Football Practice Plan: Be Organized!

Your first 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 practice plan. You cannot do it off the top off your head. You need to have a practice plan that accounts for every minute of your planned practice. A good practice plan will cover all aspects of your specific sport: warm-up, conditioning, fundamentals, skills, team play and systems. 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 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 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. Keeps a practice log recording your thoughts, ideas, and player evaluation and development. Refer to the log prior to planning the following 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 passing, shooting, 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