“Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.”

-Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

You, your kids, and their families could be together on a practice field for 20 hours or more during the season. It’s valuable time spent on weekends and school nights and is even more valuable as we get closer to the holidays.

Make the time count.

It all starts with organization and planning out your practices. We’re not going to tell you how to run each practice, but maybe we can help make it easier for you to plan them.

First, you'll find it helpful to collect and organize the drills you like in one document. We’ve created Climb The Mountain to make it easy to create a database of great drills from experts around the Internet to pull from. You can also check out this Google Sheet for a template starting with 60+ drills to populate and reference throughout the season.

‍

‍

Then, you can more easily plan out each practice, using any template that works for you. Here’s an example of one that might help you get started. Then, if you can begin to plan out some practices ahead of time, you can get a bigger picture of what you’re working on and whether anything needs to change.

‍

‍

Five lessons we’ve learned from collectively coaching hundreds of football practices.

1. You have less time than you think. Focus on the absolute most critical aspect of player and team development and spend time there. There is no end to the number of drills you “could” do. Focus on what you really “must” do to get better.
2. You’ll debate how much time to spend on flag pulling. While obviously important, learning offensive plays (where to line up, what to do) is much more complex and will take more time. We found our major pain point to be offensive execution versus flag pulling.
3. You’ll underestimate how much time your water breaks take. Minimize time wasted with kids going to find their water, being scattered all over the field, etc. We placed an orange cone on the sideline, and all the kids know that is where their water should be placed.
4. You’ll want to make practices more fun. We bought this Bluetooth speaker and created a Spotify playlist, including favorite songs from the kids. We’d also try relay races at the end of practice if there was enough time (another reason to be as efficient as you can in running practice).
5. You’ll want to give involved parents a role. Involved parents with a defined role are the best kind of parents. Involved parents going rogue, not as much, as it creates confusion for the kids. In Week 2, I outlined the roles we created for some of the dads, and still think it was the best thing I could have done to help the team be successful. Engaged and helpful parents who knew what they needed to do to help the kids – can’t ask for anything more than that.

‍

What are some lessons you’ve learned from running practices? Send us an email and let us know and we’ll add to the list in our blog.

‍

Lastly, remind your football family of the 5 Ps:

1. Proper 
2. Preparation 
3. Prevents 
4. Poor 
5. Performance