Baseball Strategy

Baseball Strategies For The Off-Season  

It is very easy to stress to your team the importance of working on their skills during the season.  Baseball Training is easy at this time because the team can immediately see how baseball training will help them in the season they are about to start playing in.  Unfortunately, it can be quite a bit more challenging to get your team to focus on improving in the off-season.  Baseball Training at this time can be difficult because of various time demands of the players and the huge time separation from the end of one season to the start of another.  Naturally, the better teams find ways to keep their players motivated and focused on improving their skills.  Here are some tips to help make this possible: 

1.      Encourage your baseball team to play together in elite leagues for summer and winter baseball.  This will give them the opportunity to continue to play together against elite talent and allow them to keep practicing their skills in game situations.   

2.      Provide a weight training program and fitness program to give to players which they can use in the off-season.   You should also divide the team into work out teams so that they players can hold each other accountable.  You cannot ensure that they will follow the program, but you can at least provide them with the proper tools.  One caveat: make sure this is appropriate with your school districts rules.    

3.      Make someone you can trust be the coach.  Consider having a former player or a father for one of the baseball players to help run the summer league team and/or the weight training program.  They will have a vested interest in seeing the team improve and, it will naturally translate into them motivating your players to improve.  

4.      Create and sell cool team baseball t-shirts in the off-season .  This may sound gimmicky, but if they are nice looking, all the players will want one and this will be a subtle reminder of the need to focus on baseball in the off-season.   

5.      Put together a library of baseball training videos, exciting baseball games, and provide a list of good baseball training websites and books to your players.  The baseball training videos and exciting baseball games can be shown when the weather is bad in off-season baseball or can even be borrowed by the players to watch at home.   

6.      Recommend that your players get hitting and/or pitching lessons from top baseball instructors in the area.  Put together a list and provide it to players and parents to make them aware of this option.  However, again be mindful of any prohibitive rules that may apply.   

Basically, your baseball strategies for the off-season’s goal is to make it as easy as possible for your team to practice their baseball training in the off-season.  If you are successful in reaching just a few players, this will result in you having a better team.  Remember the improvement of just one player can make the difference between going to state and going home early.

*To get some help with your defense, check out baseball defensive strategies.