Football Practice Plan

Your first football practice is a few days away, you're excited about getting out there and getting things going, working with the youth in the hour plus time allotted. Wait a minute... an hour... how do you fill the time in? Well, let's get started. You need to be organized and you need to have a football practice plan. You cannot do it off the top off your head. You need to have a football practice plan that accounts for every minute of your planned practice.

A good football practice plan will cover all aspects of your specific sport: warm-up, conditioning, fundamentals, skills, team play and systems, as well as special teams. Account for at least a minimum of 10-15 minutes per category. Too much in one area and the players will lose interest and you will lose out in the other areas that you want to cover. By having a football practice plan and following it, you will have good flow to your practice, maintain player concentration, and get the most out of your practice by covering all aspects.

A poor football practice plan and you will have down time which invites fooling around and lack of focus especially at the youth level.

Follow your plan!

If you are working on a specific fundamental or system and things are not working out after your allotted time frame, move on to the next scheduled assignment, and after practice make a note of how each session went and what you need to continue to work on in practice. Keep practice logs recording your thoughts, ideas, and player evaluation and development. Refer to the log prior to planning the following football practice so you know what you need to schedule. It's important that you work on fundamentals of some sort for each and very practice, do not omit this in order to work on something else. Solid fundamentals such as tackling and blocking are very important. You need to do fundamentals well in order to be good in your systems.

Remember you play like you practice!

Cheers!

Youth Football: Rebuilding A Football Program

Sooner or later you'll be faced with the challenge of re-building your program. Usually, this follows a couple of seasons where you had a solid team and were a legitimate contender. Or perhaps, you're the new coach taking on a new program. Either or, you got a lot of work ahead!

The challenges in the early parts of the rebuild can be immense as you get to know a whole new group of players and parents. The first thing that will stand out is how young and inexperienced they look compared to the team of the previous season.

Get over it quick! There's work to be done!

It's important that you get a handle on the static factors which basically would be the size, height, weight, and age of your players. Then test them! Have a practice with just shorts and running shoes in the gym. Test their speed and agility, their strength, vertical leap, and time them, in a shuttle run type activity while recording your results. At the end of the day, have a game of 4 on 4 basketball. Include all of your players including your big guys. Basketball is a great game to watch and see who can move their feet and who the athletes are. After this type of practice you should have a basic understanding of players and what group they should be placed in. The next practices assign them to their groups.

In the coming practices emphasize fundamentals and more fundamentals keeping in mind that a young team will need more of these than ever. As they gain confidence in their positions, introduce a simplified version of your system. Remember, that your finely tuned system from last season graduated or moved on with the departing players! Start slow, be patient, as this is all new to them. Praise them steady.

Finally, in your first game expect them to make mistakes and to look tentative. Re-enforce your systems between plays or quarters. Coach them up and most important encourage them to go out there and compete!

Usually, a young team will not be confident and will be a little intimidated in the early part of the season. They will look at you hard for guidance and it's important that you give it to them and talk to them steady. They will probably take their lumps early but as the season goes on you'll see the team emerge and the confidence grow. Sometimes they will look solid while other times they will be just awful!

The main thing is to get them to buy into the idea that they are young and will learn a lot in their first season .Despite their youth and inexperience they are expected to compete and to know their assignments win or lose. The main thing is that the experience they gain will be invaluable for the following season.

A solid rebuild will take 2-3 seasons.

Cheers!

Youth Football: Keys to a Solid Football Defence

As a youth football coach when you begin to plan put the dynamics of your defence together you should consider the following: Pressure, Contain, Filter, Force, and Cover.

With these elements in mind and within your defensive system make sure that you have these areas or keys covered and that your players know their assignments within the keys. Let's cover each item: Pressure- it's important that you pressure the offence into hurrying in order to take away their time and space and possibly put them in a position with your pressure that they make mistakes and as a result create turn-overs.

Contain: - its important that within this pressure that you have good contain so that they cannot get outside the pocket or the box and that everything is contained or bracketed inside. Filter- it's important that within the Pressure and Contain that every play is filtered back inside where you have your strength and more help. Force- it's important that within this filtration that you have solid run support and that your players come in force, aggressive to the ball, some coaches refer to this as gang-tackling. Finally, Cover- it's important that within the keys of your football defensive system that you have good downfield coverage.

Regardless of the front or defensive football system that you want to play these elements are the keys and your players should know their assignments within the defence.

Cheers!

Steelers Roethlisburger Sets Himself Apart From Brady and Manning

When you think of the best quarterbacks in the NFL most people would think of Tom Brady of the New England Patriots and of course the one and only Peyton Manning of the Colts. But how many of you would throw Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger into the mix as well as being one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL, and what sets him apart from Brady and Manning?

Probably the single element that separates him from the others is his ability to prolong the play. Roethlisberger can get himself out of trouble by being able to scramble out of the pocket when under pressure and either run or roll and throw his way out of trouble. Prolonging the play enables his downfield receivers the time to get themselves open so that they can bail out the big quarterback who has a great knack for finding these receivers open and turning what looked like a sack and loss into a huge gain. Even against one of the best prepared defences in the league in the New York Jets, Roethlisberger was able to do something that both Manning and Brady were unable to do and that's to beat the Jets!

So what does this tell us as coaches?

It tells us that a well designed and prepared defensive game plan will fall apart when a good quarterback is mobile and able to be creative and prolong the play. Normally, your defensive plan is based on the other team's tendencies, strengths and what they like to do offensively in a given situation. When teams are good they tend to do things consistently well all the time at a high level. As a defensive co-ordinator you are able to game plan for this as you know what they like to do. Tom Brady and Peyton Manning like to be in the pocket and they do not run the football when in trouble, they will hang in there until the last minute which was their demise against the Jets in both their play-off losses as they were sacked by the Jets defence. Big Ben separated himself by being able to be mobile. This mobility was not factored into the Jets game plan and in the end it cost them a trip to the Super Bowl as Ben made plays out of nothing that moved the chains and vaulted the Steelers into the Super Bowl.

Both Manning and Brady were not mobile against the Jets defence. Their usual surgical like approach was hindered by the Jets patient game plan of not being too predictable in their defensive schemes and blitz's. The Jets were able to create confusion and then pressure Brady and Manning into making mistakes and miscues and allowing them more of an option to run the football rather than throw which is not in their comfort zone. Roethlisberger, however, is comfortable running and rolling with the football which is what separated him from the other two great quarterbacks.



Cheers!