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Ah...the start of a new season. God help me, I love it so!

Here in SoCal we've been having rain of biblical proportions, and we weren't sure whether we'd be able to have tryouts on Saturday or not. Well, the rain stopped Friday afternoon, and our 10U field's infield drained all the rainwater off really well, so we conducted our tryouts there.

Unlike last season, where we combined our 14U and 12U girls into one division, this year we're keeping them separate. My first big decision of the season was "Do I want to coach at 14U or 12U?" Given that last spring, my youngest was in 10U and I didn't get a chance to coach her while I coached my older daughter, it was pretty much a no-brainer about coaching 12U this year. Plus, I think coaching rec ball at 12U is more interesting than 14U because most of the best players have not yet moved on to travel ball like they start to do at the 14U level.

After tryouts yesterday, my new assistant coach and I sat down and ranked the girls from first to last. I'm excited to be coaching with Dave -- a guy with a lot of baseball coaching experience but zero softball coaching experience. Dave and I immediately agreed on the basics and he's willing to learn and is open to new ideas, so I think we're going to make a really strong coaching tandem.

Dave's daughter almost didn't sign up for softball this year because she didn't think she was good enough to play, but she was on my 12U Silver All-Star team last summer, and I was extremely impressed with her attitude, her hustle, and her grit. In fact, I thought she was one of the best players on that team. I think she's got real potential, and I'm excited to see how far she can go this season.

We're hoping for a little bit of luck as far as pitchers go. Both of the best 12U pitchers are playing up for 14U (including my pitcher from last spring), and so pickings are slim as far as pitching goes. We're going to roll the dice a bit with our first choice as pitcher: I had a girl who had barely pitched in 10U pitch a few innings for me on my Winter Ball team, and she had good velocity and could throw strikes. Plus, she's a ball player -- she was one of my best hitters and fielders in Winter ball even though she was one of the 10Us playing up in a combined 14/12U division. I hear she's been working on pitching daily with her grandpa, so we'll see.

The draft is tonight, 6pm. No matter who I get for players, I know we're going to have a ton of fun!


Don McKay, Softball Editor
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I am VERY pleased with the team I drafted. Unlike previous years where I emphasized girls who could hit well, this year I've change my focus. I wanted girls with speed, as I am becoming more and more convinced that bunting and slapping is crucial to success.

Of the top 11 fastest girls at tryouts, I drafted 5 of them -- all with average to above average fielding and hitting skills. When you combine my daughter and Dave's daughter -- both very fast runners, I think I've easily got the fastest team of the four in the 12U division.

I had a tough choice at pitcher, and it was more difficult because I had the first pick of the draft. All the pitchers I was interested in were rookies in the division and pitched in 10Us last spring season. 10U pitches from 35 feet and uses and 11 inch ball. I could take pitcher A, who had a great tryout (they used 11 inch balls for batting for whatever reason) and who, going by last year's stats, was the best available pitcher. Or I could take pitcher B, who didn't get a chance to pitch much last year because her coach's daughter was the starting pitcher, and who had pitched for me some for my 14U winterball team.

I chose pitcher B, which had everyone in the room convinced I was an idiot, but sometimes you just have to believe your own eyes. I saw pitcher B pitch effectively from 40', and she was one of the best hitters on my Winter Ball team. This past winterball season had way stronger pitching that I think this year is going to have, so the pitcher I picked has already proven herself against quality pitching using a 12" ball. Plus, I think she's only scratched her potential as a pitch and could end up a dominating pitcher if she works hard.

I also got my lead off hitter from Winter Ball, who didn't make it to tryouts, but is easily the fastest girl in the Division. If you remember, she hadn't played since she was 8 years old, but also was one of my better players from winter ball. She's a good bunter and hitter, and with her speed she's almost guaranteed to get on base any time she puts the bat on the ball.

I got the girl with the most hustle and desire from my Arizona travel team, the one who always showed up for extra work, and I'm happy to say that she had a great tryout and has been continued to improved from the winter.

I got my left fielder from Winter Ball, a nice kid who can hit pretty well.

And I got a girl I know well from my daughter's travel basketball team. This girl may not have the talent of other players on the basketball court, but she hustles like nobody I've seen before and is tough as nails. I also coached her way back in my 10U days and she hit well back then.

The rest of the girls I haven't coached before, but based on their tryouts, they're good players.

Ours was the only coaching staff that had done any preparation before the draft. After the first couple of rounds, each team would take a couple of minutes to try to figure out whom to pick, and essentially (as it appeared to me) ended up guessing. Because I had ranked all the girls from top to bottom, I just took the best available girl when it was my turn to draft and was done in about 10 seconds. As a result, at least on paper, I ended up with 7 of my 10 picks that I rated above average.

Regardless, now it's time to go to work and make these girls better. We've got speed, good hitting, decent fielding, and lots of pitching potential. Hopefully, we can pull it all together and have a fun season.


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First practice last night, and I don't know if I've ever been more excited about a team after a first practice. We've got it all: speed galore, power hitting, solid fielding, some good arms, and pitching. With a little bit of luck and hard work, this team could be something special.

Oh, and might I add: not a bad egg in the bunch personality-wise. My assistant coach, Dave, who's coached plenty of baseball but this is his first season coaching girls softball, got to see firsthand what I see every season. We were talking after practice and he kinda had an amazed smile on his face. He was impressed with the talent that the girls had, but even more impressed with how hard they worked, how well they took instruction and wanted to improve, and how they were having fun but they were focused on what they were doing. I just told him that now he understands why I'll never coach on a baseball field again, but I could see myself coaching girls softball for the next twenty years if I could.

We have first practices to get to second practices, as we spend a lot of time going over how to do our stations, introducing ourselves to the girls and the girls to each other, talking to the parents, and the like. I did get video of all the girls' swings, so I'll be breaking that down over the next couple of days so it will be ready for our next practice on Thursday.

Oh, and our pitcher looks sharp, particularly for a first practice. I caught her while we timed girls stealing second (so they could time their rocker lead with her windup), and she was throwing strikes consistently. Next practice, I'll video her delivery and we'll probably tweak a couple of things so that she can get even more velocity and accuracy.

All-in-all, definitely a great start to the season.


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With all the rain we've gotten, some of our local fields are still closed, and that includes the adult softball fields where we will have our Thursday practices.

Well, I have tried two practices a week, and it just doesn't get the job done, so instead of canceling practice, we held a cozy practice in my front yard (specifically, my driveway, since I've reseeded my front yard). Thank goodness for stations! My driveway is about 20' X 20' and then another 10' x 30' -- without stations, it just wouldn't have worked.

Last year, since we were seeing so much success batting using batting stations, we developed a bunch of fielding stations as well and saw an immediate defensive improvement on the softball field. Good thing, too, because we set up all our defensive stations and got a bunch of good work in without using a field!

It was definitely a different practice, and not one I'd prefer doing on a regular basis, but in a pinch it worked out great!

Oh, and I almost forgot -- we met our teammate that couldn't make it to our first practice. Today was the first day that she had ever held a bat before. We obviously have a lot of work to do to get her up to speed, but she has a GREAT attitude so anything is possible with her!

Last edited by Don -- Softball; 02/02/10 06:36 PM.

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I knew Saturday would be a light turnout. One girl had a volleyball game, two girls had basketball games, and three girls had a soccer tournament! One disadvantage to living in a small community is that most of the good athletes play multiple sports, and so one must be fluid with practice plans.

With only half the team there, every girl got plenty of swings in. One of our goals for each practice is to get 100 good swings in. A good swing is defined as a hard swing at a strike. Each girl easily made that goal! Plus, both of our newbie players were hitting off the pitching machine! Everyone else was hitting really well, especially for the first week of the season.

We then set up for our standard defensive fundamental stations and each girl got a lot of work of fundamentals. One of my coaching goals is to turn the girls over exhausted to their parents, and with our defensive stations with everyone working and working quickly, mission accomplished there!

Then we finished up with our first game of over-the-line for the season. I always like to finish the week with something fun, and Over-the-line has been a team favorite for years. Unlike previous years, though, this team seems to be in mid-season form as far as batting goes, so the game turned into a 18-10 slugfest, with multiple home runs hit.

I cannot WAIT for the season to start in a month!

Last edited by Don -- Softball; 02/02/10 06:50 PM.

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I always say we do our first practice to get to our second practice. We also do our first week of practice to get to our second week of practice. The first week of practice includes a lot of explaining the voodoo that we do, the girls learning our batting and defensive stations, of course addressing the parents, etc. Bottom line -- we do a lot more talking and a lot less doing in our first week.

Last night was a great practice. We went over the importance of speed to the game of softball with a couple of examples -- ultimately, our goal is to have the girls make decisions on their own in the heat of the moment, and so they have to understand time and distance on the softball field.

We also taught them drag bunting and push bunting, and had them bunt off the pitching machine as one of the stations. One thing I've noticed with girls coming up from the 10U division where they use the soft-dot ball is that they have to relearn how to bunt. A lot of the girls just don't bunt well period, but even the good bunters have gotten in the habit of pushing the bat toward the ball because that's what they have to do against the 11" soft-dot ball to get it to go anywhere. We're going to focus on bunting for the next week or two until everyone can bunt well.

If they can each sacrifice bunt, plus do at least one of either the push or drag bunt, we're going to be a very dangerous team, especially given how well we hit. Opposing teams won't know how to defend us.

We also did defensive stations, and this time we included outfield drills for the first time. Everyone had a chance to work in the outfield, which got them really tired!

Finally, we finished with some base running. Goodness, we have a lot of speed on this team!! And the girls who weren't blessed with a bunch of speed were still giving 100% even if they got passed on the bases. Have I mentioned how much I love this team?

After practice, I took video of our pitcher. She's starting to be real consistent around the strike zone, and so I showed her the grip for a 4 seamer and a 2 seamer. In the next week or so, we'll start working on a change up. If we can get to the point where she is throwing all three pitches for strikes, we'll be in awesome shape!


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Wednesday's are going to be our batting cage days. Unfortunately, I didn't get the word on that until Wednesday morning, so I wasn't sure how many girls would show up. I needn't have worried -- I had all 12 girls show up for batting cages, though some did show up late.

At the 12U age, I never get on a girl if they are late. It's not like they drive themselves to practice, so what's the sense in punishing them? Plus, we live in a bedroom community where most of the parents work "down the hill" in San Diego, so sometimes parents physically cannot make it to practice on time. Better to structure practices to account for girls showing up late and maybe not warming up completely than to make getting to practice late a big deal, particularly when the players have little control over the situation.

I still see teams waste time during their scheduled batting cage sessions. We have 2 batting cages, and inevitably, there are two lines of players just standing around waiting for their turn in the cage. As you know, I absolutely HATE girls standing around doing nothing when they could be doing something. When we have the batting cage, each cage is a station (normally girls will hit away at one station and bunt at the other), and then I set up other batting stations around the cages so that all the girls are taking swings throughout practice. Our goal for each practice is to take 100 good swings, but when you set up batting stations to augment batting cages, you can easily get a couple hundred good swings in for each player in about an hour.

I had parents who were new to my team ask me if their daughters could leave after they were done with their time in the cage. Once they saw all the work that we got done in a short amount of time, they liked our practice set up for batting cages a lot!


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Thursday we did our normal batting stations and defensive fundamental stations, then we introduced our bunt defense to the girls. I rotated all the girls through infield positions and also as base runners while we went over the defense repeatedly.

In my experience, there are two discriminators between good teams and great teams. All good teams have good pitching, good infield defense, and can hit. Great teams can do all those things, plus they also execute bunting (both defensively and offensively) very well, and they have great outfield defense. In fact, just last year at our local All-Star tournament, the 8U, 10U and 12U championship games were ALL determined by bunting.

In learning our bunt defense, we are taking a necessary step toward being a winning team this season.

Oh, and I almost forgot! As a team building assignment, I task the girls with coming up with our team name and our team cheer. Both have to be original. Once everyone agrees on the team name and everyone knows the team cheer, then everyone is eligible to earn tickets during practice and games for good plays and hustle plays. They can exchange tickets for booty (little toys, trinkets and candy).

Our players came up with the name "Smokey Smiles" since our jersey is gray, and they came up with a team cheer that I think is the best one any of my teams have come up with so far. So our next practice will be the first one where they can earn booty!

Last edited by Don -- Softball; 02/15/10 05:55 PM.

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Our first practice after the right to earn booty is earned ALWAYS includes diving-catch practice. I include it not only as a reward for the girls (they absolutely LOVE diving for the ball or learning to do so), but also a guaranteed way to earn a ticket in practice or a game is by diving for the ball. If you dive and miss, that's one ticket. If you dive and make the play, that's two tickets.

Of course, we also included our typical batting stations -- can't have a practice without 100 good swings!

Monday's practice also included our first "Bunting Game" scrimmage. We've been working on bunting since the first day of practice, and now that we know our bunt defense, it's time to put it all together in a scrimmage.

The Bunting game is my single favorite activity for practice. It solidifies everyone's knowledge of our bunt defense. It requires players bunting the ball in a pressure situation. And perhaps most importantly, it helps the players develop a feel for the flow of softball.

When we were kids, more often than not we were playing baseball in someone's back yard. We didn't have adults telling us what to do -- we figured it out on our own. These days, kids activities tend to be much more structured and there always seems to be an adult around who is in charge.

During the Bunting Game, the only time we coaches say anything is to make a teaching point that must be made. Otherwise, we let the girls run the scrimmage. They pick the teams, they will determine who plays where, they determine their side's batting order, and they are the ones coaching base runners and telling them when to advance an extra base or not. The bunting game is a GREAT way to take a bunch of girls who play softball and turn them into softball players with an understanding of the game.

We'll play the bunting game at least once a week for the rest of the season.


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Wednesday was batting cages. Again, the whole team was there, and again, we got in a few hundred good swings for every player.

My daughter (aka my catcher) has been working on hitting left handed and usually will take one batting station a practice and hit left-handed. She's still in the "awkward" stage and isn't comfortable yet, and tweaked her knee a little bit. Worse, she didn't tell me she tweaked her knee and tried to catch our pitcher after practice and ended up not being able to put weight on her knee!

I took her to Urgent Care because she's had some knee problems in the past, and the doctor said that it was a slight strain (thank God!). She'll be on crutches for the next week as a precaution, but he thought she'd be fine.

My daughter is tough as nails, so she thought she could just gut it out. Hopefully she'll be back on her feet soon.


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