Keeping Kids Fresh

make practice shorter. Even a little bit can make a good difference.
emphasize good sleep and diet. sounds simple buy its not a priority in these kid's lives and unfortunately they need to be reminded to take care of themselves.

We cut down our live periods and went back to fundamental blocking and tackling. Our kids were running the plays and the defense but were not getting the job done. So we decided to stress fundamentals more these next few weeks.

I would do a quick assessment of how many live reps each starter is getting at practice.

If the guy's a senior and he's been running iso for 4 years, he probably only needs a few reps a week at it, and some of those can be in walkthrough speed. There's no need to have your 1st teamer take the majority of reps with old schemes/concepts. This is a perfect opportunity to get young guys reps and make sure your future looks good.

Our TB is also an all-state caliber DB. If he's going to get a scholarship it will be as a DB. The way I look at it is he needs alot more work on that side of the ball. Seeing him run over our scout team kids 20times per practice does him no good. Let him conserve a little energy in offensive team- maybe getting 3 or every 10 reps. His backup needs more work than he does on O.

Being an OL coach, it's a little harder to keep them fresh. When we sub it's typically not a wholesale 5-for-5 substitution. What I have done is now that the 6/7th men are up to speed I rotate them every 4 practice reps NO MATTER WHAT. It has helped tremendously- the backups are better, the starters are fresher, and I'm not dreading injuries to the OL as much as I did before. It's making us a better unit/team.

We do a lot of the same that blb has mentioned.

- We're only in full pads on Tuesday and Thursday. Shorts and helmets on Monday and Thursday.
- We practice the same length of time just more opponent film.
- We've cut conditioning at the end of practice. Generally our special teams segment doubles as our conditioning portion of practice.

At a certain point also, like blb mentioned, they just need to have it communicated to them that football is a tough game that tough people play. It's a grind. Regardless of what we do as coaches to minimize the grind, it still exists so our players need to understand that it's adversity that they must overcome and they should take pride in that. They have to love digging in and working through the grind.

That's why I believe some stuggling programs with continue to do so because some kids today just don't take pride in working through the natural grind of football. They ask themselves the question "why am I still doing this?" And let's face it, many kids start to shutdown so we have to help our players fight that inner battle to shutdown.

On a more fun note with the weather. It hasn't happened yet this year because we've mostly been rained on during our games, not at our practices. But when it's cold and rainy and you know the kids are dreading going out to practice in it, I like to set up an Oklahoma drill right in the nastiest looking mud hole on our practice field. They hit each other and get after it and they get DIRTY!!! I mean mud in their faces. White practice jerseys turned completely brown. We'll set up senior groups vs. junior groups and keep score for a competitive component to the drill. The kids love it and it has lifted their spirits every year we've done it.

We'll only be out in the weather for an hour and a half or so and most of the time is spent doing the Oklahoma drill. I know it seems silly like we're just messing around and we've wasted a day of preparation. But I would much rather have them out their doing that full speed and having fun in the nasty weather rather than going through the motions of the normal routine and complaining about the weather all practice. Just what we like to do. I think it would work for other programs as well.

I second give the kids a day off, especially if you can find a far inferior opponent to do it against. Our Mondays amount to film and not much more than a walk through, so we gave our kids this past Monday off before playing a 0-8 team. We came out on fire and won 56-0, could have been worse, but our kids were talking about how much better there legs felt this week.

Also, if you lift during the season, you might want to cut back on the weight and reps some to help save some energy.

Lose the pads, give them a football, and just let em play a pick up game.Nothing competative, just for fun. Doesn't have to be just the kids either, they always seem to have more fun when the coaches join in.

I agree, they're 16-17, why do we need to 'keep their legs'?

We are starting to get lots of bumps and brusies as well, but hey its playoff time...it happends.
We've gone to shell practices for about 90 minutes. No live contact, on bags. During Team O we step thru for about 20 minutes and run "live" for about 10 just for timing. We ll see how it goes tonight.