Last week, I sent out a request for my newsletter subscribers to send in their favorite [tag]free youth baseball drills[/tag]. Check out this one below (very creative!).
From Don…
This is not a [tag]baseball drill[/tag] as much as a game that our [tag]baseball[/tag] team plays at the end of practice that the kids love and it serves as a very good practice drill for fielding grounders.
We call it ” king of the hill”
We have an indoor facility where the nonbatting cage portion of the facility is a little larger than the size of an infield. We split the team into two groups and have one group on each end of the facility going width-wise.
We put cones out as the outside barriers and put another cone in the middle of the facility. We then play an elimination game where a player is eliminated from the game whenever they miss a grounder.
We encourage them to throw the balls to one another as hard as possible but it must bounce before the middle cone to be fair. A player is also eliminated when the throw is “out of bounds”. As players get eliminated there is more ground to cover for the remaining players. We start out 5 on 5 and usually wind up 2 or 3 on 1. We try to be fair as to how much ground one player is expected to cover as to where we allow the ball to be thrown to.
This game teaches teamwork as well as going to both the forehand and the backhand as the players will cheer for their teammates after they are eliminated. we usually play 2 out of 3 to determine the winning team and let everybody play as much as possible each time.