Coaching Youth Baseball - ASEP

Coaching Youth Baseball

by ASEP

NEW, 192 pages

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About Coaching Youth Baseball

Coaching Youth Baseball, Fourth Edition, stresses fun, safety, and effective instruction, helping you create an environment that promotes learning, encourages a love of the game, and motivates your athletes to come out year after year.

Numerous coaching books present the skills and drills of baseball. But here’s a book that teaches you how to convey these skills to your athletes in an engaging and positive manner. Coaching Youth Baseball’s focus on teaching offensive and defensive skills through gamelike drills sets it apart from the current lineup of baseball coaching books.

Sporting a reorganized format geared for sequential learning and quick reference, the fourth edition features a line-up of 11 new drills and 40 age-specific coaching tips that are sure to jump-start your planning and practices. The expertise of Coach Tom O’Connell and essential coaching skills--communicating with parents and officials, motivating players, and preparing for games and
practices--make this book a must-read as you prepare to meet the challenges and enjoy the rewards of coaching young athletes.

About ASEP

Coaching Youth Baseball, Fourth Edition, was written by the American Sport Education Program (ASEP) with the assistance of Tom O'Connell, a 30-year veteran coach, 2004 American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA) Coach of the Year, and 2007 ABCA Hall of Fame inductee.

ASEP has been developing and delivering coaching education courses since 1981. As the nation's leading coaching education program, ASEP works with national, state, and local youth sport organizations to develop educational programs for coaches, officials, administrators, and parents. These programs incorporate ASEP's philosophy of “Athletes First, Winning Second.”

About Baseball

Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond. Players on one team (the batting team) take turns hitting against the pitcher of the other team (the fielding team), which tries to stop them from scoring runs by getting hitters out in any of several ways. A player on the batting team can stop at any of the bases and later advance via a teammate's hit or other means. The teams switch between batting and fielding whenever the fielding team records three outs. One turn at bat for each team constitutes an inning and nine innings make up a professional game. The team with the most runs at the end of the game wins.

Evolving from older bat-and-ball games, an early form of baseball was being played in England by the mid-eighteenth century. This game and the related rounders were brought by British and Irish immigrants to North America, where the modern version of baseball developed. By the late nineteenth century, baseball was widely recognized as the national sport of the United States. Baseball on the professional, amateur, and youth levels is now popular in North America, parts of Central and South America and the Caribbean, and parts of East Asia. The game is sometimes referred to as hardball, in contrast to the derivative game of softball.

In North America, professional Major League Baseball (MLB) teams are divided into the National League (NL) and American League (AL). Each league has three divisions: East, West, and Central. Every year, the major league champion is determined by playoffs that culminate in the World Series. Four teams make the playoffs from each league: the three regular season division winners, plus one wild card team. Baseball is the leading team sport in both Japan and Cuba, and the top level of play is similarly split between two leagues: Japan's Central League and Pacific League; Cuba's West League and East League. In the National and Central leagues, the pitcher is required to bat, per the traditional rules. In the American, Pacific, and both Cuban leagues, there is a tenth player, a designated hitter, who bats for the pitcher. Each top-level team has a farm system of one or more minor league teams. These teams allow younger players to develop as they gain on-field experience against opponents with similar levels of skill.

Coaching Youth Baseball