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In today’s blog post, I am sharing some tips for putting together an effective football practice plan.

6 Tips for Planning an Effective Practice

The key to any successful practice is to:

Be Organized

  1. Plan for every minute of practice. You need to take advantage of each and every minute that your kids are with you for practice.
  2. Over plan for drills and individual time. If you have 10 minutes allocated for a certain type of drill, you want to plan for 15 minutes. Your kids may be having a great day and nailing all the drills, so you want to be able to progress instead of stalling because you have run out of drills. Alternately, maybe your kids aren’t getting one of the drills. You could switch to one of your extra drills that you have ready and on hand.
  3. Make sure that all coaches have a copy of the practice schedule. Whether you have all of your coaches at practice, or just a couple, with a solid practice plan that all coaches are aware of, your practice can still be an effective use of time for everyone.

Control the tempo of practice

  • Set a time for each drill and stick to it. It will teach both players and coaches efficient time management.   For example – if you allocate 5 minutes to teach a skill, you ensure that your instructions will be concise and focused on the task or concept at hand. This will make you a better coach and teacher.
  • A quick whistle must be used to prevent injury.
  • Make your practice tempo as close to game tempo as possible

Coach a kid on every play

Constantly give feedback to players on every play

– Coach on the run/coach on the fly to maximize the time available to give that feedback. Don’t just go through the motions of running the play. TEACH the play!!!

Use the whole team on each play if possible

– Use your extra players as the chain crew, ball spotter, etc., to ensure that they are involved.

Move the ball to show progress and positive feedback.

 

Be sure to check out my Football Drills video series, which contains football practice plan drills, tips and techniques, all with video demonstrations!   And don’t forget to Like the Football Tutorials page on Facebook!

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