Changing Your Youth Football Practice Schedule
\Are you short coaches and unsure about how the heck you are going to field a competitive team? LOTS of guys are in your very same shoes.
First step is to heavily recruit the parents. Let them know they don’t have to be great football minds to coach. They just have to be open minded, consistent, pass the background check and be coachable. You can train most guys up if you use cheat cards and direct them in groups right next to yours. You can get them started, jump over to your group, then come back to them when it’s time to start another drill. Drill Cheat Cards
So what do you do if you’ve come up dry for coaches? A lot of guys will just go to doing a lot of full team practices. The problem with that is it is difficult to teach fundamentals and coach up large groups of players all at the same time. Kids develop best during individual and small group drills, not in team. However if you put everyone together the lines are going to be long, most players won’t get many reps and the pace will be like watching a snail going uphill on a cold day.
One approach is to go on opposite days. The backs go on say Monday and Wednesday, the linemen on Tuesday and Thursday and you go team on Saturday. The problem is a lot of guys can’t go 5 nights a week and you are only together in team for 1 day.
Another approach I really like is altering the practice times. The linemen practice from 5:30- 7:30 and the backs practice from 6:10 to 8:10. That way you get 40 minutes alone with each group and the team overlaps together for 80 minutes. This is what I did the season I coached in Reno during that Reality TV Pilot “Worst to First”. It worked really well for us, but of course it requires the coaches to practice for 160 minutes instead of 120.
