If you’re looking for practice drills for softball, give this one a try. I call this one the 100 ball fielding drill. The more you do this drill, the better the players get and the more they even request it!
100 Ball Fielding Drill
Use four tees and a bucket with 25 balls at each tee.
Put two players at each infield position.
One will field ground balls and one will stay behind the fielder with an empty bucket.
The player fielding the balls tosses the ball to the player at the bucket and gets ready for the next ball to field. You can put one or two players at each tee (one to feed the tee).
One tee will be up the 1st baseline directly in front of the 3rd baseman to hit ground balls to the fielder at 3rd. Another tee will be further down the 1st baseline directly in front of the shortstop to hit ground balls to the fielder at short. The other two tees are down the 3rd baseline directly in front of the 1st and 2nd basemen as described before.
We rotate everyone clockwise after all the balls have been hit and run the balls back to the tees and hustle the empty buckets back to the fielders. With sixteen players everyone can field 100 balls in a short amount of time and the coach has the opportunity to correct any thing that he or she may see that needs to be fixed.
Emphasis for the fielders is placed on fielding mechanics with lots of repetition. We tell our players that are hitting off of the tees to use a smooth controlled swing to hit the ball where they want to hit it.
The first time we did this drill our hitters could not control where they hit, and it was not that productive since many of the balls were not fieldable. After a couple of times, our hitters figured it out, and it seems like we get our 100 ground balls quicker each time.