Winning or becoming good at softball depends on much more than just how talented you are as a player or a team. It all rests on how well you train and the effectiveness of the softball practice plans that you use. In fact, a player that practices well is more likely to succeed in the softball than one with all the talent in the world. It is the responsibility of a coach to come up with the best practice plan for the team, and this should not be difficult for someone with the right knowledge and softball experience. A few tips on how to create the perfect practice plan always come in handy and below are five very helpful ones.
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1. Plan Must be Doable and Effective
Time is of the essence, and you can never have enough of it to do your softball practice. However, if you plan well, you can be able to utilize every second that you have to improve the performance of your team. To do this, you should check on the total amount of time you have each day and use that to come up with the practice plan. Make sure that you do as much as possible in that time. Make sure that you include warm-ups, drills, team building and cool down exercise in the program and this is regardless of how much time you have.
2. Always Include Skill Building Warm-ups in the Plan
A warm-up is one of those things that all effective softball practice plans should include. However, how you do it will have a significant effect on the performance of the team. Most coaches will have the players run up and down the field, but this is not the best way to do it. Although this will help improve their fitness, a good warm should aim at building their softball skills. Include exercises that will inculcate particular softball skills on the players and also make the warm-ups very dynamic to stretch every part of the body.
3. Encourage Practice Versatility
It is a fact that a pitcher should spend most of the time improving her pitching skills because this is the position that she will be playing. However, if you are training as a team, you should encourage versatility in practice as much as you want each player to train in their position. Unlike in other sports, it is important for all players in softball to not only be knowledgeable on how to play in other positions but also be as good as possible in the other positions. To ensure versatility in training, you should have drills that entail rotating each player to play in different positions.
4. Make Sure That You Also Work On The Brain
Softball practice is not just about improving players physically but also mentally. Most coaches will focus a lot on improving the pitching and hitting but forget about the mental aspect of the game which is equally important. Agility, focus, and good decision-making are vital elements of a game and all players in the field should have them if you want the team to perform well. A coach can improve all these using drills, but the most important thing is not to forget about them when developing a practice plan
5. Always Be Prepared
A softball practice plan requires a lot of preparation if you want it to be productive. As a coach, you might be very experienced and knowledgeable, but there are still many things and techniques that you might not know because softball is a very detailed game. And so even if you think you know enough it is important to do some research when designing a practice plan so that it can be as rich as possible. It is from researching that you will be able to find out what other coaches are doing and get additional tips on designing your practice plan. Apart from this, you can also prepare by identifying the weaknesses that the players might be having and use them to come up with an effective plan.
Excellent softball practice plans are the difference between successful softball players and the ones that are not very successful. If you do not plan well, then you should be ready to fail, and this is regardless of how talented your players might be or how willing they are to learn. Taking the time to develop a good practice plan is the best thing that you can do for a team and with the five easy tips above in mind, this should not be a problem. Also keep in mind the fact that even the best practice plans still require commitment and discipline.