The Balanced Ball

If you are a t-ball or baseball coach, what percentage, on average, of your team’s total practice time does each player spend actively working on his skills?  One of the keys to successfully balancing winning, player development and fun is getting the most out of each practice.  If you are like many coaches in youth baseball that percentage may be rediculously low.

Consider the example of a team of consisting of twelve players that follows the following 2 hour practice plan.

At first glance, you might say that the players were only inactive for the 15 minutes of meeting time; therefore, each player was spending 88% of the practice time actively working on skills.  Unfortunatly, this assessment is woefully optomistic because it does not consider that most of the time in this practice is dedicated to whole-team activities.  During each activity, only one or two of the players is active at any given time.  Here Is how I think the active practice time shakes out:

I would estimate (being very generous to the coach) that in this example each player was actively working on his skills for about 23 minutes of the two hours of practice time,  for an APP–Active Practicing Percentage, to coin a new stat.–of 19%.  This calculation recognizes that only a small fraction of the players are actively participating at any given time due to the nature of the whole-team activities.  For example, for the 50 minutes of infield practice, only 3 of the 12 players are likely to be involvolved in each ball hit by the coach (e.g., shortstop, to first baseman to catcher).

Note however, that my calculation is extraordinarily genererous in that it does not factor in waiting time, transition time (e.g., switching from one player to the next in batting practice), and because it optimistically assumes that 4 of the 12 players are active at any given time in the 30 minute scrimmage–not likely.  Taking these factors into consideration, I would estimate that the true APP in our example practice would really be lower than 10%, meaning that each player would get only 12 minutes of active practice time.  This coach is definitely wasting his team’s time.

So what can you do to make sure you don’t do the same?

1. Buy (or borrow) and study the The 59 Minute Baseball Practice DVD by Marty Schupak.  In this classic DVD, Mr. Schupak provides instruction for how to conduct a baseball practice so efficiently that it can be done in an hour.   (I generally conducted one hour practice for t-ball and beginning baseball, but increase to 1-1/2 hour practices as the kids got a little older.)
2. Separate the team into small groups to do drills designed to maximize reps (activivity) for each player.  Having one or two assistant coaches or parents to help with the drills is necessary, particularly for t-ball and beginning baseball teams.
3. Carefully prepare for and plan each practice to minimize waiting time.  Click here for an example practice plan for a t-ball team.  The idea here is to keep the baseball or t-ball practices as lively and crisp as possible.

With these steps, I think your APP and players’ skill levels will improve, but more importantly, they will enjoy the practices much more.

On February 23, 2008 I had an afternoon practicing baseball with my oldest son, Andrew, that I don’t think I will ever forget. It was also an afternoon that he probably didn’t notice.  With the temperature in the high 50s, we were taking the opportunity for a last minute session of ground balls at a local turf football field before freshman baseball tryouts began the next day.

He attends a competitive high school with an all-male enrollment of 1500 students.  In addition to being academically strong, the school has a national reputation for football and swimming, but is exceptional in most sports, including baseball, so making the team was going to be a challenge.

Andrew had playing organized baseball since he was four or five years old, starting with t-ball and progressing to the select Knothole team he had played on the previous summer.  When he was in second or third grade, he started doing group camps and clinics.  About the time he was fourth or fifth grade, he jettisoned soccer, his other serious sport, to focus on baseball, and began doing some private hitting and pitching lessons.  In about seventh grade, he further escalated his commitment, playing “fall ball”, and doing a couple of speed and strength programs.  Throughout all this time we would squeeze in practices with just the two of us (or the three of us when his younger brother, joined us) of soft-toss, pop-ups, infield, throwing drills, and other activities to fine tune a particular aspect of his game.  Finally, starting in November of his freshman year, he began doing weekly pitching lessons at the local baseball training facility in hopes that his pitching skills would be good enough to tip the scales in his favor at the tryouts.

All this preparation brought us to this unusually warm afternoon in February.

Something about the combination of the weather, the bright overcast sky,  and our collective mood–joy at being outside after a long winter, the trepidation regarding the tryouts, and what I think was a mutual appreciation of what we have meant to each other–combined to make one of the most enjoyable afternoons of baseball that I have ever had.  I was truly “in the moment”.   The preparation was over.  The work was done.  All that was left was to hit grounders, and enjoy the warm afternoon with my son.

Thinking of that day, though, also gives me a nagging feeling of regret for the way I approached baseball for the previous dozen years. My approach was the result of my “type A” personality; focused on goals,tasks, continually improving, and being in control of the process.  From the time Andrew was in t-ball, I thought that if he was going to play a team sport in high school, baseball was the most likely avenue, given genetics which left him with just average size and speed.  There was a lot of work to do to make sure we met “our” goal.

From when he was just starting to play, I tried to make practices fun, creating games to work on the skill du jour, but I fear that my focus on tasks, schedule, and the highest and best use of each minute overshadowed my attempts to make things fun.  As the number of games in his seasons increased, and his free time became less and less, and the the requests from him for me to toss with him, to pitch to him, or to hit grounders to him slowly dwindled. Fearing that he might fall behind, or that a flaw in his game might cause him to loose out on the next opportunity to move to the next level, our practice sessions increasingly were initiated by me.  Although I don’t think that I was an ogre about it, I am afraid that our practices moved from being fun to being work.  (A microcosm of sports in America.)

So now, here we were on that warm Sunday afternoon in February, a dad and his son, enjoying each others company, practicing grounders.  As the sun peeks through the clouds, I look across the field to the young man fluidly picking grounders, and think of the little boy 12 years ago that was standing across the back yard with a  smile on his face and his first baseball glove, catching underhand tosses from his dad.

Andrew ended up not making the final cut to 17 players after surving cuts from 65 players down to 24.  Although he is still playing in his summer league, he decided not to go out for the team high school his sophomore year.  As his disappointment has faded, he has grown in ways, including academically, that I suspect would not have happened had he landed on the comfortable path of that freshman baseball team.

I am not sure yet of all the many lessons I am to learn from this experience, but there is an important one that I want to pass on to all the parents and coaches of aspiring t-ballers an little leaguers.  One moment you will be breaking-in his first glove in the back yard, then you will blink, and your son will be looking at colleges and driving off to be with his friends.  Whether he plays until he is 14 or 44, some day his playing days will end and you will realize that the important thing was the journey, not the destination.

Do not get so caught up in the working to your goals, doing the drills, driving to lessons, to practices and to games, and looking down the road to the next tryout that you forget to truly enjoy the time spent together with your son.

Savor the journey.  Be in the moment!

UPDATE: April 9, 2012

I thought I would take a minute and give a little update.  After being cut from the baseball team his freshman year, Andrew took a year off of high school sports and focused on academics.  In the summer between his sophomore and junior years, he began running running cross country and track.  He found that he enjoyed it, and that he was pretty good at it.  In fact, when he was a senior, he was a member of the state division 1 high school runner-up cross country team, and earned a spots on the podium in the division 1 high school state track championships in three events:  the 4×400 relay, the 4×800 relay, the 1600 meter run.  He is currently finishing up his freshman year at a academically prominent NCAA division 1 university where he is a member of the varsity cross country team.  Although getting cut from the baseball team was a difficult experience, and foiled my “plans”, someone else had far greater plans for him, and the experience has been incredible.

(Any advice from coaches or parents who’s kids are a bit older?  Please share by adding a comment!)

I am going to give you two pieces of information that may come as no surprise to you. First, according to a popular rule of thumb among educators, the average listening attention span of a human being is about one minute per year of age. [Innovative Teaching Strategies in Nursing and Related Health Professions, Fourth Edition, Martha Bradshaw, RN, MSN, PhD, Arlene Lowenstein, RN, PhD,  ] This means that the average five-year-old can listen to you for-you guessed it-five minutes. What the experts say is pretty consistent with my experience in coaching youth baseball. After about five minutes, kids start fidgeting, looking around, and tickling their teammates’ ears with blades of grass.  Bear in mind that the five minute attention span is for the average kid-you will undoubtedly have kids on your team will fall short of this average.

The other piece of information that may come as no surprise is that kids would gather would rather be acting -running, hitting, fielding, etc.-rather than listening to you lecture.

Although neither of these points would come as any surprise, why is it that some coaches continue to lecture for 10, 15, or even 20 minutes of their practice?

I think there are a couple of reasons for this.  First, people don’t realize just how easy it is to talk for 20 minutes. When we are talking, we are so interested in what we are saying that we completely underestimate how long we have been talking.  See for yourself — the next time you’re leaving a phone message for someone, estimate how long you think the message will take, then time yourself as you leave the message. Unless you’ve done this exercise before, I think the results will surprise you.  A message that you anticipate taking about 30 seconds could easily end up being 1 ½ to 2 minutes long.  If this is the case when leaving a simple phone message, you could see how a talk about four or five topics at baseball practice could easily stretch to 15 to 20 minutes.

The second reason, conversely, is that people don’t realize just how hard it is to talk for just five minutes. Making an effective five-minute talk at a baseball practice requires a lot more work and preparation than making a 20 minute talk.

I saw how difficult it was to talk for just five minutes recently when I was preparing a recorded training webcast at work. I knew that this topic, a demonstration of a new marketing database, was pretty dry, so wanted to make sure I kept the webcast to just five minutes. After sketching an outline and getting the required software set up, I pressed the record button started talking while I demonstrated.  When I finished, I suspected that the resulting demonstration was longer than my intended five minutes.  I estimated that it lasted about 10 minutes.  When I actually looked at the timer, however, I was astonished to see that I had yammered on for 17 minutes!  I went through three more attempts at recording it, each time hacking-out nonessential information, and refining my delivery.  I finally gave up when I had reduced the webcast to 7 minutes, but listening to the final version, I still couldn’t believe how long I was rambling on!

So what can we do to make sure that we don’t subject our players to a punishingly long lecture?

Here are a few tips to make your baseball practice comments more effective:

1. Prepare.  Do not “wing it” when it comes to baseball practices. Write down your thoughts. If possible, run through them out loud in the car on the way to practice or at least say them to yourself.  This will help alert you to potential problems before you get started.
2. Instead of lecturing, do a demonstration.  Even better, have one of your players do a demonstration. (Just make sure that the player selected actually knows how to do the skill that you want to demonstrate.)  After the demonstration, have all the players try the skill themselves.
3. Limit the scope of your discussion. If you have five points that you want to cover, decide which are the top three and save the other two for another day.  As a rule of thumb, your planned comments will take 2 to 3 times longer than anticipated to actually deliver.
4. Separate your lectures. If you absolutely need to cover 10 minutes of material, do five minutes at the beginning of practice, then the other five minutes later in the practice after the players have burned off some energy.

I think that if you remember these tips, your lectures will be much more effective and your practices more active.

I decided to put together this blog and the accompanying website www.balancedbaseball.com as a result of a few factors.

First, I’ve been having some conversations with some friends, who are also involved in coaching, about the decreasing number of kids playing baseball.  Participation in our local Knothole baseball league (In Cincinnati baseball organization is Knothole instead of Little League as it is in most areas.) is down over prior years, and the situation is the same at many leagues across the country.  Meanwhile, lacrosse has growing by almost 80,000 participants per year since 2000, according to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association. (http://www.sgma.com/press/141_Lacrosse-Play-Moving-at-Torrid-Pace; WASHINGTON, D.C. - May 7, 2009).

There are a lot of reasons for this trend, but in looking at the teams that I coached or helped coach, it seemed like our players generally returned year after year, while at the same time, certain teams in the same league would lose half of its players requiring the teams to disband or merge with other teams.  What was the difference?

It seemed like much of the difference related to how much the teams won.  Winning is generally more fun than losing, so it would make sense that players who were on teams that won a lot would return to play the next year.  Generally, our teams won more games than we lost, but that wasn’t the only factor.  You would also see that on certain winning teams not all, or even most, of the players would return.  On these teams, it was generally the “marginal” players that would decide not to continue playing.

Then, I was cleaning out our computer hard drive in a bit of free time this spring–the result of not coaching youth baseball for the first time in 10 years–and noticed a lot of files relating to those years of coaching.  I am a little over-the-top when it comes to spreadsheets, word files, databases, etc.   Actually, several people including other coaches would say that I am way over-the-top, and my review of the contents of that hard drive would definitely support that opinion.  Any way you look at it, I have invested (or wasted) a lot of time putting together a lot of tools, and it occurred to me that other people might find them helpful.

As I continued to think through our success at retaining players, I concluded that what it boiled down to was a good balance between focusing on winning and on player development, and investing a lot of time and effort on  activities and skills including:

• learning how to teach skills like throwing, hitting, fielding;
• planning practices so that the players are as active as possible;
• communicating with other coaches and parents so they understand the overall plan;
• knowing your kids, their strengths and interests and personalities;
• planning the game strategy to balance their playing time with competitiveness of the team

Sprouting from all this thinking was the concept of this blog and website.  Its purpose is to share the tools and experiences that I have accumulated so that coaches and players can benefit.  Hopefully this results in more enriching experiences for the players, and a desire to play the game again next year.