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Hello everybody this is coach Marc from softballperformance.com. Today I want to present to you a great softball
conditioning drill and I call it a great softball conditioning drill because it is a fun drill
it can be done anywhere and also it's very effetive to work on footwork, speed and aggility,
change a direction and of course conditioning. Now the only problem I see with this drill
is basically the kids will like it so much that they will not want to stop. Anyway here's
how it works. it's basicaly a tag game, it's like a tag game so you have to designate a
player whose going to be the bull dog or it if you prefer. so that player will set up
here in the center, ok. And this is what we'll call the bull dog, that player is the bull
dog. all of the player will set up in basically a safe territory. Ok, you can line up as many
players as you want. The size of the field doesn't really matter so you have all the
players on one side here. So this is the safe territory. Then You have a large unsafe territory
right in the middle where bull dog stands and then you have the other safe territory
on the other side. Now one suggestions I will make is also to set limits on the sides too
to avoid all the players going all the way or they are trying to run away from the bulldog.
Here's how the drills works. so you have the bull dog right here. There's one to start
with so one bull dog and every other player in safe territory over here. You can delimit,
you can put like a little cones on the outside you want to set the field. make sure it's
clear. so put gloves down or any thing really which will set up for delimit so you'll see,
I have a basically a rectangle right here and it will be perfect in all of the softball
field in gymnasium, in a regular park anywhere where you have the space, it can be bigger
or smaller it doesn't really matter. so, the drill starts when the extra bull dog calls
or says "bull dog". Yes, bull dog and the players on this side have no choice or forced
by the rules to basically leave the territory and try to make it safely on the other side
without being touched. the whole ideas for each player to try to cross the un safe the
territory make it all the way to the other side without being touched by the bull dog
. If ever a player is touched in unsafe territory over the bull dog, let's say the bull dog
goes out to to after that player, ritght here and that player gets touched, that player
becomes eat. Now you have one, you have one..."I'm sorry" and One and the two bull dog. so every
body else made it safely on the other side. Now there are two bull dogs. The original
bull dogs is always the one that calls bull dog. so once every body is back on the other
side then the bull dog will call bull dog and again every body has try to make it safely
accross the field without being touched. As you can see there's going to be a lot of round
and orund and chasing and skipping type movement so that will appeal to the player's aggility,
sprinting capacity and also to change the direction and trust me it's also good condition
drills. so it's really fun to do. Now you keep doing the crossing back and forth from
one side to the other until there's no body left or there's only one person left. Now
it starts with one bull dog, but easily doubles each time. If one bull dog touches one player
everytime players or the athletes crosses the unsafe territory assuming that it wil
touch the athletes one then you double the number of bull dog every single time. so sometimes
if you have a batch of fast athletes what will happen in the bull dog will not touch
anybody, but the bottomline is, that's not too long to do you can do several rounds of
it and your athletes will have the plus of doing it in addition to getting a lot of speed
and aggility work you can do the rest like warm up or a french of practice or when you
speed of work. it is important to integrate in softball or even with the older athletes
some fan drills sometimes doing technical work and doing speed and sprints stuff without
really having a challenge is not fun. this is really a cool game, you know, kids will
play just because it's fun theres a competitive aspect to it so I'm selling for you to play
it so they have said this is one of the best drills that I know to have fun with. I've
used that drill with ten other under a team and I've used that also in an international
level in olympians so both each group really enjoy it. I encouraged you to use it. for
more tips and please visit us at softballperformance.com and sign up for our news letter, to get a
lot of tips by email. I'll talk to you soon.