Improve Your Team’s Performance with these Softball Hitting Drills

Your team’s offense is as important as your defense. Good defense that’s not complemented by points scored by your team won’t amount to anything especially if your opponent outscores you.

Thus, it’s important that you should also give a significant amount of your practice time to softball hitting drills. Look for drills that will help you hit the ball further and more accurately, give you quicker reflexes and enable you to anticipate what the pitcher is going to throw at you.

So here are some softball hitting drills I have for you to use during practice. Each drill has a specific purpose to it and each of them aims to improve a certain aspect of your player’s game. Read on and learn more.

Tee Drill

This is probably one of the most basic hitting drills that every coach should have. A tee drill helps your players practice the proper hitting mechanics while at the same time let them practice hitting the balls in different areas on the plate.

Partners should do this drill: a hitter and a feeder. The feeder places the ball on the tee and at the same time moves the tee to different areas on the home plate and adjusts the height to practice hitting low and high as well as inside, middle and outside pitches.

Finger Flash

While a majority of hitting drills focus on the proper mechanics, developing batting strength and speed, you should also train your players to read and find the pitcher’s release point. This will help increase your batter’s reaction time so she can immediately adjust accordingly the way she hits the ball.

To perform this drill, there must be a hitter and a pitcher. But instead of throwing a ball to the batter, the pitcher would flash 1,2, or 3 fingers. The batter would then call out the number the pitcher flashed.

Two-Pitch Game

More than just a training for your batters, this drill would also help your team practice particular game situations.

The two-pitch game does what its name says. Batters are only allowed two opportunities to hit the ball. When the batter hits the first pitch, she would move on to the 1st base. Otherwise, she would have to hit again. A 2nd missed hit is an out.

Pivot Rotation

You must also teach your players to hit the ball correctly by performing the proper hitting mechanics. To do this, isolating a particular area of the body involved would make it easier for you to teach the correct way of hitting the ball. In the case of doing the proper hip rotation, there’s the Pivot Rotation drill.

In this drill, let your player put the bat behind her back and lock it with her arms. Let her then take her normal stance. After that, let the player pop her hips, quickly rotating her trunk while pivoting on her back foot. After doing this, the player must remain balanced and shouldn’t move either feet.

There you have it, drills to help your players improve their batting by developing their reflexes, hitting mechanics and accuracy. If you want more drills similar to these, make sure you check out my website at www.softballperformance.com.