12U Softball Practice Plans

Run 12U softball practice around the plays 12U games turn on. Give every session a pitching block at 40 feet with the 12-inch ball, a short-game block at the plate or in the field, and one team play such as first-and-third, a cutoff or a rundown. Close with live innings under the rules your tournaments use.

That list fits inside 75 to 90 minutes, the 12U range in the session-length table of our softball practice plan. Both sheets below stay inside it. If your travel team wants an extra hitting station on the 90-minute sheet, swap it in for one of the defense blocks instead of adding time.

One Night a Week or Two

With two nights, run the short-game sheet on the first night and the tournament sheet on the last night before you travel. With one night, use the short-game sheet and swap its live innings for the tie-breaker block from the other one. Your pitchers still need their own bullpen time between practices, so ask them to throw on a second day even when the team cannot.

Starting From Last Season

If your team is moving up from its first years of kid pitch, start with the guide for that age, our 10U practice plan. It covers battery work, walks, the throw to second and balls in the dirt on strike three. This page assumes those are in place. Your pitchers may not be. Moving from USA Softball 10U to 12U pushes the circle five feet back and adds an inch to the ball at the same time, so treat the first weeks of circle work as a fresh start for every arm.

Your team plays under one of these rule books, and a travel team may enter events under more than one. The table compares what the 12U division gets in each. Every cell comes from the organization's own document: USA Softball's Official Rules of Softball(opens in new tab) dated January 12, 2026, the USSSA Fastpitch rule book, 18th edition(opens in new tab), and Little League's rules pages for its Majors softball division.

How Far Do You Pitch in 12U Softball?

Forty feet, in all three rule books, with bases 60 feet apart. The move to 40 arrives at different ages, though. USA Softball's girls throw from 35 feet in 10U and 40 feet in 12U. USSSA's table already puts girls at 40 feet at 11U. Little League Majors pitches from 40 feet with players as young as nine. At the next division up, girls pitch from 43 feet at USA Softball 14U and USSSA 13U.

What the Table Changes at Practice

• The 12-inch ball from day one. Pitchers and catchers grip, throw and block the game ball at every practice, so the first tournament is not the first time a pitcher spins it
• Runners still go on release. All three books let a runner leave as the pitch leaves the hand. First-and-third defense starts there
• Games end on a clock. USA Softball and USSSA tournaments can stop a game on time and break a tie with a runner on second. Both belong in practice
• Limits differ by book. Little League caps a pitcher at 12 innings in a single day. Neither the USA Softball nor the USSSA playing rules set an innings or pitch limit, so the plan for a weekend is yours to write

Read the Tournament Packet Too

The rule book is the floor. USA Softball's rule book says game times for its Junior Olympic time limit are set before the event. USSSA's by-laws let state directors add special rules for C divisions at Nationals. So read the packet for each event before the week's last practice and copy three things onto your sheet: the time limit, the run rule and the tie-breaker.

Two nights, typed out with minutes, ready to change. Click any cell to replace a drill with one your team already knows. Add row inserts a block, and Reset restores the sheet as printed here. Print Form prints one night on its own, and the print dialog is also your route to a PDF. Download as Image makes a PNG for the parents' group, and Copy as Table puts your version into a spreadsheet.

Short-Game Night

Seventy-five minutes on the plays that decide close 12U games. Pitchers throw in block 2 here, earlier than in our all-ages plan. Block 1 already has long throws, so arms are warm, and the circle work runs beside the bunt and slap station, so nobody waits on it.

Tournament-Week Night

Ninety minutes for the final session ahead of a weekend.

Good Drills for Youth Softball at This Age

Any drill on a sheet can be replaced. When you want options, our softball drills library sorts more than 40 by skill, with game-situation drills for blocks 3 to 6. The softball hitting drills include a slap-hitting section for your left-side hitters. For the circle, the softball pitching drills are grouped by level, so a pitcher rebuilding at 40 feet can start a step back.

A slapper looks like a bunter until her hands move. USA Softball's scoring rule describes the slap hit as a fake bunt followed by a controlled swing. That is why 12U defense has to answer both out of the same first step. Your corners come in for the bunt. If the bat pulls back, they have to stop, set their feet and field a ball hit hard on the ground.

Who Charges and Who Covers

Choose one coverage and keep it for the season. A common one for this age:

• First and third basemen charge
• Second baseman covers first
• Shortstop covers second
• Pitcher fields the ball up the middle
• Catcher fields anything that dies near home plate and calls the base for everyone else

One voice decides. Two voices mean a throw to nobody.

Read the Hands, Then Commit

Teach the corners to read the bat. A bunter and a slapper both move their feet, so footwork tells them little. A bunter squares or pivots and holds the bat still out front. A slapper pulls the bat back to her shoulder, and that pull-back is the read. Corners who guess wrong get the next rep too.

Two Rules Your Own Hitters Need

The short game has rules on the offensive side as well. In fast pitch, a batter who bunts foul after the second strike is out, under Rule 7 of USA Softball's book. So two-strike bunts are a choice your hitters make on purpose. The same rule calls a batter out when an entire foot is on the ground outside the batter's box as the bat meets the ball. Tape the box at the slap station, and let your slappers learn their footwork inside it.

These three plays all depend on throws that someone else lines up. Teach each one as a named play with a caller, then run it from the same alignment until the team stops thinking about it.

First-and-Third: Choose Two Calls

With runners at the corners, the one on first takes off at release and dares your catcher to throw. Give your defense two calls at most this season, and have your catcher signal one before the pitch.

• Throw through. The catcher throws to second, and the middle infielder covering checks third before she tags
• Throw to the cut. The catcher throws to a cut in front of the bag, who reads the runner on third and throws home if she breaks

Teach your own runners the other half, a delayed break from first that tries to draw the throw.

Cutoffs Need a Caller

Every ball hit to the outfield gets the same structure. The cutoff lines up between the fielder and the base. Your catcher, or the fielder at the target base, calls "cut" or lets the ball through. A cutoff who catches a throw she should have let go costs the base just as surely as a bad throw does. So practice the call as much as the throw.

Rundowns in Two Throws

1. Chase the runner back toward her original base, so a missed tag leaves her where she started
2. The fielder with the ball runs at her with the ball held up where her partner can see it
3. The partner closes in from the other side and calls for the throw

Count throws in block 5 of the short-game sheet. Two is the goal. Five usually means somebody is still throwing to the base instead of to a glove.

A 12U travel season comes in weekends. USSSA's by-laws describe the World Series format plainly: pool play with at least two games per team, then a double-elimination bracket. Pool games decide the seeding. So the practice before a weekend has to prepare a team for several short, timed games in a row.

Pool Play Runs on a Clock

Under USA Softball's time-limit rule, the clock starts with the first warm-up pitch, and the inning in progress is finished when time runs out. USSSA starts timing when the home team takes the field after the pre-game conference, and it starts no new inning once time has expired. Your players should know which one they are under before the first pitch. Block 6 of the tournament sheet uses a short clock for exactly that reason. A team that has felt time run out in practice doesn't rush the last inning on Saturday.

Extra Innings Start With a Runner on Second

A tie at the end of regulation or at the time limit sends the next half inning out with a runner already standing on second. On offense, the job is getting her home. A bunt that moves her to third with one out is often the whole plan. On defense, decide before the inning where the first out comes from: the lead runner at third, or a sure out at first. Block 5 of the tournament sheet runs both sides of it.

Plan Pitcher Innings Before Saturday

In Little League Majors a pitcher is capped at 12 innings in one day, and a pitcher who goes seven or more that day may not pitch on the following calendar day. USA Softball and USSSA set no limit in their playing rules. That leaves the weekend plan to you. Write it before Saturday, in pencil, with each pitcher's innings per game and a total. Then fill in what she actually threw after each game, and plan the next game from those numbers, not from the scoreboard.

12U doesn't add a sixth skill. If your list of softball's basic skills has five, it probably reads throwing, catching, fielding, hitting and baserunning. What changes is that 12U asks for two or three of them at once.

• Throwing and catching meet in the cutoff and the rundown, where the catch has to turn straight into the next throw
• Fielding meets reading, because a corner charging a bunt has to stop for a slap
• Hitting now includes the bunt and the slap, which is why both sheets give hitters a bunt and slap station
• Baserunning becomes a team play in first-and-third and in the tie-breaker inning

So the plans on this page rarely run a single-skill block. They practice combinations, the way a game hands them out.

When the summer's last tournament ends, the innings planner above is the most useful record you have: who threw how much, on which weekends. Keep it. Before the roster changes, write down three more things.

• Your bunt coverage, with who charges and who covers each base
• Your two first-and-third calls and the signal for each
• Which player learned which job, from slapping to calling the cutoff

Then tag every drill you ran by the game situation it rehearses, such as "first-and-third" or "slap defense", so a search finds it when a new roster needs the same play. If Striveon's drill library is where your drills live, add them there with those words as tags and filter by them.