Youth Football Coaching – Practice Tips

One of the main goals in youth football coaching (13-14 year olds) is to prepare the kids for high school football and of course have fun and win games! Here are a couple of tips to contribute–just small practice things which have really helped develop good habits in our players.

1. Warm-up – in addition to our stretching routine each day we have added a form running & agility station period after warm-up. We continue with a modified agility station period throughout the year right before our position & group work periods and it works wonders for our teams conditioning come playoff time. (agility station consisted of mixing up various cone, bag, & plyometric drills)
2. Offensive Group work – after our position work period the running backs & ends come together for a period where we put in new plays, make adjustments, and review what we had in prior to going to team. While running our plays I increase the football practice intensity by having the running backs & ends live block on a ‘skeleton crew’ of d-ends, LB’s, and DB’s. Normally we run a passing period of 7 on 7 but while doing our running plays there was little resistance, adding in the live blocking to this period improved our backs blocking ability.
3. Defensive Group work – when it was time to do our 7 on 7 group work on defensive day I came up with a way to make this more fun by adding a little competition between the offense and defense by adding a scoring system where a completion was minus 10 points, an incomplete was plus 5, interception was plus 10, fumble plus 10 and so on, the points equaled push ups which at the end of the 7 on 7 period the side with the losing amount of points would do the push ups and the position football coaches had to do them also.

This added more excitement and fun to our 7 on 7 periods and we carried this idea into our team period and the whole team loved it and gave them something to look forward to.

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