Michigan Ignite Baseball offers a phenomenal Winter Training Program that includes individual instruction from skill-specific trainers. Over the course of the offseason, players will work with Ignite’s Hitting Coach, 2 Pitching Coaches, Catching Coach, and Fielding Coach. All of these skill-specific trainers have played and coached at the college level (or beyond) - after all, how can we say we’re a “College Prep” organization if the trainers haven’t been there, done that, and know exactly what it takes to succeed at the next level?

Additionally, we’ve found that so many organizations’ offseason training program consists of nothing but reps for 4-5 months. Repetitions are certainly a crucial part of development, but only if each rep is conducted with a specific purpose! We want players to find a mix of individual lessons in a one-on-one environment during each practice, along with repetitions of what they learned from their coaches while bonding with their fellow teammates.

Do you need to be huge to succeed in baseball? Absolutely not, just ask 7-time MLB Silver Slugger Jose Altuve! However, we want to be sure we’re promoting healthy habits both on and off the field. As a result, Michigan Ignite offers a 10-week Strength & Conditioning program as a part of our offseason training. This program is taught by licensed strength coaches and is designed to help players gain muscle, build endurance, and learn healthy exercise habits that can be performed on off-days at home year-round!

So often you will hear our coaches talk about our players’ well-being both on and off the field. At such a detrimental stage in their lives, we feel that it is our responsibility to provide them with positive resources that will benefit their mental health in their daily lives. Applying this to baseball as well, we all know that sometimes things just don’t go your way. Whether it’s a bad call by an umpire, an off-day on the mound, or an untimely strikeout, we value our players’ ability to handle adversity and remain a supportive teammate at all times.

To do so, we offer 2-3 mental performance coaching sessions throughout the offseason to promote a healthy mindset. These sessions are also designed to teach out players some coping mechanisms to persevere during difficult moments, and also how to ask for support from your coaches, teammates, family, and friends.

We are proud to offer training at 5 different facilities, each of which is utilized for a specific purpose. We have 3 indoor facilities and 2 outdoor facilities.

For our indoor facilities, we have one focused on hitting, another focused on mechanics and mobility, and the last acting as a mix of both, allowing our teams to hit, pitch, and field together, all while using state of the art HitTrax technology to track their progress season after season.

With our outdoor facilities, we use two different fields - one all turf, and one with an entirely dirt infield. The reason for this variety is so that our players are prepared to succeed on any playing surface. Sure, we would love the luxury of playing on an all-turf field full time! However, any former player knows that if you get too accustom to turf, that first bad hop off of a tiny stone in the dirt infield during a weekend tournament will certainly make you wish you had a little more practice.

We believe there is a reason why the MLB season consists of 162 games - it takes time for players to find their groove! Once players reach their 14U/15U season where they do not begin summer baseball until after their high school season has ended, the length of the season (and number of games played) is significantly reduced, limiting the amount of time they have to play in games and refine their skills on the field.

To counteract these limitations, all Michigan Ignite Baseball teams will play 4-6 “regular season” games on weekdays in addition to their 6-7 weekend tournaments in June and July. These games function as extremely organized scrimmages (not associated with an organized league) and allow our players to get more playing time, and find a rhythm for themselves and with their team at an earlier point in their season.