YBE 027: The Case For Smart Baserunning

If you currently coach tee-ball and coach pitch kids—or if you remember when your kids were in those younger leagues—what is the philosophy about baserunning in your youth baseball league? Station-to-station? Or run aggressively? And what does "aggressively" mean exactly anyway? More importantly than your league's philosophy, what is your own philosophy about baserunning? And if instead you coach a travel team or a high school team, how much time do you spend teaching your kids how to properly run the bases? Truth: good baserunning is undertaught at all age levels of youth baseball and it is downright controversial at the youngest levels. That's unfortunate. Bad baserunning can be both aggressive baserunning or station-to-station baserunning. But how do you know what's smart and what's bad? In Part 1 of a two-part series on baserunning, I talk about what exactly is smart baserunning, why teaching it is important, and 10 drills to help start teaching it to our kids.

In this 39-minute episode, you'll learn:

• how teaching smart baserunning to young kids is unfairly demonized
• why you should teach smart baserunners
• what's wrong with the argument that nothing good comes out of teaching "aggressive" baserunning
• the difference between smart baserunning and not-so-smart baserunning
• an unintended benefit of teaching smart baserunners
• the fallacy in the argument that teaching smart baserunning to young kids is unnecessary because "it's just 5-6 year old baseball"
• 5 drills related to running from home to 1B
• 5 drills related to running from 1B to 2B

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Interview with Justin Stone
• Interview with John T. Reed
• Teaching The Complete Baserunner
• Interview with Austin Wasserman; free book on high-level throwing

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