Practice schedule for 7-8 yr old

IMO, you can condition them by running your offense plays in practice quickly. Run play after play, having them run up to the line each time. This is fun for them and at this age level they don't even realize they are conditioning. Doing too many conditioning drills at this age level seems to turn off some of the kids from the game, and we should be getting them to have fun, especially since this is likely their first experience of playing the game.

I am in a league where we do have kickoffs and you can punt. At this age level punting is not a good idea though. So we spend a little time at practice on learning our kick coverage, how to onside kick, and then how to recover onside kicks and so forth. The rest of the time we do defense and offense. I save offense for last so that the "conditioning" through reps of plays happens towards the end of practice.

We work on the proper tackling techniques every practice, and work on making sure everyone knows their defensive assignments. We do drills to learn pursuit, how to recover fumbles, etc. We also do drills for covering receivers man-to-man. I will tell you that in my opinion the 7-8 year old age level is going to have a very hard time learning zone pass coverage.....extremely hard time in fact.

Offensively we work on blocking assignments at every practice. We rep our center to QB snap like crazy and we rep our plays over and over again.

I've found that in general you have a lot of kids that have never played football before and some don't even understand what a touchdown is on day one. Some don't know that touchdowns are 6 points and so forth. So learning some of the basics like proper tackling, how to block, how to take a QB/center snap, how to hand off to a running back, how a running takes a handoff, and head/neck safety are very important to the success of the team.

I've coached middle school and high school in the past and have found coaching at this lower youth level to be so much more rewarding. Good luck coach!

I agree completely with coachbigbri and jrk5150 and would add the following. Make sure you keep it fun and focus on fundamentals. If the kids are learning some skills and having a good time, they will keep coming back and develop a love for the game. If you make them miserable with hard core conditioning or drills to "develop toughness" you'll lose them to soccer or basketball or baseball or whatever. Having said that, it's no fun to lose badly, so don't think I'm saying don't enforce any discpline at practice, either (that's actually worse than overdoing it). If you practice at a high pace, minimize standing around time (multiple stations with high reps and short lines), make drills competitive, and coach "on the run," the kids will learn a lot, develop good skills and fundies, and end up having a great time in the process.

If, OTOH, you have two kids doing a drill while 30 stand in line watching and then the coaches stop after every rep to lecture their "coaching points" and the coaches do a lot of yelling but not a lot of teaching, and the drills are not competitive (i.e. hitting bags all the time instead of head-to-head with a winner and loser for each rep), then the kids are going to get bored and not have fun, and you're probably not going to be very successful. (BTW, I'm not implying that you would do any of these things - as an experienced HS coach, I'm sure you already know all that, but I wanted to make the point for any new youth coaches that may be reading this.)

How do you plan or running your trap and counter plays? Meaning, who is pulling? I've found it to be much easier to teach to send a fullback over to do the pulling instead of an offensive lineman at this age level. I'd also throw in a good standard off-tackle play of some sort. But that's just me.

Defensively I don't think you are likely to see a pass thrown over 10-15 yards past the line of scrimmage all season, and most teams will pass less than 5 times a game so gear up for the run. Of course there is the occasional team that will pass more, but most times they don't complete more than 25% of their passes.

Sounds good 94dragons. I also agree that the offensive line should be your best blockers, even if they are also your best running back. Your 2nd or 3rd best running back will do just fine if the offensive line is good enough to open the holes. Hopefully you will have more success with your guards on those plays. Another reason I use my fullback is because that way I am not opening up a hole on the line where the defense could penetrate with an athletic lineman and cause disruption on a slower developing counter play.

Looks like you've got a sound plan, and the best part of all is that you are keeping the playbook simple and down to just a few plays. That's key at such a young age.

Not too much, but an over-emphasis on traps. The FB trap and QB trap (Spin & keep?) I take to mean one guard trapping the first defender the other side of center; WB counter trap I'm not sure of but you could mean the same point of attack, since you wrote "1 blocking scheme". On children's teams that age, DL 3 tech or lower are not usually fast chargers. Even in our 12U competition last season, there was only 1 team against which I thought we'd benefit by a guard trap like that. So against many of the defenses you'll face, you won't get to earhole a DL on those traps, but maybe get a bit of an angle on him. To make more space, try converting the trap scheme into a double team where one guard holds the opponent up and the other crosses behind the center to get an angle. (This is also advantageous if your guards aren't so fast and you play with the size of OL splits typically seen with wing T.) Even there, you may run up against submarining opponents who make such schemes irrelevant.

You're going to wish you had more pre-season, but it's feasible. Team defense is especially hard to impart at that experience level.

Didn't know that, thanks. A while back I asked what that meant, got different answers so assumed it was a generic term rather than a specific flavor of wing T.

With 7-8 YOs, unless you have an experienced QB, or your QB takes the snap sidesaddle, the timing of the jet series is going to be loose. You might need to change from GDB to a nearly pure antipenetration scheme.

Then you also know that it is possible to keep their att'n even longer than that, provided you're not doing the same thing the whole time. And you won't be; unless you, the coach, get bogged down, you'll go on to the next drill after 15 mins.

Our practice will be broken down into 10-15 minute blocks. Even at the HS level it is hard to keep the players attention longer than that. What I am looking for are some everyday drills that you guys use at this level to focus on fundamentals. I was thinking of using circuits. Such as a blocking circuit with 3 stations. 1. reach block 2. down block 3. trap block or a tackling circuit 1. form tackle 2. angle tackle 3. open field tackle. We will also do what we call the Bird Dog drill where we will work on the first step of each block. We will also do Stance and Starts everyday.

I would recommend going 2 times a week after your first game
You CAN go 2 hours productively IF you make sure and have a fast paced and fun practice
You can get what you want out of practice and make it fun and fast paced too, requires some creativity
We havent done set aside conditioning for the last 16 seasons
Waste of time- when you can "hide" conditioning within the context of the practice- killing 2 birds with 1 stone
You can field competitive teams with less practice time if your priorities. precision and pace are on track- the teams Ive coached have practiced far less than our competition- but consistently had much better results- even against select or out state tournament teams.