Baseball practice can be fun or boring. In order to perfect game-related baseball skills, players must perform many repetitive drills. These are necessary; however, repeating the same drill over and over will soon become boring to little leaguers. The only exception is if that drill is fun. With this in mind, try to keep your practices, as much fun as possible. A boring practice is distracting and some players may even quit. My approach to using fundamental stations, is designed to best efficiently use everyone's time, give the players the proper repetitions needed.

Make sure your kids are doing things right. The more they do things the wrong way, the more they are apt to perform them incorrectly in a game. Players generally play the way they practice. So, if you practice right, your team will play right. Every successful youth baseball manager arms himself with the proper baseball fundamentals and a plan to go out onto the field and teach these fundamentals correctly. Have fun and do things right. Your kids will soon learn than success is far more fun than failure.

Discipline is necessary, but if you find yourself spending more time handing out laps than teaching the proper way to field a ground ball, ask yourself why. Do you have a dozen youngsters standing around while you hit one grounder at a time?

Before you practice, identify the areas you'd like your team to work on. If you don't have any idea what's going to happen in practice, chances are, the results won't be good. Don't waste a lot of valuable time. Kids come to practice, ready to play. Quickly get them into action. Work on base running first. This gets them loose and the blood flowing. Kids simply love to run around.

You should spend little time with the entire team working on the same drill. Instead, break your team into three or four groups. Have one work on hitting, one work on ground balls, another work on relay throws, etc. After 15 or 20 minutes, rotate the groups. This ensures that each player gets many more repetitions than they ever would have otherwise, and it breaks the monotony.

If you don't have enough coaches for this, ask for parental help - or conscript them from the stands, if need be. Tell them what to do, then go to the next station before they can back out.

You should spend at least three minutes at each station. Players must understand exactly what you want them to do. Show them how and don't just tell them. Things sometimes get lost in your terminology. Use only words they understand. Every player on the team must get the same meaning.

The more you can involve parents, the better the season will be for you, as coach. You will only need a couple of parents to help at each practice; therefore, try to work out a schedule involving as many as possible. Some may not be able to come out every week, but I've found you can always find more than enough parents willing to help.

Use common sense in determining length of practices. Anytime you have a group of kids, it's easy to tell when they lose interest. Age is a determining factor, too. For example, you won't keep the attention of an eight-year-old more than two hours. Their attention span does grow with age. Keep this in mind. It is always better to err on short practices rather than those long boring sessions.

For the five to eight age group, practices should never last longer than one hour. Rotate your fundamental stations more frequently and shorten twenty-minute stations to ten-minute stations. A lot can be accomplished in an hour.

Eleven and twelve year old players begin having longer attention spans and have a better understanding of the game. At this age, practices can become a bit more traditional and they will develop much quicker. Again, use common sense as you move up in age groups.

Turn drills into contests - give points to different teams within your squad, and watch the intensity level rise. Raise the stakes by offering a small reward; a stick of gum motivates a kid more than you believe. Consider handing out helmet stickers for outstanding performers.

Keep in mind that, as a Little League coach, you are one of the most influential people your players will ever have in their lives. Don't fall into the trap of always criticizing failures without recognizing achievement and effort. If a kid is giving his best, recognize that fact, even if he is failing. Support him, and he may amaze you - and himself - with what he can do.