http://www.prayforrain.us Inside Youth Baseball Wed, 11 Jul 2007 18:49:02 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The June, 2007 edition of Pediatrics, the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, has an article that every coach and parent should read about the risks of and treatments for a child's physical injuries from overuse and overtraining....and their mental injuries from burnout. The article is ... http://www.prayforrain.us/?p=49 I'm convinced that one of the reasons basketball has become more popular in recent years is because you don't need an entire team to have fun. With a basketball goal on every playground and at the end of every other driveway, kids can shoot baskets by themselves for hours upon ... http://www.prayforrain.us/?p=48 So here's a quick and easy way to get your kids moving, running and having more fun at practice (see Thursday's post ;-). Start with any "line-up drill" -- you know, these are the ones in which you ask the kids to 'line-up' and take turns doing something -- but use ... http://www.prayforrain.us/?p=46 When I first started coaching five years ago, it never would have occurred to me to run high energy practices -- for five- and six-year olds -- but this year I noticed that the more I worked the kids at practice, the more fun they had. Somewhere around the mid-season ... http://www.prayforrain.us/?p=45 I'm sure the idea of "negative attention" is a very old one for school teachers, and perhaps many parents, but as a baseball coach, I first learned this a few years ago when I was conducting batting drills with one of my players. Here's the story. One day when one of ... http://www.prayforrain.us/?p=44 I have a lot of comments to post about things I learned this season that will trickle out over the next few weeks. I thought my team had a terrific season, and I was very proud of the progress the kids made over such a short amount of time. I ... http://www.prayforrain.us/?p=43 "Angels!" This year I'm coaching T-Ball again. I forget where I read it, but one of the baseball books I read during my first year of coaching reported that 5- and 6-year olds have a three minute attention span. This is important to remember during the slow parts of games. Here's ... http://www.prayforrain.us/?p=42 The first year I coached 7- and 8-year olds, I ran many of the same pre-season drills I ran when I was coaching T-Ball. Then at our first game, I noticed that almost all of the outs recorded against our team came on base-running errors. Or, to be fair to ... http://www.prayforrain.us/?p=41 Details here from Little League International. Week-long camps run in July and August, with sign-ups currently underway. http://www.prayforrain.us/?p=40 One of the hardest things to teach young players is to run through First Base instead of stopping on the bag. Even for young kids who routinely watch professional baseball -- and see every player run fast through and past First Base -- their initial instinct is to slow down ... http://www.prayforrain.us/?p=39