Fielding, part two
Fielding games for fun
The fielding page is the thinking: what actually separates a good team from a great one, and the two things worth getting right with your hands. These are the games and the practice that make it stick.
Catch Ten
All the boys stand in a semicircle or a circle, and you stand in the middle. They throw the ball in to you, and you hit it back out to them, one after another. The team's job is to string together 10 clean catches in a row.
Ten fielders share one number. Drop it on the ninth and everyone goes back to zero with you, which is the whole point: it is a team's concentration being tested, not one boy's hands.
Any drop resets the count to zero for the whole team, whoever dropped it. That is the point: it is a team consequence, not an individual one, and it is what changes how hard the boys concentrate.
Once you get to 10, it is your call as the coach. Stop there and celebrate it. Keep going for a bigger number. Or make it harder from there: further back, faster, higher. All three are fair game, on the day.
The catching itself is the same rule as on the fielding page: watch the ball all the way into your hands, and let them give like springy foam rather than staying rigid. The one addition is where your fingers point. Above the waist or the chest, they point up, to the sky. Below the waist, they point down. Get that wrong and even soft hands are fighting the ball rather than receiving it.
Bomb The King
Players stand in two columns of catching positions, ranked from the lowest at front-right, zig-zagging back through the two columns to the highest position at back-right: the king.
Rank one is front right, nearest the coach, counting up moving left. The count carries on from back left across the back row, ending on the king at back right. Drop the king's catch and the fall is the whole point.
Catch it, you hold your spot. Drop it, you go straight to the bottom, and everyone below the king shuffles up one place to fill the gap.
After enough rounds, it moves into the finish: a set number of last shots, 10, 15 or 20, whatever feels right on the day for the group and the time you have, and every one of them is deliberately the hardest, highest catch you can give. All of them go to whoever is currently the king. That is bombing the king, and it is what the whole game has been building toward: survive long enough to be king when it starts, then actually hold on.
The Points Game
Two teams line up facing each other, 10 to 15m apart, with a second marker further back behind each line. You, or another coach or parent, feed every ball with a bat.
Each round, a pair, one player from each team standing in the same spot in their line, gets the same delivery at the same time: one round along the ground, one round a catch. It plays as two lines running the identical drill against each other, head to head.
A ball run down before the back marker earns more than the same ball let all the way through and recovered after. Effort that prevents the damage counts for more than effort that only cleans it up.
- Ground ball, fielded cleanly and thrown to the keeper on the full: +1.
- Ground ball, misfielded: −1.
- Ground ball fielded cleanly, but the throw does not reach the keeper on the full: −1. Same penalty as a misfield, a different way of failing.
- Catch taken: +2. Catch dropped: −1.
- Ball beats the fielder but is run down and stopped before the back marker: +2 for the stop itself, with no minus one charged, plus one more if the throw back is good too. A clean stop and return is worth +3.
- Ball beats the fielder all the way to the back marker: −1 for the full concession, but the first player to retrieve it and throw it in still earns the team +2 for the recovery.
- Bad attitude after a mistake, slumped shoulders, having a go at a teammate: −2, off the whole team's score, not the individual's.
First team to 15 wins. That whole-team penalty is what keeps both sides properly in it right to the end.