Please find in this blog a few of the points of emphasis that we have as a staff as we begin spring football this week. Although they are not revolutionary, they do come out of some focused and concentrated work from our staff time in March as we looked at everything that we do and tried to make it better. Our focus is to never change for change sake but to always evolve. What follows are a few of our HOW’S this spring as we are attempting to make sure our players each individually always know the WHY’S.
1 – Spring Practice Field Time Breakdown
-Our concept this spring is to always have one big block of individual time so each position coach can manage his time and teach his specific technique progression how he wants. This is a departure for us from springs of the past as we often handled almost all fundamental/technique individual time through unit/circuit work OR we were constantly transitioning between some type of group or 11 vs. 11 work back to an individual period that was of short duration. We still, of course, have unit/circuit time, group, and 11 vs.11 competition. It has just been a matter of splitting the time up differently in response to where coaches felt we were at going into year three of the program.
2 – Spring Meeting Instruction
-All of our meetings this spring are required to be diverse in the modalities we use. There is a high level in the interaction between the teacher and the learners. Of course, this is what great teachers do all the time both naturally and with practice but we are quality controlling closely and demanding it of ourselves with urgency this spring. This means that during a 45-minute position meeting we need to have a specific plan for each minute and cannot simply just grab the remote and talk through the previous practice’s film. Here are some of the strategies that we are using:
-Players draw on the board and re-teach to the group the previous day’s installation.
-Players run the remote and talk through a play.
-Spots or flat cones are down on the floor in the meeting room in order to take the correction from the film and step-through it right away.
-Forcing the players to transcribe from the board the previous day’s corrections and notes themselves instead of handing them a typed-up note sheet.
-Taking a meeting to watch prime examples from other teams instead of going through our own practice film.
In general, one way to continue to re-capture the focus of the players in the age of the short attention span is to make them stand-up for a short stretch break every 15 minutes and to be able to re-set and reseat themselves.
3 – We Teach in 3’s and “Same As”
-We all understand intuitively and know from the research on education that complex things (e.g.,the details of becoming a great football player based on one’s innate talent level) need to be broken down into manageable parts in order to be processed and thoroughly understood. We have chosen three as our arbitrary magic number in many cases to do this for our players (e.g., our pressure plans usually start at Field/Middle/Boundary). In all of our communication with our players we are striving to see how many techniques-schemes-concepts we can link together as SAME AS. Teaching in three’s allows us to never have too much on the plate of any one player for each given installation day.
Best wishes for an outstanding spring season.