Youth Football – Your Third Practice of 2008
Youth Football Practice, The Third Practice
August 9th, 2008
Thursday Practice Schedule
This is an abbreviated summary of our Thursday football practice. We gave the kids Wednesday off and then had our first padded football practice on Thursday. As usual we had the expected equipment issues, making sure everyone had everything on correctly, snaps snapped, hooks holed, belts tightened etc. You can’t assume youth football players know how to put their equipment on correctly.
Fortunately it was about 90 degrees, off of the recent highs of the high 90s. We now have our dynamic warm up and angle form fit tackling down to 10 minutes. We added a team form fit tackle as part of the dynamic warmup. Our warmups are always done without helmets on including the angle form fit tackle. During the dynamic warm up we always have just 2 lines facing each other. We started the team form fit tackle starting with our players toe to toe, face to face. We want our tacklers to make contact when their toes are at the ballcarriers toes, to make sure we are not overextended and keeping the head up. Each coach of course has their 5 kids and we are requiring perfection on the fit, contact point, head placement, knee bend etc. the player is not allowed to come off the fit until the coach taps him on the head. We then back everyone off at 5 yards and do the same at a walk, then a jog. With so many first year players this extra form work was needed.
We then got our helmets on and worked competitive fumble recovery drills for everyone. We introduced our partner system during the first break and assigned partners per the book and went through the first day question/quiz. As a team we then did the 3 competitive group, close quarters tackling drills. The age 7-9 kids did splatter/mat tackling drills during this time period. Then we got into 3 slot challenge tackling for the kids that progressed successfully out of the close quarters as the younger kids progressed to the close quarters.
We split backs and line and worked the line on first and second step แทงบอลออนไลน์ freezes, then we went to that freeze on the bags, then added a progression where they drive blocked the dummy. We also reviewed our base blocking rule (helmets off) and set up dads across from the offensive line and quizzed them on the rule and their progression. They did very well with that one. We worked on the wedge progression the last 20 minutes and the kids did real well with it, got all the way through it, which doesn’t happen very often.
The backs worked ball security and the pass catching progression as well as splatter mat blocking drills. During break we again reviewed the base defense and positions. The backs put in 4 of the “Sainted Six” plays in at age 10-11 and 12-13. The age 7-9 kids got one play in. We did this in skeleton format with dads holding blocking shields at the point of attack to make sure head placement was correct for the backs blocking. All plays right now are being run out 10 yards, the next practice they will be run out 15 yards.