This one seems hard. I mean don’t you need a baseball field to work on fielding. Surely you need a dad to line the kid up at shortstop, get a bucket of balls, walk over to home plate and toss one up and hit a shot 6 feet to the kids left so he can show some agilty and get to that ball.
Sure, if your kid is playing travel ball and is 13 this is a great approach.
If your kid is 6-10, you need to just roll him or her some ball or toss them underhand. Start close and then work backwards. Make sure they catch the ball in their glove. Better than that, skip the glove and just toss tennis balls. Get their fingers to the sky to catch and make sure their eyes stay on the ball the whole way. They can work on throwing after the catch, they can step and throw it back to you. But its ok ot just have them drop the ball in a bucket so that you can take throwing out of this.
Bounce them balls on the street so they get some bounces. If you aren’t around, see if there’s a brick wall they can throw the ball against and then catch it. I used to do this for hours and it was fun and it made it so I catch without thinking about it. Anything that generates quality reps with this just do. But no you don’t need a field and you don’t need to be able to hit the ball. Also make sure they have success early. Toss gently. Don’t fire it at them and then gripe when they miss. CRAWL-WALK-RUN — get some success and build on it. Maybe you start with 10 throws and then add on from there. A few minutes a day will change everything.
