Skill Building Competitions: Baseball and Fastpitch Softball

Effective coaching requires planning varied formats that keep players mentally and physically engaged throughout the practice. For example, challenging and cooperative games support exciting training sessions, improve focus, and encourage player-coach and player-player rapport.

While we provide vital offensive and defensive tips for most competitions, this book is not a fundamentals book. Instead, its primary purpose is to demonstrate how to use team skill-building contests under game-like pressure to get your baseball and fastpitch softball players game-ready more quickly than straight drills alone.

Focus and learning amplify when you gamify.

The baseball and fastpitch softball games are a constant competition, not only against opponents but also against oneself. As coaches, we want our players to get comfortable with both types of competition and enjoy it. The best way to be comfortable in competitive situations is to create a competitive culture in your practices.

Providing game-like structures, combining skill-building with competition is the objective of this book.

These are not simple drills found all over the internet. Instead, the 65 unique competitions are precisely detailed. Fast-moving and designed to maximize quality repetitions (swings, ground balls, fly balls, throws to bases, etc.) in an allotted amount of time.

This handy coaching tool contains functional and innovative games that reinforce your fundamental instruction. The rules of each competition, clearly laid step-by-step, promote habit building for individual skills and team communication in situations players face during every game.

Each game includes the purpose, equipment needed, time required, ages the drill is suitable, and well-thought-out rules. Chapters include competitions for throwing, infield, outfield, pitching, catching, hitting, bunting, baserunning, and offense vs. defense. Appropriate for youth, Middle School, High School, and College.

Written by Coach Gary Barr, author of Building the High-Level Swing Series, the hitting competitions alone are valuable for their suggestions on utilizing targeting, constraints, and learning how to perform well under game-like pressure.

Skill Building Competitions is a coaching lifesaver - providing great games that improve critical skills and players love. Flip open a chapter depending on the desired focus of the drill, read the rules, and you are ready to incorporate the competition in today’s practice plan.