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Introduction from Coach Pallone

Hello,
My name is Jon Pallone, I’m the Varsity Baseball Coach at Quakertown Community High School. This is my 11th year as the varsity coach, but I’ve been coaching 18 years at the high school level for school as well as summer and fall ball. The past three summers I coached a QYBA travel team from 10U through 12U this past season.

Goals: I love the game of baseball, I love the learning and development process, and I love this community. My goal for this blog is to help educate parents and players a little bit at a time to make for the best experience for a long time. I hope to give you more resources than myself so that you can help your player at home and your teams at practice and in games.

Please feel free to reach out and give me ideas of what I can include in future posts, my contact is [email protected].

American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA) Podcast

This is a link is to a podcast by the American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA). The ABCA coaching membership goes from pros, to college, high school, and yes, even youth coaches. There are a lot of great resources available to members.

Members and non-members can all listen to their podcast free. I wanted to start with this recent one from both a travel and high school coach in Virginia. His teams included Michael Cuddyer, the Upton brothers, Mark Reynolds, and Ryan Zimmerman. Could you imagine those guys on the same team here? We can dream. He has great insight and advice for parents and youth coaches. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/abca-podcast/id1113053628?i=1000634608278

PVC Hitting Drill

PVC Hitting Drill. This is from Blast Motion, a resource I’ll get to in later blogs. To adjust, put a wiffle ball on the tee and let them hit the ball, they will like it much better and it will give you and the player more instant feedback. Don’t worry about moving the tee around, just set it up in the middle of the player just in from of their front leg.

I like this drill for young hitters all the way up to the high schools guys. Take notice of the three “plains” (head, shoulders, and hips). Many young hitter will try to swing all three plains together at the same time.

The hitters eyes stay locked on the ball, so that “plain” will actually appear to rotate backwards as the head rotated from front shoulder to the back shoulder through the swing. The first plain to rotate will be the hips. I encourage you to start players on this drill without a stride, just a load (rock back). Then the shoulders will rotate. If the hitter pulls their head they’ll miss the ball. If the hitter tries to just make contact that will barely hit it, and kids like to hit things. It will also force them to swing with their lower half, something many young players don’t do naturally.

With young hitters, including my own kids (8, 11, and 13) and nephews, I tell them there are three rules to hitting. 1) Keep your eye on the ball 2)Swing as hard as you can and 3) No one cares if you miss. This will help them develop their swings.
https://youtu.be/p6o47yFom5o?si=L3jOQrJR1en8PN3O

Gross Motor Skill Development/Teaching through physical progression

The next few posts will be about teaching gross motor skills. The best athletes do not always make the best baseball players. How can we get the best out of our athletes. In future posts I will discuss letting the players be athletes, but in this one I want to focus on practice design for teams and parents.

When attempting to develop gross motor skills one of the best big ideas to to progress from simple to more challenging tasks. For an example moving from tee work, to front toss, to batting practice, and finishing with hitting live off a pitcher. Hitting, fielding, pitching, and throwing should all be done progressively in practice. Unfortunately, there is only so much time in a session so you can’t do them all in the same practice. However, by building routines and procedures into your practice you can have an efficient way to develop the gross motor skills and warm up at the same time.

Drill of the Week: Pickle https://youtu.be/QTCFUuf4X4c?si=3blHQtKyXnvn9wQX

This is a fun game that you can use to loosen up players in the beginning of practice after dynamic stretching. Please keep it to a designated amount of time so it doesn’t become the main part of practice. Another variation of this is to put all your players on the bases but the two on the bases. Have the two in the bases play catch. Have the runners go back and forth. If they are tagged they are out. The last two get to play catch. If players stay out on the base you can give them a five count to leave for the next base. You could also reward the runners who get to the most bases.

Panther Batting Practice

Please try not to take BP on the field with one player hitting and everyone else shagging. It is boring for 90% of your team at a time. Instead try Panther BP. I got this drill from Clemson, who called it Tiger BP. They borrowed it from a JUCO in Iowa who called it Reiver BP.

This is a great drill to do when you co practice with another team. 18 players is a great number to have.

Split your group in half
You put a player at each position in the field
The other half put 2 at each base and 2 at the plate
One hits and the other practices being on deck and timing the pitcher
Each hitter gets five pitches

The first one is live
The fielders and runners play it live
The hitter does not run it out
The next pitch is dead
Then live
Then dead
The fifth and final pitch is live and the hitter runs it out

This will keep all players engaged and give them live reps (instead of shagging). It will get your hitters 5 swings (instead of 1 for a scrimmage).

You can adjust if you only have 12 players.

Split into 3 groups of 4
Put 2 groups in the field and one group in the bases
Put the runners at 1B (or as you do it more 2B) and this will force players to get live looks at different scenarios