12 year old girl killed by softball

[Randle Pat McMurphy]

Another sad story. This time it is a 12 year old girl who dies after being hit with a softball the day after the minor league baseball coach was hit.

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/girl-hi...26081609990001

When I coached baseball, even up to the high school senior age group, I never hit infield practice at top speeds. Didnt think the danger of practicing on less than game condition infields justified it. See a whole lot more bad hops during practice than on a game prepped infield IMO. Wonder what happened in this case.

[Dr. Jack]

It's so sad. I don't understand this one. I heard she got hit in the back of the head. How do you get it on the back of the head on a bad hop ground ball. Just a freaky accident. Terrible news

[Randle Pat McMurphy]

Originally Posted by Dr. Jack

It's so sad. I don't understand this one. I heard she got hit in the back of the head. How do you get it on the back of the head on a bad hop ground ball. Just a freaky accident. Terrible news

Wondering the same thing. No matter how it happened, gotta wonder what was going on and what speed they were practcing at. Either way you have a coach and team who are living with this tragedy for the rest of their lives.

Always expected something like this to happen with a team that was in my son's 11-12 year league quite a ways back. Craziest thing I ever saw was an ex college coach organizing his 11-12 year practices as if the were college kids.

See if I can explain this clearly. You have 2 kids at each infield position fielding ground balls. One assitant coach/volunteer dad would stand half way down the 3rd base line and hit grounders to the kids playing 1st and 2nd base. One dad would stand halfway between home plate and 1st and hit grounders to the kids at short and 3rd so you have a crisscross effect going on across the diamond. Whoever fields a grounder throws the ball back to the coach who hit it. So far so good, right

While this is going on, the head coach is throwing batting practice to 3 kids who are rotating in and out of the batter's box every 5 hits. Have to keep in mind here that these kids are swinging away. So you have ground balls criss crossing the doamond from opposite baselines and kids swinging away during simultaneous batting practice.

Now ask yourself a question, what do the kids do with the balls they field? BP balls get thrown into the mound, so outfielders are throwing balls over infielders who have their backs turned because they are constantly fielding groundballs. Balls hit by coaches on the baselines get thrown back across the diamond.

Organized chaos at its finest. College level appropriate maybe but 12 year olds cant pay attention for 2 minutes let alone watch for line drives coming from the batter's box while trying to simultaneously field grounders and dodge errant throws from the outfield. Kept hoping the head coach would get drilled and have some sense knocked into him but never happened.