Normally this time of year I am crafting a communication on the work we have put in in the off season, highlighting the strategy we have put in place for competition, all of the hard work the players and coaches have put in, and remind you to sit back and enjoy watching your child compete. This year however we have been thrown a nasty curveball.  COVID-19 has taken over the news, has, for the most part, shut down society, confined us all to our homes, caused us to cancel team workouts and shorten our Skills Specific Camp series.

School will continue, virtually. Most of you are working from home, virtually. Where does that leave baseball? Well, naturally it will continue virtually as well. Every coach may handle this differently, but we are encouraging them to maintain a channel of communication and guidance through the social distancing period. I have communicated with them all Friday on some ideas around executing this.

We must continue to prepare ourselves as if we will play a baseball season. We may end up with a 1-2 week notice of a season start, and in this case pitchers arms need to be conditioned, we need to have taken swings at least off of a tee, and we should have worked on fielding the ball to stay sharp. If the worst happens and we have the season completely canceled, we need to treat it as a continuous offseason maintaining the development trajectory of each young player.

There are many things that players can do by themselves that seem extremely basic but are things that Big Leaguers work on every day. Some drills may need some support from Mom, Dad, or a sibling but all can be done with little or no extra equipment. You may want to invest in a tee and bow style net if you don’t have one, but most other things can be done without equipment.

I have added a page to the Development Dugout which consists of various drills that can be executed at home. Please be patient and visit often as I will be continuing to update and add to this page. I want to make sure what we add follows the principles of our core development strategy.

Baseball is a sport that has survived everything that has been thrown at it for over 100 years. It has survived Spanish Flu, The Great Depression, and World Wars. It will survive the Corona Virus as well, we just have to be creative in the meantime.

Stay healthy and ready to play,

Coach Arnold