21 - baseball

'21' is a fast paced baseball drill to improve your 'team' defense.

Place 8 defensive players in their respective positions and a pitcher on the mound. You the coach will be hitting balls from home plate.

The idea is for your defense to record 21 consecutive outs without an error.

We have our pitcher soft toss a baseball to home plate and immediately take his defensive postiton. The other players play their postitions at game speed. Once the ball has crossed the plate and the catcher has caught the ball you hit the ball anywhere you choose. The defense must make a 'clean' play both fielding and catching the ball. We have our catcher keep track of the number of outs in a row.

Anytime an error is made, the out count goes back to zero. Clean base hits do not count against your out total. Try not to be too much of a SADIST. Trying to intentionally have an error committed or calling a tough play an error on say out #20 can be very frustrating on your team.

We usually start the drill out early in the season being pretty easy on the kids. As the season progresses you will want increase the level of difficulty.

Sometimes we play the game without baserunners and other times we use the remainder of our players for baserunners. Always remember to have the baserunners wear their helmets.

The game can be extremely frustrating, for both players and coaches, when the defense gets very close to 21 and then boots the ball and has to start over. But when they hit #21 the players are usually very excited. Watch the expression on their faces the first time they make 21 straight plays to start the drill. The kids usually go nuts. DON'T LET IT GO TO THEIR HEADS. When this happens you usually have time to spare so we start the drill again and we increase the difficulty to let the kids see that instant success can be very fleating.

Always give encouraging remarks even if the drill is kind of dragging on because of sloppy play. Remember, you can increase or decrease the level of difficulty. Try to be POSITIVE, POSITIVE, POSITIVE.

We started using this drill in 2002 and we did place at state at the 4A level: 2002-3rd, 2003-2nd, 2004-3rd, 2005-4th. Of course we had a really great core group of kids each year.

Article Source: http://www.sportspracticedrills.com

Moriarty Pintos Varsity Retired, for now, Middle School Athletic Coordinator

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