Good Practice Habits For Young Baseball Players
If you want to be a good baseball player or a good coach, there’s just no getting around practice. Good practice habits for young baseball players are essential to maintaining and improving peak performance.
A good coach owes it to the team to put everyone through interesting and effective drills. While drills are great for overall team spirit and general conditioning, each player must make a commitment to make the most of every practice in order to excel. Any valuable goal worth chasing usually has a series of habits behind it. If you have big league dreams for yourself and your team, what are a few habits you can establish for yourself to keep you motivated and interested?
Eyes on the Prize
So what is the prize of baseball for you? Do you want to be the best base stealer in the state? Do you want to be a champion slugger? What steps do you think you need to do to reach that prize? What kind of time and effort do you think you need to give every day, week, and month out of a year to get closer to your goal? By identifying and naming what you want, you’re getting that much closer to it.
Make a collage of your favorite players who you admire for their abilities and achievements. None of these players got to skip out on practice! Any time you don’t want to go, look at your collage with Brookes Robinson or Johnny Bench or Derek Jeter… and remember that they all did their drills.
Start Small, Give it Time
You know how people with 42 New Years resolutions barely even get to see one of them through? Don’t try to be perfect at everything. Work on one habit at a time to the best of your ability. As you master each habit, you’ll eventually build a complete toolbox with all the best habits and nothing will be able to stop you. But it doesn’t happen in one night, it takes patience and diligence. It took Cal Ripkin lots of time and patience to break Lou Gehrig’s record, but he did it.
Punctuality
Being on time for all functions shows that you respect the coach, you respect your team, you respect the volunteers, and you respect the game. If you’re chronically late, is it just practice you’re not making on time, or is it everything?
1.) Examine what makes you late and try to define it. Then try to work in little steps that help you to be on time.
2.) Arrive at practice five minutes early just once, and note how it feels. If it feels too early and you feel fidgety, bring a book, or play a game on your cell phone. Get used to the idea of being early, it might be fun and productive!
3.) Vow to yourself that you’ll stop doing all those late-making, last-minute tasks before you’ve got to leave. If you’re carpooling, do everything you can to be ready to go. Be waiting outside your door before your ride gets there.
Find a Practice Pal
Tell a teammate that you want to work on making your strength super explosive, or you want to be a better hitter, or some other personal objective. Don’t pick just any teammate, pick someone you know will be enthusiastic and supportive. Basically, you can help each other check in with your progress every week, and the teamwork you give to each other will be infectious. Don’t be surprised if coach makes everyone pick a practice pal!
Finally: Show a Little Gratitude
You know what you get to do? You get to play baseball!
Baseball is the national soul. It’s played everywhere, passed from parents to children. It’s America’s family heirloom. You know what they hope baseball will look like one hundred years from now? They’re hoping it will look like baseball! When you watch a game today, it’s the same game that you’d see if you climbed out of a time machine and it was 1860.
Try one of these gratitude exercises for one month, and see if it changes your viewpoint, even just a little.
1.) Next time you feel yourself wanting to criticize another team mate, compliment them instead.
2.) Take five minutes before gearing up to write down three things that are positive about practice.
3.) Try to thank at least one volunteer, parent, coach or manager, anyone who makes your game possible, at the start or end of every practice.
Simply taking the time to say “Thank You”to all the things that make baseball the best game that’s ever been invented can have a huge impact on your ability to do great things.