The serious players on your youth baseball all star or travel teams spend endless hours on their hitting. Personal hitting coaches and batting cages at their homes are the norm. With all of this technical training and repetition, game day hitting can be successfully simplified with the following four tips.

The first step is to have your players relax and trust in the hard work they have put in. Central to relaxing is to make sure they breath. Upon observing your players closely, you will discover that a substantial number are not breathing. A quick reminder of this will yield great results especially when the game is on the line.

Next is for them to choose the right pitch. The quality of their at bats is directly related to the quality of their decisions. Take the time to teach them to master the knowledge of the strike zone. This fundamental of the game is crucial for your players to have game day success.

The third tip is to understand to focus on things that they can control and on game day that is a good swing with hard contact. If they choose to swing, what happens (i.e. hard contact, swing and miss, weak grounder)? Baseball has been around for over a hundred years so the positions are set to where the majority of the balls will be hit. All the player can control is hitting the ball hard. If that happens, but he gets out because it is hit right at somebody, that is still a good job.

The ability of making adjustments is the next game day hitting tip to master. This applies to all areas potentially needing adjustment such as the umpire is calling a ball and a half off the plate a strike or an opposing pitcher throwing with a lot of pace or no pace at all. They need to be able to recognize and adjust pitch by pitch. In the instance of the umpire calling an outside pitch a strike, get up to the plate and deal with it (versus just complaining about it and striking out). Another adjustment is changing your players approach when they have two strikes which would be a ball in play keeping a larger strike so nothing gets past them.

With your players focused on relaxing, making good decisions, spending their energy on what they control and developing their ability to make adjustments, they will achieve a tremendous amount of success hitting. This will become contagious with your entire line up and your team will be on it's way to a championship.