UPDATE from extremely large middle school team
I made a post a couple months ago about having a middle school team consisting of 41 girls. We had 25 on the 7th grade team and 16 on the 8th grade team. Just wanted to update how the season went and what we did. I was an assistant coach and not able to be at all practices. For the most part we split practices into 4 groups or so and ran different drills around the ball field. We would also split them up and scrimmaged at times which they seemed to like the best. As far as the games went we would typically play the 7th graders vs the opposing team's 7th graders and this posed the biggest issue since we had so many. We rotated often, except for pitching as we tried to keep that fairly consistent to get them into a rhythm. At bats were sparse in the beginning of the year so we ended up splitting the 7th graders into 2 teams, A and B and each team played 2+ innings based on time. This worked out pretty well especially as the season went on and we had injuries and players missing so at times we were down to 16 or 17 making rotations easier. Our 7th grade team fared ok but just due to having a large team we couldn't always have our best players out there all the time, though we did win some games.
8th grade season went better. We had 3 new ones on the team and though they weren't as polished still found ways to get on base and contribute. We went 5-3 with that team but again if we had about 11-12 I believe we would have had one more win.
All in all it was a good season and we saw a lot of girls step up and improve, which is all we really want to see. They had a fun season and most of the girls are on a summer ball team. The funny part is most of our summer ball teams will only have 10/team due to numbers being 20- 14u players and 30- 12u players so instead of having bigger teams we have very small teams. We'll probably be pulling girls from other teams up to play over the summer if we're short.