ss to glove side

Does he bend at the waist or at the knees. The comment that the instructor has told my son when he has issues fielding is to play 6" lower. If you are bending at the knees you can raise your body with your glove to adjust to the ball if it comes up on you.

He would have my son run with his legs bent 3/4 to get him to learn to move around low. Smooth and low, like a dance.

Let me know if it helps! He should feel a "burn" in his thighs and legs after a good workout.

Great advice!

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

The key thing at staying low and the difficult part for the player to remember is to start low and stay low. Many players will be low in the ready position but raise up to advance on the ball to their left or right. They will stand up to run then try to get low again, often this results in "stabbing" at the ball. Try to work on playing the whole game 6" lower. Stay down, you will be quicker then getting up to go and then getting down to field.

Thanks floridafan!

We are going to work on saying low every defensive practice.

I have seen it with him and others exactly as you describe. He generally does it right unless he is a bit tired or frustrated. First time in a long time he got upset.

Since he is playing football too we have neglected fielding and it did show up.

The hard thing as a Dad is that he is fighting for a starting spot in the spring and was playing great. I just hope this does not set him back too much in the coaches eyes. He handles these things better than I do He is a true freshman.