High School Softball Practice Plan: Three Full Practices + Drills

This is the complete high school softball practice plan: three practices you can run this week, a block for managing a pitching staff across a seven-inning schedule, the drills that matter at varsity, and the mistakes that lose a high school team its close games in April. It is part of the full set of softball practice plans by age, which has the 90-minute structure every plan below is built on, plus 10U, 12U, 14U and indoor.

It is written for fastpitch under NFHS rules, and for a season that looks nothing like travel ball. The circle and the bases did not move from 14U. What moved is everything around them: seven-inning games two or three days a week, a roster picked at tryouts, a JV that feeds the varsity, athletes who walk in from a basketball court in March, and a pitching staff that has to survive a schedule instead of a tournament.

Jump to:

• What changes in high school
• What a high school player can and cannot do yet
• The two-hour varsity practice plan · The 90-minute in-season practice plan · The pre-game or light-day plan
• Pitchers and catchers in high school
• The drills that matter in high school
• Common high school mistakes · The other five days

What changes in high school

14U was the jump in speed. High school is the jump in season. The rule sheet barely moves: a player who spent last summer at 14U travel plays on the same circle and the same bases under the same stealing rules. What she has never done is play twenty games in eight weeks with a school bus to catch and a test the morning after a doubleheader.

NFHS writes the base rules for high school softball, and each state association adopts and modifies them: run-ahead rule values, pitching rest rules where they exist, courtesy runners, re-entry, equipment and the length of the season are all state lines. This page names the categories and prints none of the values on purpose; get them from your state association's sheet and your umpire association's case book before you spend a station on any of it.

The season. Tryouts in late February or early March, a week or two of pre-season, then games two or three days a week until a district tournament in May. That compression is the whole difference. In travel ball the week is for building and the weekend for playing; in high school the week is the season, so practice is maintenance and situational work, and the building either happened over the winter or does not happen.

What a high school player can and cannot do yet

What varsity expects. She runs the warm-up and the throwing progression without a coach, because the captains run them. She knows every station on this page from a card and can lead the player next to her through it. She knows the signs, gets a sacrifice down on the first pitch, and plays two positions, because a sixteen-player roster needs her at both. She keeps her own count in the bullpen and her own time on the throw to second.

JV and varsity. JV is where the plan gets taught and varsity is where it gets run. Same station names, same clock, same close; the JV version puts tee and front toss ahead of live, bunt coverage at walking speed ahead of a live runner, and the assistant's voice ahead of a card. A freshman who learns the plan on JV walks into varsity practice the next spring knowing what comes after throwing. On one field, split by half and meet for the situational block, where JV is the offense for twenty-one outs and then switches.

The multi-sport athlete. A third of a high school roster arrives from basketball, some of it in the second week, with legs and no arm. Her throwing progression runs two weeks behind everyone else's: full distance by the end of the second week, no long toss in the first, no live at-bats against your best pitcher on day one. Her bat comes back before her arm. She is a runner in the situational block and a hitter at the tee until the arm is there.

What she cannot do yet. Hold her timing against a pitcher who locates three pitches, from the first at-bat of the season, after a winter of not seeing one; pre-season live at-bats are for exactly that. Make the DP/Flex substitution in her head, which is yours to make. Add up her own week across the school team, the travel team that still practices on Sundays, and the Wednesday lesson. Pitch seven innings on Tuesday and again on Thursday, whatever she says she can do.

The two-hour varsity practice plan

The six blocks from the hub, stretched to 120 minutes for the pre-season and the first weeks of the season, when the field is yours every afternoon and there is still something to build. Two coaches assumed, captains running the first two blocks. The coach cue starts each block; by the second week a captain should be saying it.

If you are the only adult. Three defensive stations, one self-run from a card with a captain leading it. Take the staff block yourself, because the week's arm decisions get made there. If you have three, the third coach owns JV's teaching version of each station on the other half of the field and brings them over for twenty-one outs.

Pre-season. If your players ran the off-season softball training plan over the winter, its Sharpen block in weeks 10 to 12 is the pre-season practice: arms already at 90 feet, a tee routine they can run alone, and a first bullpen at 43 feet on the first day of tryouts instead of the second week.

The 90-minute in-season practice plan

Games Tuesday and Thursday, a Saturday doubleheader, and this is Wednesday. Nothing gets built in a game week. Throwing is short because the arms have games, the defensive block fixes the one thing that went wrong on Tuesday, live hitting is off a pitcher who is not throwing Thursday, and the situational block runs the play the next opponent will give you.

The block that goes when a game week gets short is live hitting, not the staff block and not throwing: a pitcher cannot make up a skipped day-after session alone, and a hitter can take fifty tee swings at home.

The pre-game or light-day plan

The day before a game, nothing new gets taught. Arms stay short, tomorrow's starter throws enough to find the zone and stops, and the situational block runs the one play the opponent is most likely to give you. Sixty minutes, and the close names the lineup, the DP/Flex if you are using one, and the bus time.

If the game is today and you have the field for an hour before it, cut everything after throwing to the starter's warm-up and one round of ground balls. In a week with a Saturday doubleheader this is Friday, Thursday was a game, and Wednesday was the week's only real practice. That is normal in high school.

Pitchers and catchers in high school

At 14U the pitcher's block was about finding 43 feet. In high school it is about a staff surviving a schedule: three pitchers, twenty games in eight weeks, a seven-inning game every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. The question is not what one pitcher throws at practice but what each pitcher throws on each day of the week relative to when she pitches. Everything is counted in reps and written on a whiteboard the players can see. There is no widely adopted published pitch-count standard in fastpitch, so the reps below are deliberately conservative; if your state has adopted pitch-count or rest rules, its sheet is the ceiling and the week sits under it.

The staff has three weeks running at once. The starter's week: game, day after, two days out, day before, game. The second pitcher's week is the same shape shifted, so she starts the game the starter cannot. The reliever's week is lighter and available every day. The block is keyed to those days, not to the practice.

The other pitching coach is not you. Most high school pitchers still have a Wednesday lesson and a travel team that throws on Sundays, and none of the three of you is adding it up unless somebody decides to. Have that conversation with her parents in the pre-season, not in April: what the lesson throws, what the travel team throws, and what you will do when the total is too high, which is fewer pitches for you. For catchers the job is still calling the game, and she has the pitcher's whole book in her head because she called every bullpen in it. Nothing in this block measures how hard anyone throws.

The drills that matter in high school

The nine drills the plans above run most, with the coaching point on each. Names are the hub's, so the drill index there and the plans here match.

1. Twenty-one outs. The defense stays on until it records twenty-one against live hitters and live runners, the coach calling the situation before each pitch. The coaching point: an error resets the inning, not the count, because a seven-inning game punishes the fourth inning more than the first.
2. First and third. Three variations each way, run until the defense calls its play before the pitch. The coaching point: in a seven-inning game the running team gets this look three times, so the defense's call has to be the same all three.
3. Bunt coverage. The rotation plus the backups: third charges, shortstop covers third, second covers first, and somebody is behind every throw. The coaching point: the rotation starts on the bunt attempt, not the bunt, and the backup moves whether or not the ball is bunted.
4. Cuts and relays. Ball in the gap, relay lined up before the catch, the trail infielder calling the throw, a runner scoring from first. The coaching point: the relay is turned glove-side before the ball arrives, and the call comes from behind her, never from the outfield.
5. Double-play feeds. Underhand from second, dart from short, the pivot with a runner sliding. The coaching point: the pivot foot is on the bag before the feed arrives, and the throw goes over the runner.
6. Live off your own pitcher. Live at-bats at 43 feet against a pitcher from the staff on her two-days-out day, catcher in gear, every pitch in her book. The coaching point: across a week every hitter sees every pitcher, so nobody on your roster faces a new arm for the first time in a game.
7. Front toss with counts. The coach calls the count before every toss and the hitter says her approach out loud before she swings. The coaching point: the two-strike swing is a different swing practiced separately, and in-season it is most of what the hitting block is for.
8. Spins at close distance. Every pitcher, every day, at 20 feet, every pitch in her book, no radar gun. The coaching point: this is the one thing a pitcher does the day after she throws seven innings, and it is where the movement lives between starts.
9. Bullpen at the age's distance. 43 feet, 40 to 50 pitches on her two-days-out day, location called by the catcher before every pitch and named by the pitcher after. The coaching point: the count goes on the whiteboard, next to the week, before she leaves.

Common high school mistakes

Most of these are a travel-ball practice run in the middle of a school schedule.

• Running the two-hour plan in a game week. Building in April costs more than it adds; the 90-minute plan exists because the week is the season.
• One arm throwing every game. She will say she can. The whiteboard is there so the week wins.
• Sixteen players at one live station. An at-bat every fourteen minutes each. Four hitting stations with live as one of them is an at-bat every six minutes.
• The JV as a scrimmage opponent and nothing else. If they only play defense against varsity, nobody on that team learns the plan they will run next spring.
• Captains running a warm-up nobody taught them. The coach runs it the first week of pre-season and the captains watch; after that it is theirs.
• Basketball players live on day one. Legs and no arm. Two weeks of throwing first.
• Learning the DP/Flex during a game. Run a lineup card through the rule with your scorekeeper in the pre-season, or protest a game in April.
• Posting the numbers. Radar readings and pop times measure things a sixteen-year-old will chase at the cost of the mechanics that produce them. The stopwatch is hers.
• No plan for the days you do not have them. Covered below.

The other five days

In season, a high school team practices or plays five days a week, so the other five days mean something different here. They are the bench: eighteen players, two hours, and the math of coached reps per player. And they are the rest of the year: tryouts in late February, a season over by May, and thirty weeks the roster is not yours. At this age the athlete either does the work in those weeks or does not, she is old enough to be asked directly, and the players who look different at the next tryout are the ones who did.

The between-practice work is short and by position: the throwing progression with a partner or into a wall, the tee routine with a two-strike round into a net, pitchers' spins and one short bullpen a week with a catcher, catchers' receiving and blocking, slap and bunt footwork. Thirty to forty-five minutes, three days a week. It does not need a field, and at sixteen it does not need a parent.

That is what Next Athletix does for a softball coach. It does not write your practice plan; this page is the practice plan. It assigns daily, position-specific training sessions to your roster and shows you who did them, which matters most with a roster too large to watch one at a time. You create the team, show the QR code on your phone at one practice, every athlete scans it, and they are on the plan before they leave the field. A high school roster is almost entirely 13 or older, so each athlete runs her own sessions on her own account and a parent can be linked to see her work. Your dashboard shows who did the work this week, who is on a streak, and who has gone quiet, which turns the close of your next practice into a sentence said to the players: "Fourteen of eighteen did their sessions this week."

Be straight with parents about what it is. A coach account is free. A free athlete account gets one sample session a week; the full plan runs on the Training plan, which is per athlete with a 7-day free trial, and athletes and parents subscribe on their own account with nothing billed to you. Pricing is here. It does not replace the practice you just planned. If your team wants a structured winter before tryouts, the off-season softball training plan is the 12-week version of the same idea, and its last three weeks are the pre-season above.

Print it

Everything above is the plan. Print the page or send the link to your assistant coaches and your captains; there is nothing to sign up for. The hub has the 90-minute structure, the blank template and the drill index, and the tier below this one is the 14U softball practice plan, where the 43-foot circle was learned. If you want the between-practice work assigned and tracked, that is what the free coach account is for.