The long wait for baseball season is over. It’s time to lace up your cleats, grab your glove, bat, a bucket of baseballs and head to the nearest field.
But whether you’re a parent of a child in youth sports, a coach or playing in an intramural league yourself, there are a few things you can do in order to set yourself up for a successful baseball season.
1.) Practice Makes Perfect
Practice is important. If you want to be a great player or coach, you need to take time to work on honing your skills. There are drills you can run to practice fielding, base running, throwing and hitting. Break your team up into smaller groups to work on individual skills and then cycle off in other rotations to get in quality reps. Practice is your time to prepare and plan for a game-time scenario, and there’s only a limited amount of time we get to practice. Use it wisely.
2.) Make A Plan
We’ve all been a part of a gathering before where if there wasn’t a plan in place, the situation could devolve quickly into chaos. The same can definitely be said for youth sports. Make a plan for practice and before every game. This will help you use your time more efficiently and help you stay on top of managing the game.
3.) Focus On The Basics
We aren’t professionals. Baseball is more than just an athletic game, it’s a game of strategy, too. It’s easy to get caught up in one of the many intricacies of the sport. But, it’s best to focus on the basics when you can. Either find time in practices or devote entire days to becoming familiar with basics like fielding, hitting and baserunning before you get into the fine details required to throw a forkball, run a squeeze play or other “inside baseball” strategies.
4.) Temper Your Expectations
Unless your intramural squad is made up of a bunch of former first-round draft picks, it’s probably safe to assume that mistakes are going to happen. That’s part of the sport and part of what makes it great. Focus on what you can control and set realistic goals and expectations for the season.
5.) Be competitive, but have fun
Baseball is one of life’s great competitive sports. It’s America’s pastime. But there’s a time to engage in competition and there’s a time to just enjoy the moment and have fun. Everybody wants to win, but having fun is the most important thing and one of keys to a successful season.
As you plan for a successful season, you also need to prepare your team for registration and any associated league dues. Baseball is fun, but managing team registration and payments has taken the fun out of sports for too long—until Pickle Juice came along. We help simplify your registration and payments and make it easy for you to manage it all from one centralized location. Interested in learning more? We can set you up with a free demo.