Managing and Organizing Youth Baseball

By Greg Kaup

As a grizzled veteran of over a decade of youth baseball seasons, author Greg Kaup takes you from the pre-season draft to the post-season party sharing with you along the way the insights he has gained. This book will be a great addition to any baseball manager's coaching library.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greg Kaup
• Release date: Oct 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310309373

Greg Kaup

Born and raised in Rogers Park, the most northeastern neighborhood of Chicago. Grew up rooting for the Cubs and along the way learned the very important life lesson that you can't always get what you want!Upon marrying moved to a northwestern suburb of Chicago where my wife and I raised two wonderful sons. During this period in my life I became a "Mr. Mom", served as Commissioner of both the youth baseball and basketball programs in my town and acted as the Cub Master for our local Cub Scout Pack.Currently working as a Client Training Specialist for a large Payroll/HR services company while working on my first fiction novel which will be based on my experiences growing up in Rogers Park.

Book preview

MANAGING and ORGANIZING

YOUTH BASEBALL

By Greg Kaup

Published by Greg Kaup at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Greg Kaup

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Dedication

I want to dedicate this book to all of the men and women who volunteer their precious time to help the youth of America learn to play and enjoy the great game of baseball.

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

1) Introduction

2) The Annual Draft

3) Preseason Activities

4) Coach/Player Relationships

5) Practices

6) Practice Drills and Templates

7) Practice Games

8) Season Management

9) Game Management

10) End of the Year Party Ideas

11) Last Thoughts

12) Index

13) Bibliography

14) About Greg

15) Connect with Greg

1) INTRODUCTION

Hi coach! My name is Greg Kaup and I am a former youth, park district baseball coach. I have over a decade of experience coaching house baseball teams. In addition to my time spent on the playing fields I have also had the privilege of serving as the Commissioner on the Baseball Board of Directors here in my home town of Elk Grove Village, IL. In my coaching tenure my teams were consistently competitive and many seasons saw my teams battling for the post season championship. Two of my teams actually did become playoff champions.

The purpose of this book however is not to show you how to develop championship baseball teams although if you follow some of the ideas I am presenting here I do believe your teams will be very competitive.

The real purpose in writing this book is twofold. First, I hope to show you how to effectively teach your players the game while making the learning process fun for them. Secondly, I hope I can provide you with some ideas and methods which will allow you to be more organized and successful with your season.

What prompted me to write this book was some things I observed on the local playing fields in my home town. While driving through the streets of my town last Spring I would pass various baseball fields on which teams were practicing for the upcoming baseball season. On several occasions I stopped by to observe the practice.

What I typically saw was, in my mind, a practice that was ineffective and most importantly not fun for the players. What do I mean by ineffective and not fun? Well most practices consisted of the coach pitching Batting Practice to one player while the rest of the players stood idly in the field, awaiting for a ball to be hit to them.

Now I will be honest with you and admit that when I started coaching youth baseball this is how I too conducted my practices. However, through the years, after watching coaching videos, reading coaching books, attending coaching clinics and observing other coaches’ practices I realized there was a better and more effective way to organize and conduct a practice.

I am very hopeful that after you read this book, you will be able to plan and conduct effective and fun practices for your players. However please be aware that Practices and Drills are not the only topics I will cover here. Some of the other topics included are preparing for the Annual Player Draft, Preseason Planning, the Strategy behind Practice Games, Season and Game Management techniques, the ins and outs of Managing a Pitching Staff and lastly, End of the Year Party ideas.

Coach I believe that after reading this book you will be able to take away at least a handful of ideas which will help you to become a more effective coach and more importantly allow your players to have fun while they learn the great game of baseball.

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2) THE ANNUAL DRAFT

I know that no two baseball organizations’ Annual Player Drafts are alike and although your draft may be a bit different from ours, I believe the fundamentals of every draft is the same.

In our organization every manager, at the end of every season was asked by the league to privately rate every player on their team in 5 categories. Those categories were, hitting, fielding, speed, pitching and baseball knowledge. The ratings scale was 1 through 5, where a rating of 5 meant outstanding and a rating of 1 extremely poor. In addition, the manager was asked to list what he considered to be each player’s two best positions. This information would then be used by the Baseball Board to compile the Draft Sheets for the next baseball season. The Draft Sheets would list every player from the previous season with each category rating and a composite number which was the sum of all of the individual rating categories.

If any new kids joined the league for the upcoming season they were either