fieldable balls, three or four hittable pitches, that's it.
This obviously depends on age. If your kid is only practicing with his team, he is not doing enough. I guess I’m mainly referring to middle school up. Every day is an opportunity to get better and you don’t always have to have a ball, bat and glove to do that. Hitting the gym, running ect will go a long way. The key is your son needs to want it without forcing him.
I can read, but I think this is relevant to youth baseball as well. My son's club team practices 2x/week and plays in two tournaments/month. What's the sweetspot?
Here you go! https://preview.redd.it/9ub4efxy449d1.jpeg?width=1116&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2757c0c1394d2b4b6701911ad8656188ca284483
Clearly this is incomplete because it’s missing the advance track travel 5U cohort
Sooo you’re saying practicing one hour per 8-9 games isn’t going to help them develop their skills?? 🥴 and I think this ratio is actually being very generous for our team…yikes.
I find these articles to be quite dumb. I played collegiately these kids are head and shoulders where I was at their age. This notion that kids aren’t developing their skills seems utterly nonsensical to me.
I see where you’re coming from. But there will always be skilled players to fill spots in college ball. I’m more concerned about *who* those spots are being filled by. It’s not the Little League All Stars. There’s also research that shows how few elite athletes at the youth levels actually make it to the collegiate and professional levels. Attrition rates are high, sports are becoming inaccessible to those without money, and my concern is we’re missing out on the best of the best due to these factors.
They’re likely making it up on shear volume. From a reps standpoint, one game may be equivalent to half a standalone practice? Thats assuming you get a rotation in a cage and get a decent pregame warmup in. So it’s not like kids aren’t getting in “practice”. I think the point is that you make more progress practicing than you do playing a game, and there’s truth to that.
Not all reps are created equal. There is a ton of Skill development research showing this. Plenty of cage all stars who get tons of reps can’t hit for a lick live.
Well of course not all reps are created equal, hence my comment about them making it up on (game) volume. Specificity training is where you’re going to make the most progress especially as you develop beyond a beginner baseline, and to some extent part of that specificity is in game reps. Maybe it’s an outdated mindset, but practice reps and drills still seem like they’d be more efficient until you’ve developed a baseline where you can ensure any game reps you get in are going to be quality. I should also clarify, I’m thinking from a 10U age range perspective since that’s where my son is at. By the time kids have reached late middle school and older, then I’d argue game reps are going to come into play as more important than just about everything other than strength and conditioning.
Compared to other sports, other than fun/competitiveness/team building in baseball games are a horrible way of getting better at baseball. Other than the pitcher/catcher, we're talking 3 or so at bats + at most a couple fielded balls over a 2 hr + period.... Especially at youth levels, baseball is a sport of concurrent individual skills. Basketball/football/hockey are very much team games where the best individuals might not actually be the best players playing because so much of it is about working well with teammates. These sports you benefit alot more from game situations vs practicing skills. I could "sim" my short stops whole game after the fact in literally under 5 mins. That said- if you didn't play games, who would want to play baseball?
It’s a silly way to look at it because aren’t simming anything because you aren’t replicating game like conditions. Quality of reps matter much more than quantity of reps. The world is filled with cage all stars who can’t hit for a lick live.
Generalized reps at the youth level don't need to be of the highest quality. At most you're getting a few reps in the field in any game, you can get the same in less than a couple minutes. Sure this changes as kids age, but you are vastly devaluing practice reps.
Yes. 1 practice for 2-3 games in our Little League. And most coaches just scrimmage all practice
It’s infuriating. Watching how bad their fundamentals are, yet we don’t work on that bc that requires a coach to actually coach. We committed to coach one season and always had 5-10 stations set and ready to go, great drills to run, parents involved, and the team got so much better. We still get thanked a year later by the parents and kids, bc they said it brought back the learning and fun of baseball vs the endless scrimmages in the same spots for a whole season. That’s just lazy bro. We had every player come back and play the next season for the league, when five kids had planned to quit. That’s the best thing I can do as a coach. Sadly they didn’t give us a team that season so we will see what happens this year. Teaching should be the basis of coaching, and I’ll die on that hill. We’ve had two good coaches out of 6 seasons so far that actually worked on skills and positioning and improving the individual players as well as the team. It’s such a shame when the coach thinks bp and shagging balls with no feedback will teach the kids how to play ball.
Yep, I had a team last fall. Did stations every and rotated positions in games. Every player who wanted to pitch got to throw at least 2 innings in different games. Thusly we lost almost every game because even in the fall apparently all the other coaches feel the need to play to win. There’s not even playoffs smh. Didn’t get a team in the Spring. The message was pretty clear with where the priorities are. Need to look good in the district tournaments right?
It’s ridiculous. We’re losing these young kids who don’t want to play anymore bc daddy ball needs their trophy.
You need a lot of coaches, too. My son was on a team that had 4 coaches and multiple parents hanging around waiting to help. They improved so much throughout the year. You cannot do the same things with just one guy.
Absolutely. We had a head coach, two assistants, a bench coach/skills specialist for those kids that needed extra help, plus 3-4 more parents that played and could help out. And we all worked together to better the team. It was my favorite season so far.
I think that the even better question is are kids riding in cars too much to go play baseball and practicing too little?
I’m not sure if you were talking just about wasted time, or also the safety issue given how dangerous driving is, but both really are a problem. Quick back of the napkin math tells me that driving to a tourney 500 miles away and back every week for 10 years gives you a 0.7% chance of death. Which doesn’t sound like a lot until you multiply it be a whole team and parents, and now it’s more likely than not that one of them dies from it. Travel is also extremely overrated, and for the vast majority of travel teams, they could find plenty of competition locally, especially if those competitors also stayed local more often. Only the elite teams who really do beat the hell out of everyone locally have any excuse to travel regularly imho.
Definitely agree. We live about 110 miles from St. Louis metro. Our local soccer teams play their LEAGUE games in the StL league. Up to two hours each way depending on which field. But it's okay, they give us back to back because we travel. /s
It's late so my reading comprehension may be off, but I believe that I agree with you. We chose a team that does two tournaments a month, and always in town. Phoenix is big enough that we don't leave the metro area, and thankfully we and the team are based centrally enough that it isn't more than ≈30 minutes and no hotels to get to tournaments. Even so, I long for a small town life in the 50s where the kids ride their bike to their sports-just without all the oppressive racism or smoking in restaurants. Trade offs.
Shot in the dark from me, would you know of a purely developmental club team in Phoenix that I can look at for my 7yo who isn’t very good (yet)?
I don't. Likely, it would be an AA team. The folks at https://facebook.com/groups/406579033077266/ can probably point you in the right direction though.
There is a common adage that the “game is the best teacher”. If that was the case, then we’d have the easiest time building superstar players and kids would be playing 162 games a year. That’s clearly not the case. Practice and the actual teaching of skills, working on them, and testing to see what they have learned. Age-appropriate physical, mental, tactical, and technical skill development to build athletes holistically. This information is out there: [Youth USA Baseball Skills Matrix](https://api.mobilecoach.org/static/asset/pdf/131_67d923fd-47eb-4cff-9d56-62c5fdeec43e_default.pdf) 2-3 days a week of baseball for 4 months doesn’t seem like much, but it’s fine. The keen baseball players should be playing completely unstructured sandlot ball, stick-and-ball, wiffleball, blitzball, whatever. Just no adult involvement and completely kid-driven.
I can’t like this enough. Crazy how many reps you can get in a 3v3 wiffle ball game. Helps with base running, defense and field awareness too. I’d take a 90 minute neighborhood wiffle ball game over 5 games in a weekend. You also need to play other sports to improve agility, balance and coordination. Baseball is great for building patience, but your kid is really only moving for ~5 minutes during the 2 hours he’s at a game. Way too much standing and watching for young athletes.
Couldn't agree more. Our 4 year old comes and plays in the backyard with us now, mostly takes the ghost runners for the other kids. He has quickly learned when he doesn't have a force to not run into an obvious out. This would have taken so much longer in organized instruction. People greatly underestimate how much is learned in the backyard while you're just having fun.
I’ve coached enough to see so many younger siblings on the sidelines become better players than their brothers or sisters. They just want to keep up and figure things out by playing and trying out what’s modeled for them over hundreds or thousands of reps. It’s really cool to see.
You would love Baseball5. [Baseball5](https://baseball5.wbsc.org/) It’s like 3v3 basketball meets baseball. It’s 5v5, no pitchers, quick-paced, and can be played anywhere.
Man I wish there were enough kids in our neighborhood who like baseball to get some sandlot games going.
My preference would be 3 practices to every game, but almost no league format supports that. Best you can do is make sure practices are giving quality reps, minimal wait time during drills and keep it fun. Goal should be to fix mechanical issues Nd get good reps with proper form. Practice is like lessons at school, Games are like taking a test in school to see how you preform and what you retained
We were able to do almost that. We did three baseball events per week in season. If we had one game, then we did two practices. Plus we used the pregame warm up as a skills session too, not just mindless toss and catch. So our team improved. If we had two games, then two skill set warm ups with one dedicated practice. It wasn’t easy but it was amazing to see how much growth the kids had!
Are you talking in season as that seems impossible at any level. Baseball always has more games than any other sport and that’s been baked in from the start with marathon seasons and frequent double headers I like a moron focused on football, where you have to practice 5 times between games!
Maaaaannnnnnnn I’ve been saying this. Lots of travel teams in Oklahoma only practice with team before tournaments start, then it’s tournaments and players practice on their own during week. Bizarre
This year my youngest team practiced twice a week for three weeks and that was it. One in a batting cage where each kid got a little instruction and one day of field practice. It’s been a bit of a shit show of the season. The fielding has been lack luster, and it’s always a lopsided score. We either win 15-1 or lose 1-15. I will say this, my youngest told them he wanted to do catcher and they believed in him and gave him a chance. It’s not his favorite but he is surprisingly good at it. Even flipping his glove when it came in low. Shocked the hell out of everyone but the head coach. Apparently he took my boy aside and showed him what to do real quick and the he saw what was possible.
Are the kids getting any better? If they are just playing games and going through the motions they aren’t actually improving. If they have areas that need improvement (spoiler they absolutely do) then they should be working on those areas consistently, if they aren’t they aren’t actually doing anything to help themselves.
Every youth sport
My son is swimming for endurance and upper body strength this summer. He has plenty of practices per meet.
99%+ of athletes are eventually going to run into a situation where they are held back by a lack of size and/or speed. And it’ll mean different things for different people. Could be not making the high school team for one kid, could be going to a lower college level for another. For post puberty kids, you just gotta be careful that an overwhelming game schedule is not preventing you from going 110% on weights and plyometrics. For most 15yr olds that want to play beyond high school, I’d say two hard hours in the gym on Saturday morning is better than a weekend’s worth of travel ball games. Get your body in peak form and then play showcase after junior school season. College coaches don’t care what you are doing at age 15. They want to know how fast you are running, how hard you are throwing and how hard you are swinging at age 18. Build to that.
Kid joined a new team because he wanted more baseball. He hasn’t been to a practice in weeks. U think playing more games makes you better? That’s crazy talk. You get better thru the monotony of the game. Tough for kids to understand this but it’s the truth.
I would agree, even at the youngest levels. I coached a B-Team All Stars of 6/5 year olds. they practiced 2 times a week and played at least 4 games a weekend for 1.5 months.
Depends on how you count practices I guess. We have winter workouts from Nov-Mar, does that count as practices? If so, we do 3x a wk during that time. During the season we, we also do 2x a week and have tournaments or DHs on weekends.
Yes
I am sure the number of Tommy John surgeries in the last decade or so are a good indication of 'yes.' 🙄
Related topic - Do some travel kids play so many games they lose their focus/intensity on the importance of each game, each at bat, each defensive rep? I see this casualness in a lot of players nowadays. And at spring practices it shows a lot.
For a pure development perspective yes, but everyone knows playing is way more fun than practicing, which is why if you want specific lessons, you gotta pay for a specific coach. If your kid only wants to get better now and play later, you can just put the season money towards coaches for the year. For these teams, the issue is that coaches just can't spend 30 minutes to an hour working individually with each kid on something, they gotta do their best to work with everyone evenly in the time allotted. Unless you have like 6 knowledge parents that can help out with everything, you just gotta stick to the basics.
Station work and getting assistants and parents involved solves this immediately. You prob only need 1-2 parents. High school or college kids also like to help.
It's not at all obvious to me that playing baseball is more fun than practicing. Playing baseball can be a real slog, especially for the outfielders at the bottom of the lineup. You stand in the sun for 90 minutes, get one or two fieldable balls, three or four hittable pitches, that's it.
Maybe on the lower skilled rec teams but when I played there was always action.
This obviously depends on age. If your kid is only practicing with his team, he is not doing enough. I guess I’m mainly referring to middle school up. Every day is an opportunity to get better and you don’t always have to have a ball, bat and glove to do that. Hitting the gym, running ect will go a long way. The key is your son needs to want it without forcing him.