Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Youth Football Training Drills For Every Coach

By Nelda Powers


Youth football training varies from that given to adult players. A number of coaches may not know this but the young need special drills to get the best out of them. More drills only waste training time therefore leaving the team weak and prone to defeat in a game.

The definition of a drill is the activity that is closely supervised, narrowly defined and is repetitive. This process makes the players learn skills that they otherwise would resist due to the rigor and routine. With drills, skills are perfected and remembered even after years of no use. However, no matter how important this is, the coach should leave only a small fraction of the training for drills so as to concentrate on other team building exercises.

The other drill is repetition, the act of iterating a single skill of football. It is good to allow the players to try what skills are best for them so as to repeat. For example centers and long snappers should be seriously repeated for best performance, they however need little supervision by the coach. These repetitions make a team synchronized in their game without showing the audience what they are actually doing.

The very start of skill training is called chalk. Here, the team is taught verbally like in a classroom. The retaining of the lesson is not high but is necessary before the actual physical training. Every team member will have got the explanation before trying out the new skill in the field. Muscle memory is the best way to remember what is taught hence the repetition stage.

Young players need to go through put-ins. These are the first time activities that make a team able to consistently and correctly carry out specific offenses or do certain defense stops. The process should escalate from chalk, walk-through then run it on full speed with the right timing to perfect the skill and make a great team.

After put-in, the team is taken through a process called walk-through. This stage takes the longest time to inculcate. The team walks through the specific skill while carrying out the defensive or offensive maneuver. Here, the opposing team stays motionless to allow the other team show what they have learned of the new skill. A good example is the fit-and-freeze technique.

The last stage in the drill is the scrimmage. Here, both teams perform their leant skills at full game speed. With the guidance of the coach, the offensive tries the maneuvers skillfully while the defense quickly prepares to stop them like in a real game. This helps so much especially the rookies who are yet to face a real team in a match. Reorganization after passes is also coordinated in this stage in most cases by the team members themselves since the coach dos very little supervision here due to the speeds.

20 minutes is just enough for the drill section for a youth football training. This will leave enough time in the two hour period for the players to learn other skills and coordinate a play. A good coach will let the flow with periodic input here and there.




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