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Post by ddsmith58 on Sept 25, 2008 12:32:23 GMT -6
I am a high school coach that is worried about kids getting burned out on football before they get to middle school. Our association teams practice four days a week and play on Saturdays. I think this is too much. I played when I was young and we only practiced one time a week and played one game. Should I really be concerned??
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Post by davecisar on Sept 25, 2008 15:17:53 GMT -6
My teams practice 3 days a week until school starts, then we go 2 times a week
Many of our competitors practice much more and dont have the success weve had
BUt as a kid we practiced 6 days a week and played on Sundays, maybe todays youth is different
We try to do as much as we can in a small amount of time with a real sense of urgency within every minute of practice.
Ive done a ton of clinics and observed 100s of youth football teams practices, I speak from experience. Most youth football teams waste nearly half their practice time on things that are not important or urgent and have an extremely slow pace. Most IMHO could do what they do in 1/2 the time in many cases.
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Post by los on Sept 25, 2008 20:10:45 GMT -6
I agree with Dave....2-3 good days is plenty......4 days of practice, then a game, would burn "me" out pretty quickly in youth ball, maybe the kids too?....you can get too much of a good thing, lol....I felt lucky to play our games on thurs. evening.....we had 2 tough days = mon and tues......a brush up and special teams day = wed.....played on thurs....then 3 fun filled days away from the screaming mob....I mean team, lol!
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Post by raiderpirates on Sept 26, 2008 12:39:06 GMT -6
Four days here. My first year we did five week days, kids would, show up and want to play.
We take one day off for the middle of the week now(church day, Wed.) but this week we are doing live scrimmages(O vs. D yesterday and D vs. O today).
The day before a game.
Though not a fan of this tactic, when you are young you recover quickly, we are going to a GAM defense(don't even get me started there) and we have yet to win a game so the HC is pushing people to play better.
Recently we did no pads on Friday, just walk throughs, some passing tree(all two routes), and special teams.
We won't even get into play calling and schematics right now.
Also another travel/select team folded and is looking for kids to play, five or six will be at afternoon practice. If the league commish works it out we may try to add them as two teams and split their squad from the 31 select 4th-5th and 5th-6th squad to two smaller squads of balanced.
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trojan
Junior Member
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Posts: 494
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Post by trojan on Oct 2, 2008 6:52:32 GMT -6
I coach 7th grade, so I'm a little removed from youth football, but hardly.
We have the same schedule as los, except that we practice on Friday. We watch Thursday's game film and try to prep the kids for our next opponet's defensive tendencies.
We have done our best to follow the ideas Coach Cisar mentioned about a high tempo practice, but I must not be an expert at running those types of sessions.
I just feel like we need additional days of review. Individual players will "get it" one day, then forget it the next. I guess my fear is that if I implement soemthing new, like a two TE set, rather than one TE and a SE, and we only have a couple days (OR ONE!) to go over it before a game, that the concept would not be successful.
I don't consider myself a college-caliber coach, but I do wish that I had all that practice time with either only offensive players or just defensive players.
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Post by justryn2 on Oct 2, 2008 7:15:29 GMT -6
We have three days of practice plus a walk through. We play our games on Sunday. We are a select 7th and 8th grade team. So, practice Tues, Wed and Thurs; walk through on Saturday morning (usually just an hour), then game on Sunday. Personally, I wish we could play our games on Thursday and have three days off. The reason for the walk through on Saturday is that, if we go two days with no football before the game, some of the players (OK, MOST of the players) have already forgotten everything we worked on in practice the week before.
Coach Smith, I really wouldn't worry too much about burn out. What I've seen at the high school level is that the biggest drop-off comes between freshman and sophomore year. A lot of players, even those that played youth ball, find out how different it is at the high school level where there are no weight restrictions. A player may have been a stud on a weight restricted youth team but, once he has to play against "the big boys" it just isn't as much fun.
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Post by los on Oct 2, 2008 19:30:12 GMT -6
I agree with the missing a couple days before a game deal, justryn.....we had a few weeks over the years, where we got such heavy rain or lightning, that we had to just skip wednesday.....took us half the game to get organized on thurs. lol.....then....I know we had at least one saturday morning make-up game....so that was 2 full days with no practice.....really looked terrible to start off, especially offensively.....didn't seem to hurt the kids defensively, but the offense was all out of whack......good games to defer if you win the coin toss, lol.....Thats also a good point about weight class formats.......I always felt ours made a smoother transition, not only from the 8-10 younger group up to the 11-12 group, but also up to the jr. high school team, by playing unlimited playing weights(just letting every kid the right age participate) with "ball carrier weight limits"(ours was 125 lbs. for the 11-12 kids)......just made the game more realistic.....the smaller kids got use to playing with the biggins....they seemed less intimidated by size at a younger age.....now... the parents sometimes....that was a different story, lol.....I'd think in an average year....our team's weights would run from, say.... 80lbs. for the smallest kid to close to 200 lbs. for the biggest kid, then everything in between in our 11-12 age group.....if you run your drills and stuff in practice properly, like by size and skill level, and not mismatch players...safety shouldn't be a big issue.....the smaller kids could usually outmaneuver the big guys during a scrimmage or real game!
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