Purchasing your child their first baseball glove is an exciting venture. It also can be challenging with all the different types of gloves available. Hopefully, this will give you some insight into what to look for when getting ready to purchase that youth glove.
There are 2 common theories about what size of glove their players should wear that I have heard little league coaches discuss.
- First theory is to buy a smaller sized glove (9.5″-10.5″) for your child. A smaller glove will allow your child to control the glove easier to where it needs to be. This aids in developing the correct fundamentals now and to build confidence later.
- Second theory (the less common of the 2) is to buy a larger glove(11″-12″) for your child. This larger glove will allow your child to flag down the balls and build confidence to enjoy the game, then build fundamentals off of confidence.
- Personally, I teach to use a smaller glove and develop the skills now. If the player is starting from square 1 and is needing to learn the basics, it is easier to teach them the correct skill set and tweak them as they grow vs allowing them to develop bad habits with a larger glove and have a coach change everything that they have learned down the road.
Glove Material
When shopping for a youth glove, there are many different types of materials used for gloves. 2 common materials are real leather and synthetic leather. Buy your child a real leather glove and stay away from the synthetic leather glove. The real leather glove will take a bit to break in, but it can be broken in the way you or your child wants to break them in. The [real leather] gloves will feel better and also perform better. The synthetic leather gloves are shaped to look like they have a good design, but they are designed to stay that way and are tough to close. The synthetic leather has a tendency to be slick and have balls slide out of the glove. Synthetic leather gloves will be cheaper than most real leather gloves, but the cost is well worth it in the end.
In a later blogs, I will be discussing what glove is best for infield, outfield and pitcher for the advancing player.
A very good option for a real leather youth glove is the gloves made by Vinci. They are $49.95. These gloves are designed from adult models in smaller sizes to start the player out right. The Vinci Youth Gloves can be found here:
Vinci Youth GlovesGuest Blog by Mark Jones
