WHEN PREPARING YOUR football team for an upcoming game, time is of the essence. There’s an old saying that “time lost on the practice field is never gained back.” All coaches should take that to heart.
Your practice schedule and plans should be well thought out and organized in order for effective teaching, coaching and learning to be achieved.
Practice-Planning Tips
Regardless of the level of competition you’re coaching at, the following practice-planning tips will prove to be helpful.
- Write Out Practice Plans. Spend considerable time and thought on your practice plan and stick to it, being detailed for every segment and situation. You’ll obtain the best returns for your efforts if you put it down on paper.
- Make Yourself A Checklist. Situations often arise during the course of practice that cause you to be rushed, making it easy to forget to cover something that you really wanted to cover. To avoid these situations, keep a checklist that includes all the various phases you need to go over in a particular practice. Build your checklist around your offensive schemes, drills and fundamental techniques.
- Divide Practices Into Segments. A typical practice schedule should be divided into five segments: pre-practice, specialty, individual, group combo and team periods.
Pre-Practice Periods
This segment can be used as recognition or walk-through periods to review different situations such as: base runs, protections, special plays, screens, draws, and reverses vs. your opponents fronts and adjustments.
Use this time period as “mental time” for your units to step through and rehearse their assignments according to defensive fronts. This will give you an indication as to whether your players have retained assignment information from the meeting room to the practice field.
Specialty Period
This segment is devoted to the kicking game. If you’re a position coach and the majority of the players you’re responsible for aren’t involved on special teams, you can use this valuable time to get started with your unit.
With offensive linemen, I use this time as a warmup period to do agility work and reaction drills, or work on pulling, trapping or whatever other phases that I don’t have a lot of time to cover in the individual periods.
Individual Periods
Time management is critical and the focus is on individual fundamentals and techniques. You must select drills that will teach and develop particular fundamentals and techniques. These drills should be decided on prior to the start of the season, so you’re organized and thoroughly prepared on what you’re teaching.
Your selection of drills should be decided by looking at the purpose of each drill and asking yourself, “How much are we going to utilize what this drill teaches in a game, skill, fundamental, technique or segment of the game? And does this drill fit into our practice time-wise?” Individual drills should:
- Teach coordination of eye, mind and body.
- Develop confidence and poise in your players.
- Help you evaluate and align personnel.
- Stress fundamentals, skills and techniques.
- Create game-like situations in practice.
- Fit in with your objectives, methods and coaching philosophy.
- Cover all the essentials of your offensive scheme.
Group Combo Periods
This segment is devoted to having different units going against each other. For example, use this time to work the defensive line, linebackers, running backs or a combination of all three groups together. Various situations can be covered in this segment, including one-on-one, two-on-two, three-on-three, half line, full line, the inside and perimeter running games, blitz pickups, twist pickups and pass-protection schemes.
This progression of teaching gives your unit a clean view of the overall picture and allows you to concentrate on coaching an individual or the entire unit itself.
Team Periods
Emphasis in this period is placed on developing the team as a unit. This is necessary in order to polish the timing of plays, check offensive assignments and to put the individuals into game-like situations.
Proper execution by your players in this period will demonstrate if the transfer of knowledge has occurred and whether your players are ready for game-like situations.
The objective here is to improve the all-around development of your units and the execution of their assignments.
Coaching Is Teaching
It’s not always the system of play that wins games, but the players who execute the fundamentals better than the opposition. It’s not necessarily how much you teach your players, but how effectively you teach them.
Select practical and effective drills that will develop individual and unit fundamentals, techniques and skills under game-like conditions.