Three hours. That’s how long my first real practice as a head coach ran. The worst part: there were only 17 players; now we are way more efficient with 40.
Three hours, and if you’d asked my guys to name one thing they got better at that day, I’m not sure they could’ve told you. We hit in the cage. We took some ground balls. We ran a defensive period that fell completely apart because nobody knew whose job it was to cover third on a bunt. Guys stood in lines. Guys stood by the fence. Guys stood everywhere except where the actual work was happening.
I remember driving home that night, grip-steering the wheel of my truck, and thinking about something that had nothing to do with baseball.
I played this game for fifteen years before I ever stepped into a dugout as a coach. I knew how to swing a bat and how to catch a ball. But before I ever led young men in a numbered jersey, I got baptized in leadership wearing a military uniform with a name tape. Four years of it. And in that world, you don’t run an operation without a tactical plan that answers three critical questions before anybody moves: What is the objective? What does success look like? How much time do we have to get there?
I had spent four years living inside that relentless, clock-bound discipline. And then I’d just spent three hours coaching a baseball team as I’d never heard of it.
That was the turning point for me. The problem was never the drill; the drill was fine. The problem was I’d built a practice plan that was really just a grocery list: hitting, then this, then that, with no answer to what any of it was actually for.
A list is not a plan. A list is just where you’re hoping the time goes.
The Zoo vs. The Jungle
To understand why a structured list fails, you have to understand the difference between the Zoo and the Jungle.
A zoo tiger cannot compete with a jungle tiger. In the zoo, there is no fighting to survive, no raw competition, and everything is perfectly scheduled, caged, and structured. But as coaches, we face a catch-22: we need the zoo to prepare our guys for the jungle. If you want your kids to actually get better, practice has to be harder than the game. You have to intentionally speed their internal clocks up during the week, because if the first time their clock gets sped up is in the first inning on Friday night, you’ve already lost.
I learned this lesson the hard way with our current graduating class when they were younger. Our very first time in live action, we lost 4-11. We committed nine errors. You read that right. Nine errors in one game.
Only one of our starters that day had any real varsity experience from the year before: a sophomore first baseman. Our pitching staff surrendered 11 runs, but only one of them was an earned run. As a coaching staff, we were pulling our hair out. But when the dust settled, we had to look in the mirror: we hadn’t done a good job prepping those cats for the jungle. We were so focused on the mechanics of the “zoo” that we forgot to prepare these largely underclassmen for competition against 18- and 19-year-olds. Competition that spent the last three years getting their faces kicked in by our 2023 class. The varsity game is fast. It is light-years faster than the 14U and 15U summer ball tournaments they were coming off of.
We took the kid gloves off. We dropped the fences of the zoo and threw those jokers directly into the jungle to train for the jungle.
We brought back the high-speed chaos they used to see when they practiced up with us as 8th graders. We had multiple baseballs flying around the diamond simultaneously. We put ground balls on a strict clock. We fired up the double-machine batting practice drills with built-in timing, movement, and speed challenges. We forced them to swim in the deep end.
The result? Later that same spring, we traveled to that exact same team’s home field and beat them 6-4. Those guys grew up right before our eyes. They won their final four region games of the season to steal 4th place and earn a postseason berth, including a clean sweep of the team that held 4th place at the start of the week. They realized they belonged in the jungle. Instead of shrinking, they stepped up because they had been trained to survive the environment.
The Three-Question Practice Plan
To build jungle cats, every single station, drill, or period on your practice sheet has to survive three tactical questions before you ever blow the whistle:
- What is this station actually for? “Hitting” or “Infield” is too broad to coach. It needs to be: “Two-strike approach against a fastball away” or “Bunt coverage on the clock.” If you can’t name the hyper-specific objective in one sentence, you don’t know why you’re running it, and neither will your players.
- How many quality reps does each kid get in this window? Time on the clock does not equate to work getting done. A 20-minute station where a kid gets 6 live reps because he’s standing in a long line is garbage. A 12-minute station where he gets 15 rapid-fire reps is gold. Count the reps, not the minutes.
- What does success look like today? “Get better” is a lazy standard. Success must be measurable. Give them a target number, a time constraint, or a hard execution metric they either hit or they didn’t.
Admittedly, we are incredibly blessed here. We have luxuries plenty of programs don’t: a full turf facility, the AWRE camera system, a fleet of Hack Attacks, a covered cage setup with four hitting spaces, and an administration that aggressively invests in our development tools.
But wealth doesn’t buy culture; stewardship does. We DIY our own training aids to maximize reps. You can go buy a rack of expensive weighted training bats, or for the cost of three rolls of tape, some old cracked bats, and a little bit of time, you can create your own overload/underload bat training system.
Furthermore, you don’t need a massive staff to find reps. This past year, it was mostly just me and my assistant, Logan, running the show until the JV season ended. We had to get creative, and we realized there are a massive number of hidden practice reps right inside your games.
For example, you get exactly ten minutes for your pregame Infield/Outfield (I/O). If your dudes aren’t moving at 95% game speed during that window, you are doing them a massive disservice. We built a brand-new pregame I/O routine from scratch this year. It looks like a high-flying, three-ring circus, but opposing teams are always stopping to watch, and opposing coaches constantly compliment our guys on their relentless effort.
Look at the infielders between innings. You get roughly 3 ground ball warm-up reps per half-inning. If you treat those seriously (one two-hand, one backhand, one forehand) across a 7-inning game, that is 21 reps. Multiply that by a 30-game season, and your players just got over 600 free, high-focus repetitions without adding a single minute to your practice schedule.
The Application
The dirt doesn’t care how beautiful your practice plan looks when it’s typed up in Excel. It only cares whether the time spent on it actually forged a competitor.
Before your next practice, pull up your plan and add a mandatory fourth column next to every single block: Purpose. If you can’t fill that column out with one clear, aggressive sentence, cut the drill before the first pitch of the day.
Then, pick just one period this week, pull out a clicker, and count the actual quality repetitions per kid instead of just watching the minutes tick away on the scoreboard clock. You will probably be uncomfortable with what you find. Most coaches are.
But that discomfort is the exact catalyst you need. It’s the same gut-check I felt in my truck after that useless three-hour practice years ago. It is infinitely better to face that reality in your truck on a Tuesday afternoon than to watch a lack of preparation bite you in the rear end during a one-run regional loss in May.
Your players won’t remember how long practice ran. They will remember whether they walked off the dirt better equipped to survive the jungle than when they set foot on it.
Give them a plan that guarantees it.
Let’s get to work. — Coach O
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