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By My Blog
Put the tee where he walks past it, not where it's out of the way Here's a small change that quietly gets your kid more reps: put the tee somewhere he p...
Here's a small change that quietly gets your kid more reps: put the tee somewhere he passes every day, not tucked in a corner he has to go dig out. This one is for the parent who set up a hitting spot at home and noticed it doesn't get touched as much as they hoped. The fix has nothing to do with drive and everything to do with placement.
A kid with a bat and thirty minutes isn't going to move furniture to hit. If the tee lives behind the lawnmower, or the net is folded up in a closet, or he has to drag everything to the middle of the garage first, most nights he just won't. Not because he's lazy. Because the little bit of friction is enough to talk him out of it.
Now flip it. The tee is set up right where he walks in from the car. The bat is leaning against the wall next to it, not in a bag zipped shut in another room. The net is already hung. He comes in, drops his backpack, and there it is, ready. Ten swings before he even goes inside. That's the whole trick. You remove every excuse between "I could hit right now" and actually hitting.
We've built enough garage cages and backyard setups to say this plainly: the families whose kids hit the most are almost never the ones with the fanciest gear. They're the ones who put the hitting spot in the path of daily life. Where he walks past it. Where she can't ignore it.
Most people set up a training spot the way they'd set up storage. They think, where's the space I'm not using? And they tuck the cage into the far corner, behind the stuff, out of the traffic. It looks tidy. It also means the tee is now the hardest thing in the garage to get to.
Think about it the other way. What spot does your kid walk through every single day? The path from the door to the house. The stretch of driveway they cross to get the mail. The corner of the yard they pass on the way to let the dog out. That's where the tee wants to live. A little in the way is exactly right, because "in the way" is another way of saying "impossible to forget about."
You'll know it's working when the hitting stops being a scheduled thing. It's not "go practice for thirty minutes." It's five swings here, ten swings there, a quick round after dinner because the tee was just sitting there asking for it. Those loose reps add up faster than any planned session, and they add up because the setup never made him choose.
A tee that gets used is a tee that needs zero setup. That's the standard. If your kid has to assemble anything, find anything, or clear space before the first swing, you've built in a reason to skip it.
So set it up complete and leave it. Tee standing. A bucket of balls right next to it, already full. The right net hung and ready so he's not chasing balls across the yard after every swing, which is its own kind of friction that kills a session fast. A bat within arm's reach. If he can walk up and swing without touching anything else first, you've done it right.
This is also why the garage tends to beat the backyard for consistency, even though the backyard has more room. The garage is covered. It doesn't care about rain, heat, or the late-evening dark. The tee stays set up permanently because nobody has to break it down and haul it inside. Summer 2026 heat, an afternoon storm, none of it moves the tee. It's just always there, always ready, and "always ready" is what turns a hitting spot into a habit.
You don't need a full cage to do this. A tee, a net, a bucket of balls, and a spot your kid passes every day will out-train a beautiful setup nobody walks by. Start there. If it earns its keep, and it usually does once the reps start piling up, you build out from it. Add lanes. Add turf so it feels like a real place to work. Add a machine down the road. That's the natural order, and it starts with placement, not gear.
We build the bigger stuff too, the full garage conversions and the indoor facilities a whole team trains in, and the same rule holds at every size. The spaces that get used are the ones people naturally flow through. When we lay out a facility, we're thinking about where kids walk in, where the tees sit relative to that door, how fast someone can go from arriving to swinging. Placement is design. It's not an afterthought.
So before you spend a dollar on anything new, walk your garage or your yard and watch where your kid actually goes. Put the tee right in that path. Leave it standing. Then see how many more times a week that bat comes off the wall. My guess is you'll be surprised, and so will he.