We love to implement a [tag]baseball drill[/tag] we call “Star Drill” in our practices. These are excellent [tag]youth baseball drills[/tag] to use throughout the year. They are great drills to put “game like” pressures on the players, and it allows them to build cohesiveness and trust.
We have the players line-up at the tips of a pentagram (5-point star). The lines are equally placed approximately at the positions of Short Stop, 2nd Base, 1st Base, 3rd Base, and Catcher (home plate). We time the players each week to mark their improvement and error reduction to complete the drill. They have to catch the [tag]baseball[/tag] and throw it to the next station and hustle to the end of that line or they might be in the middle of the next throw (incentive to hustle). The order of the stations are as follows: SS, 1B, 3B, 2B, Home, and back to SS.
The players must go through each station (star point) until the player that started the drill at SS catches the last ball at SS. With our team of about 20 players, we can get through this drill as fast as 90 seconds or as slow as 4 minutes. If a player misses the throw or drops a catch, he must hustle to get the baseball, without help from his teammates, get back to his position before he can throw the ball to the next station. If there is an errant throw, his teammates can “pick-him up” by digging the ball out of the dirt or jumping to catch it.
We do these [tag]baseball drills[/tag] 2-5 times depending on how well we are achieving our goals from the drill. We keep track of the lowest errors and times of the season to compare each week our improvement.