April 13, 2020

For some families, springtime means baseball/softball. The Academy of the Sacred Heart’s athletic department has these home-training tips to keep your ball player active and primed in the sport they love.

Only a few weeks ago, our days were filled with school, homework, athletic practices, and many more activities. Now, all activities have been moved to our homes. How do we navigate athletics now? How do we maintain skills? How do we stay in shape? These instructions for at-home workouts per week are great for any age and skill level without any athletic equipment.

Pitching Practice:

Need: Pair of socks, reflective surface

• Roll up socks in a ball facing a mirror or reflective surface
• Go through warm up motions and throw to the mirror or reflective surface
• 60 full pitches

Need: tennis ball, hard surface to throw at, tape to make a square

• Use the tape to create a square on a hard surface to represent the strike zone over the plate
• Use tennis ball to pitch and try to aim for square
• 60 pitches

Running Practice:

Need: open space for running, pillow/towel/bag for a base

• Space out 60 feet for base running
• Place bag/towel/pillow at end
• Sprint from one end to the bag and remember to turn in as you would be turning into the fence and not towards 2nd base
• 3 sets of 10 full sprints

Batting Practice:

Need: bat (if you don’t have a bat, roll up a towel and use masking tape to keep it in rolled shape for a more effective swing)

• Slowly take 25 full swings with your bat/towel
• Full-speed swing 25 times

Fielding Practice:

Need: tennis ball, hard surface to throw at (such as a wall)

• Throw tennis ball against the wall (as hard as you want) aiming in front of you
• Try to create grounders back to you or just one hop back to you
• Move closer to the wall after every throw

At this time, we are really encouraging our student athletes to have fun with and enjoy their sports. We suggest that they take the role of coach and teach a sibling or a parent one of the skills in their sport: how to dribble, how to serve, or how to do a relay exchange.

During stressful times, it is important for everyone to stay active and healthy. From a coaching standpoint, we want to control what we can control, reinforcing and practicing the fundamentals that we’ve established so far and try get a little better each day. We can take this opportunity to work on our mental aspect of sports and practice positive self-talk.

With physical distancing, we aren’t able to work on offensive or defensive systems, but we can have positive mental repetitions that will benefit us when we return to our playing surfaces. Overall, our advice to student athletes is to keep moving and enjoy this time with your families.