So the season’s over, what’s next?

Admin October 4, 2017 Comments Off

As the 2017 Bombers Baseball is coming to a close, or has wrapped up for some teams, it’s time to start planning for 2018.

We encourage the boys and families to take a break from baseball over the next few months. We are advocates of young athletes participating in multiple sports and do our best to enable our athletes to pursue other disciplines.

Fall Season Recap – For those of you with children participating in the Fall program, there are a few things to remember about Fall baseball as compared to the Spring / Summer season. League administrators often don’t worry about separating the teams by skill level and mix the “Rec” and “Competitive” teams into one division. As a result some of our teams took part in games where our boys were playing much more competitive groups. On the flip side, we also had games where our higher level teams had games against less competitive teams. Fall ball is all about giving the boys a chance to explore new positions and transition into the format they will be playing during the Spring / Summer 2018 season. Do not get hung up on the results of games as an indicator of the progress made during the Fall season.

We have many players who opt to take the Fall season off, but return for the Spring / Summer season. This allows us to mix the players up differently in the Fall, sometimes leading to a broader mix of skill on a particular team. Due to having more players in the Spring / Summer we’re usually able to align the boys more appropriately in the traditional season.

Fall Skills Training – Realizing the boys are juggling a lot with going back to school on top of playing baseball usually 2x per week, we stop hosting our weekly practices around Labor Day. Our older teams use the 60 minutes before their games for skills development (fielding / hitting) giving them several hours of practice a week. Occasionally a team will get together during the Fall for additional practices, but program driven skills training takes place primarily in August. We’ll get back outside with the boys for regular skills training again in mid-March.

Winter Warm Up – Beginning in mid January we will offer a Winter Warm Up program where we’ll get the boys together at an area batting cage / indoor practice facility. We’ve operated the Winter Warm Up a few different ways over the years doing our best to accommodate the busy schedules our families maintain during the early part of the year. Traditionally it’s involved a 60 to 90 minute practice held on a Saturday evening mid-January thru mid-March. We’ll have more information on the format for the 2018 Winter Warm Up in the coming weeks.

2018 Team Placement – We realize many of our players sign up to play baseball with their buddies / classmates, etc. During their younger years of baseball we prioritize the pre-existing relationships of players when forming team rosters. As players grow up in the program we’ll begin to see natural differentiation run it’s course, where it’s clear certain players are taking the game more seriously and / or developing the skills faster needed to play the game proficiently. To ensure we do everything possible to create an environment for the boys to fall in love with baseball, we’ll begin to recommend roster placement for players that provides them the best opportunity to continue developing their baseball skills.

Each new season we’ll “reshuffle the deck” and form rosters to best align the boys taking into consideration everything we can that impacts the players baseball experience. This process is a collaboration of coaches and parents. We normally will begin the discussion of forming rosters during our Winter Warm Up sessions with rosters finalized in mid March. Important to note, no player gets “cut” from the Fall season to the next Spring / Summer season. If a player participated in the Fall, they will have a spot on a Bombers team next Spring / Summer.

Individual Skills Training – Some of our players will participate in individual or small group skills training at one of the area baseball facilities. We encourage families to take a break from baseball and start this individual work in January. Should you ever have questions about specific trainers / coaches, feel free to email or call us and if we have any feedback on a particular trainer we will share it with you.

2018 Registration – To help us in planning for the 2018 Season we need to understand who is returning next year. Please click HERE to register for the 2018 season.

Anticipated 2018 Teams – Based on our current Fall program participation and the players we believe will be returning from last year’s Spring / Summer session, we’re anticipating having the following teams for the 2018 season: