Posted by: Coach Chuck (partschuck@greenlynk.com) on Wed Mar 5 12:02:59 2003

Im looking for an inexpensive yet effective tool for 7 & 8 year old batting practice. What are your thoughts on the swing-a-way. Also, with this team we have 14 players and they all bat in the line up Any thoughts on a batting order? Load up the front of the order? Spread your power throughout the line up? Any advise would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!
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> > I have both a swing-a-way and a personal pitcher. Both very useful. If I had to buy just one I'd buy the personal pitcher. I might even buy 2 personal pitchers to accomodate 12-14 kids on a team.
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> 7-8 yr. old batting practice ... A hittin stick is a very good and inexpensive tool to get alot of swings and watch their form .. And another item that I found that the kids love is a product called Strike -three ... Its a pitching machine that uses the air from a leaf blower for power and throws baseball whiffle balls as well as tennis balls and is very accurate. Its costs around 30.00 and I was very impressed with it and still use it for my 11 and 12 yr. old girls fastpitch. They have one at present on e-bay under the search "pitching machines". And another aid that I found out about here that has become very useful is a punching bag . I mark different areas in the strike zone with a piece of duct tape and have really noticed an increase in the kids power and in making contact at the tape marks and in using there hips .. And the ole batting tee is still a great inexpensive item ... I use all these and have seperate hitting stations for the kids ... Bag .. to hittin stick .. to batting Tee .. to the whiffle ball thrower and then some live pitching .. And once the routine is down .. we can get through on hitting days in about 2 hrs ... with 13 kids ... each getting over 100 swings .. And having fun doing it ...
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> I just bought a personal pitcher for my high school girls so I havent decided on its usefullness yet and would love a swing away but the 500.00 is a bit steep at the present...
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> As for the batting order ... Its hard to say what to do without knowing what you have ... I have my better 4 at the top of the order since the top usually gets to bat more often than the bottom ... Usually 1 more at bat per game and then space the rest out to some degree to take advantage of our runs per inning rule ...
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I Just got finished coaching a 7-8 year old team last season. I had several kids that had poor bat speed, however I also had a few that were excellent bat speed. I used the "Tee" for several practices, as well as soft tossed whiffle balls (golf balls) using a broom stick handle to develop hand and eye coordnation. During practice I would let my kids swing with a heavier bat and have the machine pitching faster the the actual game speed. For your batting order I would go one step farther and go with base running speed I normally put my best hitters in the 2-4 spots and had a kid that would hit singles in the lead off spot. Most teams I coached against would use the worst hitter in the bottom spot, I would sneak him up the order maybe third from last so if the inning ended in the middle of the order I could possible make it back to the top with 2 outs. My team scored 121 runs in 9 games. and we had two games called for time limit while we were still batting with less than 2 outs. I had 1 kid that played 2 years without a stikeout and I had 1 that did not strikeout in 1 year. We finished the season with a team batting average of .675. Bat speed is a must but base running is as well.