THE STEPS YOU’RE taking to improve your program right now, are as important as anything you’ll do all year long. Some people think of this as the time of year when football coaches have “down time.” This couldn’t be further from the truth. This is the time of year when you’re giving your players their off-season workout mandates before they leave school, reviewing your schemes for all phases of the game and seeing what changes you’ll be implementing prior to next season. Now is the time to tweak your offense, add a new blitz to your defense, change a kick or punt coverage, evaluate returning players (and coaches) and pore over materials you’ve gathered from clinics and issues of Gridiron Strategies.
It’s also the time to begin planning your August two-a-day practice sessions. Planning and organizing your August practices well in advance is a key element for running a successful program. In a national Gridiron Strategies survey on off-season football programs, it was revealed that the most successful high school programs in the country — those with 3-year winning percentages of .776 and higher — take their off-season planning and preparation time very seriously.
The survey found that these winning programs spent less than 15% of their August practice time in a classroom setting and yet still teach a whopping 76 to 100% of their schemes before school starts. When you factor in time for conditioning and weight lifting, this means that these teams have little time to waste. Coaches need to be on the field teaching and instructing. It also means that prior to August practices, the entire coaching staff needs to be armed and ready to go with full knowledge of the practice timelines, the teaching agenda for each day, weight room plans and how all drills function and the purpose each drill serves.
Gridiron Strategies compiled all the data from the national survey into an in-depth report called “Outstanding August Practices.” To order this report, visit our Web site at: www.gridironstrategies.com/ff/gridstore.