High School Baseball Question

[jpenrod]

For those of you with kids in High School Baseball, played high school baseball, coach High School Baseball, etc.

My nephew started high school this year and was very excited about finally being able to play school baseball. He has been playing in numerous "little leagues" since he was old enough to hold a bat. His father played college ball and just missed being picked up for the minors (last player cut at open tryouts) , his father's brother played minor league ball and still works in scouting for a major league club. Basically I give you his pedigree so you can understand that he comes from a baseball family that understands the way things work.

I was speaking to my sister the other day and she told me how dissappointed they have been with the High School team this year and have wondered why they even let him waste his time with them. She said all they have them do is run, run, run. and if there is time at the end of "practice" they may throw each of the players about five pitches for batting practice. I told here it was probably just conditioning for early season and would get better, then she told me they only had about 5 games left! Admittedly this is the freshman team, not even JV, but even so I would think they would have had a little more practice than that. According to my brother-in-law, if it was not for the time that the uys on the team had spent playing in little league most of the players would not even know what end of the bat to hold because of the poor coaching on the team. I want to encourage my sister to let him continue playing high school, just for the fact I figure more college recruiters will be attending high school games than little league games, but I am wondering what everyone else's experience is with this. Is high school ball normally so poorly coached or is this just because they have a bad coach or because they are on the freshman team?

[BoSoxNation]

That is all that my freshman team did too....RUN! I think that they do that to pick out the people that really want to play at the Jv or Varsity level

[jpenrod]

That is all that my freshman team did too....RUN! I think that they do that to pick out the people that really want to play at the Jv or Varsity level


That is sort of what I figured. I think my sister might have expected more from the school league, especially since they keep preaching "this isn't your little league team anymore".

[TG Coach]

For those of you with kids in High School Baseball, played high school baseball, coach High School Baseball, etc.

My nephew started high school this year and was very excited about finally being able to play school baseball. He has been playing in numerous "little leagues" since he was old enough to hold a bat. His father played college ball and just missed being picked up for the minors (last player cut at open tryouts) , his father's brother played minor league ball and still works in scouting for a major league club. Basically I give you his pedigree so you can understand that he comes from a baseball family that understands the way things work.

I was speaking to my sister the other day and she told me how dissappointed they have been with the High School team this year and have wondered why they even let him waste his time with them. She said all they have them do is run, run, run. and if there is time at the end of "practice" they may throw each of the players about five pitches for batting practice. I told here it was probably just conditioning for early season and would get better, then she told me they only had about 5 games left! Admittedly this is the freshman team, not even JV, but even so I would think they would have had a little more practice than that. According to my brother-in-law, if it was not for the time that the uys on the team had spent playing in little league most of the players would not even know what end of the bat to hold because of the poor coaching on the team. I want to encourage my sister to let him continue playing high school, just for the fact I figure more college recruiters will be attending high school games than little league games, but I am wondering what everyone else's experience is with this. Is high school ball normally so poorly coached or is this just because they have a bad coach or because they are on the freshman team?

It's not uncommon for middle school and freshman team coaches to be below average. Even at the varsity level, it depends on how the school values winning baseball and the flexibility they have on coaching hires. Some schools have to hire within the school. Some have enough flexibility to hire within the district. Some (ours) are fortunate they can hire any teacher from any school district to coach.

[TG Coach]

""While he had a total of forty home runs in his first two big-league seasons, it is unlikely that Aaron will break any records in this department." ~ Furman Bisher, Atlanta Journal and Constitution "journalist""

Irony: Hank Aaron never won a regular season home run title. He was just consistant.

[bbjunkie]

My son's on the HSJV team with a coach who tries to run the show by himself. There practices frequently come down to a lot of kids standing around or soft tossing to each other while one kid is in the batting cage with the coach throwing to him. All the kids realize they aren't learning much, but recognize that if they don't pay their dues here they won't get to the varsity team. However, JV should be a prime learning experience and not just a place where they have to do time. I don't know what the HS politics are around this situation, but I'm sure the varsity HC understands the situation. Maybe he just isn't able to do anything about it.

[wlcvikings]

I'm a sophmore and play on the JV team, our practices are very structured with only a small amount of conditioning at the end, last year on the freshman team, we only had one coach, but still managed to learn more from him than any coach id ever had, and again a small amount of conditioning at the end, i don't think that its all freshman teams that condition for the whole practice, it is based on the coaches beliefs, if he feels his team needs to get faster because they are lacking other fundamental skills (hitting, fielding) then conditioning is the only way to do that:homeplate:

[JCM718]

Well, I'm out here in Las Vegas, and I'm on the JV team. There is no freshman team becuase participation is so low. I hate that out here, back in Boston where I used to be participation is higher. But all we really do is run as well. We practice; but I hate listening to my friends in school asking me why the baseball team runs the most out of any sport.

The way I see it, is baseball, at sometimes can be such a low effort sport, and when coaches don't see that effort, they can easily become tickd off. I just love the sport and will never quit.

[TheKid]

i am currently on the JV/freshman team (i go up to JV sometimes). In our freshmen practices we only run if we do poorly or if we didnt run last practice. We're a pretty solid team at 7-11. But I don't think if we ran more we'd be better, i actually think you'd be worse since you'd hate going to practice and hate playing the game of baseball.

[Utility07]

I coach freshman baseball. We always run at the end of practice a little bit. If the kids lack focus, or are being immature, we run more. There are the occasional days where we do little but run.

[LHSbaseball3]

our team isnt like that at all. my school only has a jv and vars. our coaches for jv are amazing, but vars is terrible (kinda ironic) im on jv, and we run 2-3 poles everyday before practice (pole to pole is one) and we run around the bases 4 times after.

i would stick with it because it can only get better, freshman teams are always the worst my friend said