We went to the field yesterday to work on staying down. He did a nice job.
What I found is that when running full speed to get to the bouncing ball up the middle he is really at the mercy of the hop. if the ball takes a bad hop moving that fast it is really tough to adjust. We get to practice on a pretty bad HS field. Good practice though.
If He can get to the ball and have time to slow up he has a chance to adjust.
He will just need more repetition.
We do practice short hops and he is pretty adept at picking the ball. Before the shorter days he would get a bucket of short hops to each side and right at him.
He is really good at letting go.(Better than I am
However, The inning before the coach made a call I would not have made and took the bat out of his hands. I talked to my son and he admitted he was pretty upset. This may have been a factor too. He knows he should have let the last AB go. Basically the coach called a safety squeeze to win the game with one out. My son thought and so do I that you either squeeze or hit. Too much to think about with a safety squeeze. Plus they had never practiced a safety squeeze. Pitcher threw high he popped it up and pitcher made a great diving catch. He now knows that on a safety squeeze he can pull back on a ball just like a SAC bunt. I had never talked to him about a safety squeeze either.Like 3rdGen... says. The ss has to take what he gets in a DP situation and this was a very tough play. I think I get spoiled sometimes because he generally fields so well. This just happened to be a play that cost the team the game in the semi finals.
Bill