How to coach tee ball without losing your mind (ages 4 to 6)

You volunteered to coach tee ball because nobody else raised their hand. Now you have twelve kids, half of them in helmets that fall over their eyes, and one of them is currently lying face down on second base. Welcome.

The job at this age is not really baseball. It's teaching kids that this thing called baseball is fun enough to come back to next year. If you do that, you've done it right. Wins, losses, mechanics, none of it matters. Get them to want to come back.

Here is what actually works.

Keep practice to one hour. Maximum.

Four and five year olds have about a 40 minute attention ceiling on a good day. Six year olds maybe push to an hour. Anything longer and you're coaching against their developmental biology. Plan for 50 minutes and end early sometimes. Parents will love you.

Run three stations, not one drill at a time

If you try to run a single drill with the whole team, ten kids are standing around picking dandelions while two kids field a ball. Use stations of three or four kids each. Rotate every 8 to 10 minutes. You need at least two assistant coaches to make this work. Recruit parents on day one or your life will be hard.

Three stations that work for tee ball:

• Hitting off the tee into a net or fence
• Rolling ground balls from 10 feet away
• Running the bases (yes, this is a station, and they love it)

Teach them where first base is. Then teach them again.

A real percentage of tee ball plate appearances end with the kid running toward third. Or running toward the pitcher. Or running back to the bench. Before every at bat, point to first base. Have a coach standing on first waving. Some leagues paint footprints from home toward first. If yours doesn't, ask why.

The base running station above is partly for this reason. Have them run home to first 20 times in a row. Make it a race. Sounds dumb. Works.

Forget about throwing for the first few weeks

Throwing form takes years. At this age, almost all of them throw like a kid pushing a basketball. That's fine. Don't try to fix it in week one. Instead, focus on catching, which mostly means getting them to track the ball with their eyes and trust that the glove won't get them hurt.

The single best catching drill for this age: soft toss with rolled up socks or beanbags. No baseballs. Stand 5 feet away. Toss underhand. Some kids will flinch from socks for the first month. That's normal.

The lineup is not a meritocracy

Bat everyone every inning. Most tee ball leagues require it anyway. Rotate positions every inning so nobody gets stuck in right field for four innings while their friend gets to be the pitcher kid. The pitcher position is just a kid standing near the mound for safety. Nobody's pitching. But every kid will want to be that kid. Rotate.

I make a paper grid before each game with names down the side and innings across the top, and just fill in positions. Takes 4 minutes. Saves a lot of confusion.

What to actually say to a 5 year old who strikes out

You can't strike out in tee ball. They get the ball in play eventually, or you put it in play for them. If a kid swings and misses 10 times and starts to tear up, say "the tee is being weird today" and adjust the tee for them. They're 5. Move on.

What you absolutely don't do: critique their stance, tell them to keep their elbow up, or any other thing you remember from high school baseball. Nothing. Just "nice swing, try again."

Snacks are part of the job

This is not a side comment. Snack rotation is one of the most important things you organize. Parents need a schedule, and a kid who doesn't get a juice box after the game while their friends do is going to remember that for the rest of the season. Send a snack schedule out before the first practice. If you can put it somewhere everyone sees it without checking a group text, even better.

Things you will see in your first season

• A kid catching a pop fly and then immediately throwing it back to the sky
• Two outfielders fighting over the same ground ball while a third runs the wrong direction
• A kid sitting down in the batter's box
• A parent yelling "swing!" three seconds before the kid swings
• One kid who is somehow already really good and you have no idea why

All of this is normal. None of it is a coaching failure.

What to skip entirely

• Sliding (most leagues prohibit it at this age anyway)
• Bunting
• Anything called a "drill" with a name
• Stretching routines longer than 30 seconds
• Lectures about hustle
• The infield fly rule

One hard rule

End every practice with something fun. A relay race. A coach hits pop ups for them to chase. Anything where they leave laughing. They will not remember the throwing drill. They will remember whether they had fun.

That's the whole job for tee ball. Make them want to come back. Everything else is just keeping them safe and moving in the same general direction.

When this group ages up into coach pitch, practice changes more than you'd expect. The 7U and 8U practice plans pick up where this leaves off—and when they start hitting off live pitching, teaching kids to hit a baseball goes deeper on the drills and cues that actually work at that stage.