Catcher Positioning: Giving Targets & Signals

During this blog post, I’m going to discuss some basics when it comes to being a kids softball catcher.

Catcher Positioning: Targets

The big thing that we do is we give our targets from our glove to our body. So we use our body a lot for our targets.

For example, say we have a right-handed hitter up at the plate. We have our catcher in a down position, and she’s going to give a target for an inside fast ball.

What she’s going to do is shift on over and split the inside corner of the plate with the midline of her body. Then she’s going to hold her glove out in the middle of her body and out towards the pitcher. By doing this, the pitcher not only has the glove as a target to throw to, but she has the catcher’s whole body.

Now the same thing will apply on the outside pitch. The catcher will just shift over, split the outside portion of plate with her body, glove out away from her body, and she has glove and the midline of her body to shoot for. The bigger the target, the easier it is for the pitcher to see.

Low pitches are very interesting because the chance of them being thrown into the dirt are increased greatly. So the one thing we have to talk about with our catchers to make sure that they can efficiently get that ball if it does go into the dirt, is when they give their low target, we want them to take their wrist and rotate it. Instead of having their glove in the normal target position, they’re going to go ahead and rotate it.

Now if we do get the ball into the dirt, it’s easy for them to rotate over and bring it down here when they go to the blocking position. Or even on the low pitch that doesn’t actually hit the dirt, but they can get that glove down there a lot quicker.

Giving Signals

We’re going to give signals from the down position to our pitcher. We change it a little bit because we don’t want the third base coach or the first base coach stealing our signals. And believe me, they do that. They cheat. They walk over past the line to take a look to see what they can get. So we want to block them as much as we can.

When we give our signals, we take our left hand and our glove and we put it down below our left shin so we’re blocking the third base coach from looking underneath and picking up our signs.

Now we take our right hand and we’re going to put it on our inside leg and bring it down below our left leg so we can block the person from third base and we’re also blocking the person from first.

Do you think your kids softball catcher would learn a little something from this blog post? Share your thoughts below!

And while you’re at it, make sure you “Like” my Facebook page for more free kids softball coaching tips and drills.