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29 Mar 10 at 17:57 |
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Overworked Posts: 1 Joined: 29 Mar 10  Offline |
Teaching Late Starters to Bat |
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Guys, Have found that since I have taken on more coaching responsibilities around my club that I have am not equal to the task in terms of coaching batting. To elaborate. We have a reasonable sized junior setup where I coach, 35-40 kids across 4 teams. However, unlike what the ideal model would have, many of them are late starters. 14+ years old. What I have found since taking over the worst hit team (the under 18s), is that with the exception of 2 or 3 players, they just cant bat. Coaching session after coaching session is being used over winter trying to rectify this problem, but having just played an indoor game, all the old demons have arisen! I have several main concerns that I was hoping to get some advice on. Is a general net session where boys (and girls!) are batting against real bowlers counterproductive for these kids? Especially since we cant guarantee that there will be a coach able to get into the net with them to try and ground out a technique? Should we pull them from the net and try other avenues? Back to tennis ball and plastic bat? Do we regress to progress? How should we take the new (late starters) when they come and try to teach them in a way that will help them catch up as well as possible to their more experienced team mates? More to the point, there is a tour of South Africa in 18 months time that I am honestly as a coach bricking myself at the prospect of trying to get them ready for. Can you offer any advice on how I can prgress these kids in terms of batting. (Coincidentally, the bowling and fielding is superb!) |
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Comments
You need to start them off with a stationary ball and progress onto throwdowns. Get their feet moving so their bodies are in the right position and have them playing aggressive shots - particularly driving a half volley and pulling a longhop. Start by throwing half volleys, then start throwing long hops, then mix them up, to make sure they can actually tell the difference.
Once they can punish the bad balls, introduce a good length delivery, and teach them to adjust their drives and pulls to defend the ball instead. I'd focus on these three shots to start with - tell them not to worry about anything wide of offstump or down the legside - just think pull, drive or block. You can probably get them into the normal nets at this point.
Posts: 27
I echo what AB is suggesting. Get players to work in pairs or threes and go over the basics. Ball off a tee, then drop feeds through to bobble feeds and then throw downs and finally bowling. If you have access to a bowling machine then use this as well.
As you suggest, in some cases having this type of player in nets can be counter productive. They get into bad habits (opening the stance to swing through leg) or worse still get bowled a lot and demoralised. It doesn't help if the bowling is poor as they'll either be leaving or chasing wides and not playing that many balls.