09/01/2026
Most of your winter gym time will go to hitting. It always does. Fielding is where you'd actually get the most back.
Hitting is the thing parents can watch improve, so that's what fills a two-hour block in January. But in our experience the ground ball decides more 12U innings than anything else — and it's the one skill you can genuinely teach on a gym floor. No field, no cage, no waiting for the thaw.
The trouble is what in-house fielding practice usually looks like: a coach hitting grounders at a line of kids. A girl gets a handful of reps in forty minutes and nobody's footwork changes. That's not the coach's fault. Nobody handed him a curriculum, and "get in front of it" is what he was taught himself.
We'll be straight about how we're built, because "we coach everything" is not a real answer. Fielding and hitting are the core of what we teach, and the ground ball is what this post is about. Pitching is its own discipline and we staff it that way — Coach Heidi runs that program. She pitched herself, and she teaches the mechanics along with the part nobody drills: what you do in the circle when it isn't going well.
There's nothing to buy in this post. We're a nonprofit club program in the south metro, this is the gap we keep running into, and over the next several weeks we're going to say out loud what we think can be done about it — including the parts that are awkward for a club program to say.
If you're on a board or running an in-house program: what does your winter gym time actually go to right now?
