How important to your success is spring practice?

Most everything in coaching HS football is a trickle down from the collegiate ranks. This is no different with spring football. Schools in our state started doing this about 15 years ago - Some might have always been doing it.

My gut feeling is that it's more of the Jones's keeping up with the Jones's.

The colleges run their drills/scrimmage in the March/April while the HS's (in my state) have to wait until the very end of May. That in itself creates a tight window between a spring injury and the start of the season in the fall.

We started to embrace the time we have with our players in the spring and approached it as a time to get better at our basics. Some schools are big into setting up scrimmages with other teams (injuries galore). Sometimes I think this has more to do with getting kids excited about padding up in May and June than it does with actually accomplishing anything that is worth the reward because there are tons of risks.

We only go against our own team when we do some controlled scrimmaging and we keep each other off the ground to the best of our abilities. In all of those years we NEVER sustained an injury that kept a player from starting fall camp with us.

Spring is also a good time to play with some new ideas (pass combos, protections, defensive stunts, new run play timing. etc.)

We'll limit this to one or two concepts we'll try to experiment with but our overall focus is to get better at individual technique and with our base offensive plays.

Another positive aspect is that we recruit our building like crazy and usually have over 100 players out in the fall. During the spring the numbers are usually bigger because some kids are just trying football to see how good they can be. We've "discovered" a bunch of kids during the spring.

As someone in a state where this is no full pad spring ball I would have to say that it is not that big of a deal that we do not have it. However we are allowed as much time with our players as we want in the off season, I know some states limit how much time and interaction there is in the offseason, so I feel we make up for it in that area.

We start workouts the first week of July in helmets and go the whole month three days a week for two hours before our middle of August full pads start date. Basically doing fundamental drills, 7-7, and insertion of our plays in July. I feel this is more beneficial to us than spring ball esp. since we are a small school and I don't even know if we could do an effective spring ball numbers wise. I think it is also a nice way to get the momentum building to put the pads on.

I believe it is essential. The more quality reps a team gets the better football it will play. I would love to be involved with HS spring ball...

My current state has regulations against spring ball -

1) No coach may work with any athlete on sport skills outside of the competitive season from Aug 15 until the last day of spring sport competition. This is direct instruction.

2) After the last day of spring season a coach may work with only 2 athletes for a 1 hour period, up to 6 athletes a day, and no athlete may receive more than an hour of instruction on sport skills total per day. So if I work with kids in the summer on sport skills I can only work with 2 kids per hour, up to 6 kids, and once those kids are done with me they can't be coached by anyone else that day...

RI-DICULOUS...no wonder our state's quality of football sucks.

I think the importance of spring ball is obviously relative. If Everybody has it, and everybody does it, then there is relatively little advantage (other than the advantage gained through superior organization and coaching)

I have found that spring is of great importance when recruiting the halls. Give kids a little taste, and gives coaches a chance to evaluate in a no pressure situation. It also is a good maturing opportunity for the upcoming senior class. A chance for them to visualize how they will lead the club next year.

What section are you in that you can go full gear during the summer? Down CCS way, we can't get gear til mid-August.


But with our spring ball, I use it to get the team back into a football frame of mind, get as much offense as we can installed and use it as a lil sand box time to try out some new things.

I was just thinking the same thing.

The philosophy for spring ball here has always been to teach fundamentals and get the basic package down as well as we can while preparing for more installation over summer and in fall camp. I'm curious to see the new HC's approach to it, since he seems to do pretty much everything different from how we've traditionally gone about things.

I'd take that option any day! Spring ball sucks!

Duece