As a volunteer coach you have enough on your mind and things going on in your life (family responsibilities, your job, and your very own social life) that leave limited time to prepare for a well organized practice. Yet practices are the most important part of a young athletes sports experience. As a matter of fact, practices make up a majority of time your team spends together throughout the entire season in comparison to games played.
In order to make the most of this valuable time at practice, we have designed a template that can be used with any sport you coach. This practice blueprint provides a great way to create the proper flow of every practice. The flow of practice is as important as the skills being taught. It creates an energy level that keeps everyone engaged in the learning process, and provides you, the coach, the opportunity to control what and how skills are being taught.
A Multiple Sport Template
This template is not exclusive to any one sport. You must however fill in your own creative instruction/drills/& competitions. In future blogs we will provide suggested drills & competitions for specific sport fundamentals, this template is where a coach would place those drills and competitions they find useful. We also divide each practice template into individual, small group segments, with limited segments designed for the entire team. The reason: more can be achieved (more repetitions) over a shorter period of time when the team works in individual (players working in pairs) and small group segments. Of course sports with smaller rosters (basketball & ice hockey) are the exception, but should not disregard small group (3 player) training segments.
Practice set-up & use of skill stations
Set-up and coaching responsibilities are vital to a fast paced flow to any practice. Be sure to organized every training segment into stations with a coach assigned to that particular station. Multiple stations with an equal dispersion of players assigned to pairs is an essential ingredient to running a successful practice.
Place your practices on the clock
We strongly believe you should limit practices to 90 minutes. Anything longer becomes counter-productive. Over the 90 minutes a practice is broken down into 5,10, & 15 minute timed segments. The reason we recommend short segments is to keep the flow of practice moving quickly to maintain energy with the full engagement of every player. The other reason, kids cannot focus their attention for longer periods of time.
Establish a theme for every practice.
Themes are a powerful way to engage a team and remind them what their goals are, it’s an excellent way for coaches to focus on a particular point they observed was lacking in a past game or performance. A theme can be as simple as correctly holding onto the football to limit turnovers, more passing/less dribbling in soccer, limit mental errors in baseball, or more quickly covering your man after losing possession of the ball in basketball, etc. Start practice with the theme, have everyone remind each other throughout practice, and end practice by reviewing the theme. It will keep you and the team on point all practice.
Compete to Improve at Practice
A part of every practice should include time for multiple competitions. Competitions that measure each player’s individual progress and how well they can apply that as a team. I first designed competitive practices when I worked at the NFL and created a program called the NFL Junior Player Development Program. This program was actually an introductory season dedicated entirely to learning the fundamentals of tackle football. Since we did not include traditional games during this season it was important to provide ways to measure success and include the important element of competition, something every athlete craves.
Pete Carroll describes his first experience of witnessing this in his new book “Win Forever”, when I invited him to attend one of these sessions in the Bronx, NY, as the New England Patriots Head Coach. Pete describes how blown away he was to witness the emotion and passion the coaches and players had as they were learning and competing. That template we used that day is outlined below.
A Practice Blueprint for Any Sport
Segment One: Dynamic Warm-ups for 10 minutes.
A warm-up that provides continued movement that jump starts the flow of blood to the large muscles in the body (shoulders, hips, & legs) through creative drills and methods. Warm-ups should be conducted with high energy since it’s the way you begin and set the tone for the entire practice. Change up warm-ups every practice and rotate different activities throughout the season. Set-up an obstacle course that forces athletes to move (increase their heart rate) and challenges their basic athletic elements of agility, balance, coordination, & flexibility. Or create a free flowing game (ultimate frisbee) that focuses on the same athletic elements.
Segment Two: Individual Fundamental Skill Station for 10 minutes
Set-up three stations with one assigned coach that introduce different individual fundamental skills to pairs of players that rotate through every 15 minutes. For example a soccer practice may be working on ball control and crossing the ball this particular practice. The three stations of individual skill work would possibly be (left foot dribbling technique drills, right foot dribbling technique drills, left & right foot passing technique drills).
Segment Three: Individual Fundamental Competitions for 5 minutes
Follow every 10 minute skill development segment with a 5 minute competition that self-measures each players execution of that particular skill just taught. Record & track scores of every player, comparing scores over the course of the season.
Segments Four – Seven: for a total of 30 minutes
Repeat the individual fundamental skill sequence as the team continues to rotate through the three stations of different fundamental work with 10 minutes designated to skill repetitions, 5 minutes to competitions.
Segment Eight: 5 minute Halftime to review drills and practice theme
Segment Nine: Small Group Team Skill Station for 15 minutes
Divide team into two groups (i.e. offense & defense) of a equal number of sub-groups. Extend the fundamental training introduced during the individual segment into the small group segments. For example, extending upon the soccer drills suggested above, small group work would then focus on dribble out of trouble/pass cross field, dribble up field followed by give & go down the wings.
Segment Ten: Small Group Skill Station Competition for 15 minutes
Bring the two groups together, still keeping them in their small assigned sub-groups to compete against the other half of the team. Design competitions and a scoring system based on executing skills taught in their skill stations. Multiple competitions should take place at the same time, allowing every player to be active and moving with no downtime.
Practice Ends by reemphasizing the theme with a quick review of skills taught.
Note: this particular template was heavily weighted towards individual skill development, more appropriate for the beginning of the season. A coach can easily reverse the emphasis and weight a practice by assigning more small group training with a fewer amount of segments assigned to individual fundamental training. We do however recommend continuing individual skill work throughout the season.
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