Recommendation Report

Recommendation Report

To: Mike Applebaum (West Hills High School softball coach)

From: Melissa Eggleston

Subject: Recommendation for upcoming practices

As you requested, I have thought and made up a schedule for a more efficient and effective practice.  The purpose of this report is to propose new ideas for practices.  After giving it much thought and researching different methods, I decided that there should be three main points of the practice.  With your comments in mind, I developed the following criteria for practices:

1.     Offensive stations

2.     Defensive stations

3.     Conditioning

Recommendation

I recommend that we start off practice with an hour of hitting stations that are consistently moving.  After an hour of hitting, we will go into defense for another hour.  Finally at the end of the practice, there would be a 30 min to an hour of conditioning left to do.  This would work better then what we do now because the girls would consistently be moving and practice would be a lot more fast pace so the girls can build stamina and endurance. 

Discussion
Judging from when you get off work and when you are able to come down to the fields, practice would start at 3:30 and end no later then 6:30 so all of the criteria is accomplished. 

Offense:  After pre-game warm ups we would jump into hitting stations right away.  There would be 7 different stations to rotate the girls through.  Every girl will have one partner they will go through the stations with.  4 out of the 7 stations will consist of the girls using different types of bats to improve their swings.  2 other stations will be held in the cages where one girl will be tossed baseballs and in the other cage the girls will be tossed softballs.  Out on the field we will have live pitching either from the pitching machine or one of our players.  While the live pitching is going on 2 other girls will be out in the field shagging the balls for them.  With all of this going on practice will be run a lot more smoothly because everyone will have something to do. 

Defense:  For the beginning of defense everyone will warm up their arms together.  After everyone is warmed up outfield and infield will be spilt up so they can work on drills separately.  After the infield and outfield have done the drills they need to, they will come together to work on specific drills as a whole team.  Starters and non-starters will be worked in equally so everyone has something to do.

Conditioning:  For the last half hour to an hour of practice there will be conditioning.  Conditioning can vary from a lot of different things.  We can run sprints or have different stations of circuits.  We would be able to switch off what kind of conditioning we do depending on if we have a game the next day or not.  With all the conditioning we do it will build up the girls endurance so they will be able to last longer in the games and they will become stronger players as a whole.