Training vs. playing: why your player needs both

I’ve watched players leave programs, ours included, because they wanted to play more games.

And every year at tryouts, multiple parents ask me, “How many games do you play?” Not one has ever asked how many practices we have.

I get it. Games are the fun part. Kids sign up to PLAY baseball games — that’s the whole point, and it should be. Nobody falls in love with this sport in a cage. But it raises a question every baseball family should think about: does playing more games actually make you better? Or does training?

The honest answer is both. But not in equal amounts, and not at the same time of year.

Most youth baseball players get this backwards. They play a ton of games, train a little, and wonder why they look the same in June as they did last September. Games feel like progress. There’s a scoreboard, a uniform, a dugout full of teammates. Training doesn’t have any of that. It’s just you, a coach, and a lot of reps.

Here’s why you need both, and how to get the mix right.

What training does that games can’t

Training is where skills get built. Games are where they get tested. You can’t test something you never built.

Think about what a position player actually gets in a game. Three or four trips to the plate. Maybe a dozen pitches seen. A couple of ground balls, if the ball finds him. That’s it for a two-hour game — and a lot of it is standing around.

Now compare that to a 45-minute hitting class in a group of four. Dozens of quality swings. A coach watching every one. Immediate feedback on what changed and why. Blast Motion data that shows whether the bat path actually got better or just felt better.

Training gives a player three things games never will:

• Volume. You get good at what you do a lot. Games don’t give you a lot of anything.
• Feedback. In a game, nobody stops the action to fix your load. In training, that’s the whole point.
• Permission to fail. A kid will never try a new swing or a new grip in a tight game. In the cage, he can miss 20 times in a row while it clicks.

It works. We’ve watched several of our players go from hitting the ball 45–50 mph as 9-year-olds to 65+ mph as 11-year-olds. That’s intent, instruction, and reps — not just growing up.

Training is also where athleticism gets built. We believe in athletes first — speed, strength, and movement — then the baseball skills on top of that. You can’t build a faster first step in the third inning.

What games do that training can’t

None of this means games don’t matter. They matter a lot. They just do a different job.

A cage is a controlled environment. The pitches come from a machine or a coach throwing to you. Nobody’s on base. Nobody’s yelling. The game takes all of that away.

Games teach the things you can only learn under real conditions:

• Pressure. Two outs, runner on second, a pitcher you’ve never seen. Every kid needs reps in that moment — and you can’t fake it.
• Decisions. Where’s the throw going? Do I take third? Is this my pitch? Baseball IQ gets built by making those calls live, getting some wrong, and remembering.
• Adjustments. The pitcher’s spinning it today. The field’s wet. The umpire’s zone is wide. Good players figure it out by the second at-bat.
• Failure in public. Baseball is a game of failure. Learning to strike out, walk back to the dugout, and be ready for the next pitch is a skill. It might be the most important one.

The problem: too many games, not enough training

Youth baseball has drifted toward a games-first model. More tournaments. More showcases. More weekends where a family drives two hours to play three games and gets four at-bats.

I understand why. Games are fun. Games are visible. A tournament schedule feels like you’re getting your money’s worth.

But if a kid plays 60 games a year and barely trains, he’s mostly practicing the swing he already has. Bad habits get more reps, not fewer. And the pitchers? Too many innings with too little arm care and strength work is how young arms get hurt.

High school coaches and college scouts look at the five tools: hit, hit for power, run, throw, field. Every one of those is built in training and confirmed in games. Nobody gets recruited for his tournament record at 11U.

The scoreboard on a 10U Saturday is not the measure. The measure is whether your player is better this June than he was last June.

What other countries do differently

Not every country pushes kids into competition as early and as hard as we do. Look at three places that develop athletes very differently.

Norway. Kids play, but the results don’t count. Under Norway’s Children’s Rights in Sport, the youngest kids play only local club matches — no results lists, no league tables, no trophies. Regional competition opens around 11, but scores and rankings stay off limits. National championships don’t exist until the year a child turns 13. Clubs that break the rules lose government funding.

The result? A country of about 5.6 million people that tops the Winter Olympic medal table and produces athletes like Erling Haaland. Take the scoreboard away and coaches spend their time on skills, not on winning a 10U trophy.

Russia’s Spartak Tennis Club. A run-down club in Moscow with a few indoor courts and a brutal winter. In the mid-2000s, it was producing more top-20 women’s players than the entire United States, according to Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code. Anna Kournikova came through there.

Their rule: no tournaments until a player has trained for three years. Kids spend that time on technique — slow-motion swings, and lots of swings with no ball at all. The coaches think the ball is a distraction until the stroke is right. Then they compete.

That rule would never fly in American youth sports. But look at the results.

The Dominican Republic. Outside the U.S., no country sends more players to the major leagues. And for years, young Dominican players rarely played organized games at all — there isn’t much Little League there. They trained. Hours a day of drills, swings, and throws.

But here’s the part people skip. That model built incredible tools and a gap in game skills. Scouts noticed Dominican hitters lagged in plate discipline, and trainers there started adding more games because some things you can only learn in a game.

That’s the lesson. Norway shows that early winning doesn’t matter. Spartak shows that skills built first hold up when you finally compete. The Dominican Republic shows that training without games leaves holes. You need both — in the right order.

How it fits together: train, compete, learn, repeat

Training and games aren’t competing for your kid’s time. They’re two halves of one loop:

1. Train — build the skill with reps and feedback.
2. Compete — test it under real conditions.
3. Learn — see what held up and what broke down.
4. Train again — fix what broke, with a clearer target.

The ratio shifts with the calendar. That’s how we build our club teams at Gorilla:

• Offseason (November–March): training-heavy. This is where most of the improvement happens. This offseason we have 55+ training sessions available — hitting, pitching, fielding, speed and power. Train as much or as little as you like. We have a class and a plan for every player.
• Season (spring and summer): game-heavy, but not game-only. Players compete in league and tournament play and keep training through the season. Fewer reps, more targeted — fixing what the games exposed.
• Fall: a bridge. Fall ball gets players back on the field to test what they built over the summer, and shows us what to attack in the winter.

This is a long-term development approach. We’re not trying to win November. We’re trying to build players who are still getting better at 16.

What parents can do

You don’t need a spreadsheet to get this right. A few habits go a long way:

• Ask the other question. When you look at a program, don’t just ask how many games they play. Ask how many practices they run, how many training sessions are available, and what a player actually works on in them.
• Use the offseason. If your player only touches a bat between April and July, he’s going to look the same every spring. Winter is when players separate.
• Watch games for information, not just results. After a game, ask one question: what’s one thing you want to work on this week? Then make sure it gets worked on.
• Don’t over-schedule tournaments. More games isn’t more development. Leave room in the week for training and rest.
• Protect the arm. Pitchers need strength and arm-care work, not just innings. If your kid pitches, ask what his throwing program looks like.
• Be patient. Development is not a straight line. Some months the swing gets worse before it gets better. That’s normal. That’s the process working.

The bottom line

Training builds the player. Games reveal the player. Skip training and there’s nothing new to reveal. Skip games and you never find out what holds up.

And never lose sight of why kids are here: to play baseball games. Training doesn’t replace that. It makes it better. The game is a lot more fun when you can hit, throw, and field.

The kids who get better year after year aren’t the ones who played the most games. They’re the ones who trained with a purpose, competed to find out where they stood, and went back to work.

Further reading

• The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle — the book that made Spartak famous, and a great read for any sports parent. Coyle’s notes on his Spartak visit
• Norway punches above its weight in sport — here’s what Australia could learn (SBS News)
• No league tables, no trophies: how Norway made sport fun for kids (Marcellus)
• If NZ really wants to revive youth sport, there’s one obvious nation to emulate (The Spinoff)
• Mother of Russian tennis: Larisa Preobrazhenskaya (The Moscow Times)
• Dominican players and the plate-discipline gap (Baseball Prospectus)