T-Ball Drills and Practice Plan for Ages 4 to 6
You volunteered, and now twelve children between four and six are looking at you. Here is the practice plan, the drills that hold their attention, and the parts of coaching T-ball that nobody mentions until you are standing on the field.
The short version
- Keep practice to 45 minutes. At 4 to 6 you are coaching attention span before you are coaching baseball.
- Run stations, never one big group. Three stations of four kids beats twelve kids in a line, every single time.
- Change the activity every five to eight minutes whether it is finished or not.
- Recruit three parents before the first practice. One coach and twelve five-year-olds is not a practice, it is crowd control.
- Nobody stands in a line. If a drill has kids waiting a turn, it is the wrong drill.
- Skip scrimmages until week four. They cannot yet do the thing a scrimmage tests.
- The 45-minute plan
- Run stations
- 14 drills
- Safety rules
- Parent helpers
- What to skip
- What you need
- Game day
- What nobody warns you about
- What good looks like
- FAQ
A good T-ball practice for ages 4 to 6 runs 45 minutes, uses three stations of four players with one adult at each, and changes activity every five to eight minutes. No drill should leave a child standing in a line. Explain in under thirty seconds, use one coaching cue per station, and finish with a loud whole-team game and one specific piece of praise per player.
The 45-minute T-ball practice plan
This is the plan, minute by minute. It assumes around twelve players, three parent helpers and one field. Print it, put it on a clipboard, and run the clock. The clock is the whole trick, because the temptation at this age is always to let a good drill run long, and a good drill that runs long stops being a good drill.
0-5 minFree play while they arrive.
Balls out, no instruction, no whistle. Parents are still parking and kids trickle in over ten minutes.
Fighting that is a losing battle, so make it part of the plan.
5-10 minTeam circle and one silly warm-up.
Start it once most of them are there rather than exactly on the clock, and let the stragglers join in.
Names, one rule for the day, then something that makes them laugh. Animal-walk races to the fence and
back work better than stretching, which this age group does not need and will not do properly.
10-34 minThree stations, eight minutes each.
Split into groups of four. One parent per station. You rotate with a whistle and do not negotiate.
Hitting at one, fielding and catching at another, throwing or base running at the third. Swap what sits
in each station from week to week so all five skills get real time.
34-42 minOne whole-team game.
Something with a winner and a loud finish. This is the part they will tell their parents about, so it
should never be the part you cut when you run behind.
42-45 minCircle, one thing each, done.
Name one specific thing you saw each kid do well. Not "good job everyone." A five-year-old who hears
their own name attached to a real thing comes back next week wanting to do it again.
Why 45 and not 60. Published coaching guidance for this age
group puts practice in the 45 to 60 minute band. Forty-five is the safer end, and the last fifteen
minutes of a sixty-minute T-ball practice are almost always worse than the first fifteen. Inside that
window, keep any single activity under about eight minutes.
Run stations, not one big group
If you change one thing about how you run practice, change this. The difference between a T-ball practice that works and one that dissolves is almost never the drills. It is how many kids are standing still at any moment.
- Three stations, four kids each. Four is small enough that nobody is ever more than a turn or two from their next rep. At six per station you have started building a line.
- One adult per station. This is why you recruit parents in week one. It does not matter that they have never coached. They need to hand a ball over and say a name, and the message to send them is further down this page.
- Set it up before anyone arrives. Cones down, buckets placed, gloves out. Setting up while children are on the field costs you ten minutes you do not have.
- Rotate on a whistle, not on completion. Eight minutes, whistle, everyone moves one station clockwise. Kids learn the pattern by week two and start moving themselves.
- Same three stations for the first month. Novelty is for the drills inside the station. The structure should get boring on purpose, because boring structure is what lets them stop thinking about where to stand.
Fourteen T-ball drills that actually work at 4 to 6
Every one of these keeps all four kids busy, needs equipment you already have, and can be explained in a single sentence. That last part matters more than it sounds. If the explanation takes longer than thirty seconds you have lost half the group before the drill starts.
Hitting
1. Tee and freeze. Hit off the tee, then hold the finish until the
coach says go. It teaches them to stop flinging the bat, which is the single most important safety habit
at this age.
2. Knock the cone. Put an orange cone thirty feet out and tell them
to hit it. They will not hit it. They will, however, swing level and look at the ball, which is the
actual objective.
3. The two-tee swing path. Set a second tee directly behind the
first with its ball about six inches higher. The rule is that the bat must hit the front ball and miss
the back tee entirely. A kid who chops down at the ball clips the back tee and hears it, which teaches
the swing faster than anything you can say. This is a Little League drill and it is worth owning a
second tee just for this.
4. Name the field. Call out left, middle or right before they
swing. They will miss most of the time, and they will start understanding that the ball goes somewhere
on purpose.
Fielding
5. Alligator chomps. Two hands on every ground ball, glove down,
top hand clapping over it. Say "chomp" out loud. They will say it too, and they will remember it in a
game, which is more than can be said for "use two hands."
6. Roll and race. Coach rolls a ball, kid fields it and races back
to the bucket. The race is the point. Fielding is the thing they do on the way.
7. Barehand clamp. Same ground ball, gloves off, both hands. With
no glove to scoop with, they have to trap the ball between two hands, which is exactly the habit the
alligator cue is after. Use a soft practice ball and keep the roll slow.
8. Cleanup race. Balls scattered across the grass, kids collect
them into a bucket against a timer. It is cleanup disguised as a drill, and they never notice.
Catching
This is the skill most T-ball practices skip, usually because a hard ball coming at a five-year-old produces a flinch and the flinch looks like failure. Take the hard ball out of it and the skill arrives on its own.
9. Tennis ball toss. Underhand tennis balls from six feet, glove
up, two hands. A tennis ball does not hurt, so they watch it in instead of turning their head away.
Move back a step only when they stop flinching.
10. Beanbag basket. Toss a beanbag and have them catch it with two
hands like a basket, no glove at all. A beanbag cannot bounce out, so every attempt that touches their
hands is a success, and at this age the feeling of having caught something is most of the lesson.
Throwing
11. Knee throws. Both kids on one knee, ten feet apart. Kneeling
removes the legs from the equation so the arm has to do the work, which is where the mechanics live.
12. Fence targets. Spread them along the backstop about twenty feet
out, one arm span apart, each with their own target taped or chalked on the fence. Everyone throws at the
same time and nobody waits a turn. Spacing them along the fence rather than lining them up is the safety
part, because balls come off chain-link faster than a five-year-old reacts. Never have two groups
throwing toward each other.
Base running
13. Run through first. Every rep, every time. The habit of stopping
on the base is the hardest one to undo later, and the easiest one to prevent now.
14. Red light, green light, home run. The classic game played on the
basepath. It teaches them where the bases are and the order they go in, which at four is genuinely the
whole curriculum.
The three safety rules that matter most
T-ball is a safe game, and almost every injury in it comes from one of these three things. None of them are obvious to a first-year coach.
1. One bat out of the bag at a time. The bat is the only genuinely
dangerous object on the field. Keep the rest zipped up, and draw a line with two cones showing the three
kids who are not hitting exactly where to stand, which is behind the hitter and well outside the swing.
A four-year-old will otherwise stand beside the tee to watch.
2. Fielders stand beside the base, never on it. A player standing
on the bag gets run through by a base runner who has been correctly taught not to stop. Teach the
fielder to set up a step to the side of the base and reach for it.
3. Reset the tee height for every hitter. A tee set for a
six-year-old sits near a four-year-old's chest, which produces an uppercut swing and a bat that finishes
high. Waist height, every time, and it takes four seconds.
And helmets on for every swing, including off the tee in practice.
It is the rule that is easiest to let slide, because practice feels casual.
Getting three parents to help
The whole plan depends on having three adults. Asking the group produces silence, so ask individually and make the job sound small, because it is. Send this before the first practice:
Hi everyone. Practices are Tuesdays at 5:30 and they run 45 minutes. I need three
parents each week to stand at a station and hand kids a ball. No baseball experience needed at all,
I will tell you exactly what to do when you get there, and you are done when practice is done. Reply
with any weeks you can do and I will build the schedule around it.
Keep a simple list so the same person is not doing it every week.
When only one parent turns up. It happens. Drop to two stations
of six and cut the drills to the ones where all six move at once, which here are roll and race, cleanup
race, red light green light, and hitting with you running the tee. Do not try to run three stations
alone.
What to skip at this age
Most T-ball practices go wrong by including things that belong to older baseball. These four are the usual culprits.
- Scrimmages in the first few weeks. A scrimmage tests whether they know where to go and what to do, and in week one they do not. It produces twenty minutes of standing around. Save it for week four and keep it short.
- Conditioning of any kind. Laps, up-downs, sprints as punishment. There is no fitness problem to solve at five, and it is the fastest way to make a kid decide baseball is not fun.
- Long explanations. If you are still talking after thirty seconds, look up. They are already gone. Show the thing once, then let them do it wrong a few times.
- Correcting everything. Pick one cue per station and repeat only that. A five-year-old can hold one instruction. Three instructions is the same as none.
What you actually need
- A bucket of 20 to 25 balls. More balls means fewer trips to pick them up, which means more reps. Practice balls and game balls are two different things at this age: squishy foam or wiffle balls for drills, and the reduced-injury-factor balls your league requires for games. Little League's Tee Ball division specifies a reduced-injury-factor ball meeting the NOCSAE standard, so check what yours says before buying.
- A dozen tennis balls and a few beanbags. The cheapest thing in the bag and the only way to teach catching to a kid who flinches.
- Two tees. The second one doubles your hitting-station capacity and makes the two-tee swing-path drill possible.
- Eight to ten cones. They mark stations, they become targets, they turn into games. The most useful thing in the bag.
- Helmets for every batter. On for every swing, including off the tee in practice.
- A whistle. Sounds excessive for twelve small children. It is not. Your voice will go before the season does.
- A clipboard with the plan on it. Deciding what comes next while twelve kids wait is how a practice unravels.
What you do not need: a pitching machine, radar, weighted balls,
or anything marketed as development at this age. A tee, a bucket and some cones covers the entire T-ball
season.
Game day, which is a different job
Practice is the part you can control. The game is the part nobody explains, and most of the questions a first-year coach panics about on Saturday morning are answered the same way in almost every T-ball league. Confirm each one with your own league, because local rules vary, but this is the shape of it.
- Everybody bats, every inning. Nearly every T-ball league uses a continuous batting order: the whole roster hits in order each inning regardless of outs, and the inning ends when the last batter has hit. That is why nobody sits, and it is why you should not be tracking who is due up.
- Nobody keeps score. Little League's Tee Ball division is explicitly non-competitive. Parents will keep score in their heads anyway. You do not have to help them.
- Put the extra fielders in the outfield. With twelve players and nine spots, the overflow goes to the grass, spread wide. Assign each one a specific patch and walk them to it. Rotate positions every inning so the same child is not stationed at the fence all season.
- Expect all twelve to chase the same ball. They will. The fix is a single rule repeated all season: the player whose name you call goes, everyone else stays put. It works by about week six and not before.
- Three or four innings, or a clock. Little League recommends Tee Ball games run four innings or up to about an hour and a half, and most rec leagues land nearer an hour. Know which one yours uses before the first pitch, because it decides how many times you can rotate positions.
The one thing to say to parents before game one. Tell them the
league does not keep score, that every child bats every inning, and that you rotate positions. Saying it
out loud in week one prevents almost every sideline conversation you would otherwise have in week five.
The parts nobody warns you about
None of this is a sign you are coaching badly. It is what four to six years old looks like on a baseball field, and it happens to everybody.
Somebody will pick dandelions in the outfield. Let them. Chasing
it turns a harmless moment into a standoff you cannot win. They will drift back in when something loud
happens, which is an argument for making sure something loud happens.
Somebody will cry. Usually about the batting order. Give them a
job instead of a lecture: hand them the bucket, make them the cone-mover, put them in charge of the
whistle for one rotation.
One kid will not participate at all. Some weeks they sit with a
parent the whole hour. That is a normal week. Invite them once per station, never twice, and let them
come back on their own terms.
The parents are the bigger variable. Give every parent a job on
day one and the sideline coaching mostly stops. A parent running a station does not have a free hand to
shout instructions from the fence.
What success looks like by the last game
Set the bar here and the season gets a lot more enjoyable for everybody, including you. By the final week of a first T-ball season, a typical player can usually:
- Hit the ball off the tee and run to first without being told which way to go. That is the whole game at this level, and it is a genuine achievement in ten weeks.
- Get in front of a slow ground ball some of the time. Not field it cleanly. Get in front of it.
- Throw the ball in roughly the right direction from ten or fifteen feet.
- Catch a soft ball tossed underhand from a few feet away without turning their head away from it. A glove catch off a real baseball is a next-season skill for most of them.
- Know their own spot in the field and go stand in it without being walked out there.
- Want to come back next year. This is the one that matters. Everything above can be taught again next season. A kid who decided baseball is boring usually does not come back to find out.
If a player does not reach every item on that list, nothing is wrong. Four-year-olds
and six-year-olds are two very different athletes sharing a field, and the gap closes on its own.
T-ball coaching questions
How long should a T-ball practice be?
Forty-five minutes is the sweet spot for ages 4 to 6, and an hour is the absolute ceiling. Published coaching guidance for this age puts sessions in the 45 to 60 minute band, and inside that window no single activity should run much past eight minutes. The last fifteen minutes of a sixty-minute T-ball practice are almost always worse than the first fifteen, so ending early while they still want more is a feature, not a failure.
What age is T-ball for?
Most leagues run T-ball for ages 4 to 6. Little League's official Tee Ball division covers league age 4 to 7, and it is described as a non-competitive introduction focused on fun and fundamentals. Check your own league, because the cutoff date and the top age vary locally.
How do you teach a 5-year-old to catch a baseball?
Stop using a baseball. Underhand tennis balls from about six feet, glove up and two hands, and beanbags with no glove at all. A five-year-old who turns their head away from a ball is not failing to catch it, they are protecting their face from something that hurts, and no amount of coaching removes that. Take the pain out and the skill shows up on its own. Move back a step only once the flinch is gone.
Does everyone bat every inning in T-ball?
In most leagues, yes. T-ball typically uses a continuous batting order, meaning the entire roster hits in order every inning regardless of outs, and the inning ends after the last batter. Little League's Tee Ball division is also explicitly non-competitive and does not keep score. Rules vary locally, so confirm both with your own league before the first game.
How many drills should you do in one T-ball practice?
Five or six activities total, not fourteen. Three station drills of about eight minutes each, one warm-up game, and one whole-team game at the end fills 45 minutes properly. Trying to fit more means each one gets cut short before anybody gets enough repetitions.
What is the best way to organize a T-ball practice?
Stations. Split twelve kids into three groups of four with one adult at each station, and rotate on a whistle every eight minutes. The alternative, running the whole team through one drill at a time, creates a line, and a line is where a four-year-old stops paying attention and starts pulling up grass.
How do you keep 5-year-olds focused at baseball practice?
Shorten everything and keep them moving. Explanations under thirty seconds, activities under eight minutes, and no drill where anybody waits in line. Use one cue per station rather than correcting everything, and end each practice by naming one specific thing each child did well.
Should T-ball practices include scrimmages?
Not in the first few weeks. A scrimmage tests whether players know where to go and what to do, and early in a T-ball season they do not, so it turns into twenty minutes of standing around. Around week four, a short three-inning scrimmage starts being useful.
What equipment do you need to coach T-ball?
A bucket of 20 to 25 balls, two tees, eight to ten cones, helmets for every batter, a dozen tennis balls, a few beanbags and a whistle. Practice balls and game balls are different things at this age: foam or wiffle balls for drills, and the reduced-injury-factor ball your league requires for games. The tennis balls and beanbags are how you teach catching to a child who flinches. You do not need a pitching machine, weighted balls or anything sold as player development at this age.
One thing for the end of the season. T-ball coaches are almost always a parent who got
talked into it in February. If you are organizing the team gift, we keep a guide to
baseball coach gifts, and when they move up from the
tee there are more fun youth baseball drills to
grow into.
Also in News
Bible Verses for Baseball Gloves: 34 That Fit, and How to Write Them
Bible verses that fit a baseball glove, sorted by how much space each spot gives you, plus which marker survives a season and the pitcher glove rule to check first.
Read More
Senior Night Baseball Ideas: A Parent's Complete Guide to the Last Game
Plan the perfect baseball senior night with our complete guide: poster vendors, ceremony order, speech templates, gifts, and the emotional last at-bat tradition.
Baseball Wristbands: The 4 Types and Which One You Actually Need
Four different products get called a baseball wristband. Here is how to tell signal wristbands, silicone message bands, sweatbands and compression support apart, what each costs, and how to size one.