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Let me warn you that this drill is only for kids under the age of thirteen. As all coaches know, once kids hit the age of thirteen, their personalities change and this drill will not work very well. In fact, try this and coaches will get the “Are you serious” look from players. However, for kids under thirteen, this is a fun drill, especially for early in the season when players are learning the basics of fielding ground balls. It also serves as a good practice warm up drill.

Team Fielding Drill for Guaranteed Fun

Players are separated into two groups and set about forty to fifty feet apart, with one player behind the other.

One ball is used and the drill gets started by one of the players at the beginning of the line rolling the ball to the player at the beginning of the opposite line, who fields the ball. After releasing the ball, the player runs to the back of the line where he rolled the ball to (opposite group).

However, as player releases the ball, they are required to yell out; to the player he is rolling the ball to, a fielding instruction, beginning with “Stay Down.”

Easy enough – after everyone has gone through a few times with each player yelling stay down as he releases the ball, the coach has players add the instruction of “Line it up” so kids are now yelling “Stay Down, Line It Up” after each toss to their teammate.

The coach adds a new instruction every few minutes with the third instruction being – “Stay Down, Line It Up, Two Hands,” and the fourth one, “Stay Down, Line It Up, Two Hands, Look It In.” and the last last one “Stay Down, Line It Up, Two Hands, Look It In, Get Rid of It.”

By the end, as you would guess, kids are all tongue tied, confused, and laughing as they attempt to say all those things as they are rolling the ball to their teammate. Of course, coaches should be explaining what each yelled instruction means and insist that players are doing those with each groundball. It is a fun way to have players learn groundball-fielding fundamentals, where the players are instructing other players and learning at the same time. Coaches will see a marked improvement of fielding fundamentals in a short time, or at least from practice to practice.

Finally, this drill can be done for different types of ground balls – slow, fast, left right, bare hand plays, glove only, etc….

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