Help your students learn to read the situation and choose the best defensive play with this printable game pack for Danish Longball, a striking and fielding game built across four builds!
Danish Longball is the last game before baseball, and it's where everything finally converges.
In my grade six striking and fielding unit, it arrives after Race To The Bases, Chuck The Chicken, Whacky Baseball and Ribby. Each of those did one job. Striking with power. Attacking open space. Getting the ball to a stop spot. Reading a forced play. Danish Longball is where students have to hold all of it at once, and it's the reason a full game of baseball two lessons later feels achievable rather than overwhelming.
On offence, a batter now has to think about where to send the ball, and to be careful not to send it straight at the runner base and get themselves tagged out. On defence, the questions get properly hard. The score matters. The inning matters. There might be three players sitting on the runner base waiting for a safe moment to break for home.
And the fielding team always has a choice: chase an out, or throw to the pitcher and freeze the play. That decision is the whole learning target, and it's a genuinely good one, because there is no universally right answer. It depends on the situation, which is exactly what you want students weighing.
🏃 Build One: Beat The Fielders. No striking at all. The teacher throws the ball, everyone runs, and the fielding relay gets established before a bat ever enters the picture.
🧊 Build Two: Freeze Ball. Striking arrives, and with it the freeze. Runners start deciding whether to hold on the base or break for home.
⚾ Build Three: Danish Longball. Outs become possible. Caught balls, tags between the lines, a thrown bat. Three outs and the teams switch.
🔗 Build Four: Fielder Rally. Fielders can no longer run with the ball, so every play becomes a relay. This one changes the game more than it sounds like it will, because now the fielding team has to think about where to stand before the ball arrives rather than after.
Four builds is a lot, and that's deliberate. This game carries more rules than almost anything else I teach, and compressing the builds because a class seems to be picking it up quickly is the fastest route to spending your lesson refereeing rule disputes instead of teaching defensive decisions.
The pack includes the full game, all four builds with their diagrams, learning targets, discussion questions, assessment ideas, and teacher notes.
Happy Teaching!
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