Playing Your Best in November (Peaking at the Right Time)

I listened to a collegiate speaker at a very accomplished program about a decade or so ago, and the gist of his lecture was that the average FB play lasts about 4 seconds and the average rest in between was about 50 seconds when you factor in resetting the ball, time outs, etc. 

So his whole thing was you should practice in "game like" conditions. 

We have tried to do this ever since and have found that it makes for shorter, more intense practices and does away w/ alot of the old school "drudgery" like excessive conditioning. 

I also personally believe that teaching kids to hit is HUGE when they are younger. But by the time they reach varsity FB IMO, you can scale it back quite a bit to save their bodies and keep them healthy and again IMO they actually play harder and tougher on Fridays bc they are not beat up from practice. 

I feel this approach has helped our kids to continue to improve through out the season. It's not for everybody but I thinks it's a solid approach to look at based on your concerns.

PS - Personally I feel like many FB coaches (including my former self) tend to be guilty of excessive amounts of hitting and conditioning bc "that's the way it's always been done" without evidence that it actually improves performance.  I feel our peformance has improved when we went away from some of that stuff. 

Coach,

It's not necessarily that we incorporated "4 seconds and 50 seconds of rest" so to speak, it's more like being conscious of what you're doing during drills and team time. etc. 

I coach the line, so we are going to be explode into the sled and drive but for a very short burst. Not elongated. We want all of our drills to be short and explosive. We want our team time to be slightly faster that what the game averages say so that we are equipped for Friday night's pace.

We don't want long drawn out sprints or extended jogs. Things like that. As a result, we don't schedule any time for conditioning, I tell my coaches to make all of their drills short, explosive and intense and that it's their job to keep these kids engaged at a high level and mentally and physically prepare them this way. As a result, this has saved us practice time that we may have used on conditioning so we could either emphasize more teaching and drill work, or as the season progresses we can cut practice a bit shorter and save the kids bodies a bit. Hope this made sense.

I have found IN MY EXPERIENCE that practicing this way has improved OUR performance. 

I'll bite, you say that you're 'off season champions' and that your summer workouts are 'tough'. Why would you want to cut back on that routine during the season?

I am fully in the boat on cutting back as the season goes along, but that is because you should be operating at an optimum level by week 6 or so, therefore there is no reason to rep the same drills ad infininitum. The focus should not be on how long you are doing work; but rather today, you are doing 'today's work'. For example, the only conditioning that we are doing as the season progresses is something we do at the beginning of practice called SAQ (Speed, Agility, Quickness). We do it everyday. It doesn't matter if it is week 0 or week 15, we do it first and we do it fast and quick. It is a circuit type speed training that we do that tries to simulate in game type moves. The same is true with the next segment which is a 1 vs. 1 team pass drill. It's good on good, the offense has to pass the ball, and the defense knows it is pass rush/pass coverage. The same is pretty much true with all our segments of practice, even as the playoffs progress.

It has taken about a year and a half here to get these cats to understand that we are going to do what we do each and every day and the expectations aren't going to change.. I suspect that in your offseason workouts that you plan to do a heavy squat day and that is what you are going to do that day. The same is probably true on your power clean day, and bench day, and so on. Why not take that attitude and make it part of your in season training.

If you aren't lifting in season, then they will take notice and think that things have changed because you don't think lifting is important during the most important time of the season. If you cut out tackling, then they will think the same. We were fortunate to play for the big cookie this year, and I made a point to the kids every chance I could that we were getting ready to do XXXXXX because that is what we do on this DAY OF THE WEEK during this PERIOD TODAY. Most HS kids need to continue to develop every week. How often do we wish we had more time to work on XXXXX? Why not work on XXXXX in the last week of the season just like you do the first?

There is nothing wrong with cutting some things back/out. But you need to communicate what the reason if and why you are doing it. Also, one thing that has made a difference is that we made an effort to change the attitude/culture of what we want the young pups to be. I tried to point out to the young guys/scout team/JV during the playoffs is that they are getting work that their opponents aren't getting and that they will SOOOOO much further along than their opponent the coming year.

You came to work this past Monday with the intent to get something accomplished, right? Did that change because the football season is over?

Get up tomorrow and go do work. Teach you kids to do the same.

I apologize if this comes across the wrong way but in reading this from your post, "We were a quarter-final team that went 6-4 overall, 4-3 in conference. We beat every team we were "supposed to" but any of the tougher teams in our area we lost to," I wonder if your team was good enough to play with the best this past year.

I only say that because I coached for a number of years at a school where we racked our brains trying to figure out why we could not compete with the better teams in our state. As coaches, we worked long and hard, and pushed our players hard in the offseason and during the season. Since leaving that school and coaching at two other schools, the most recent, being a state champion at the highest level, I have come to the realization that you need to have players to compete at the highest level, regardless of offseasons, coaches, etc. The HC that I work for now does not bring the kids in at all over the weekend. As coaches, we meet for about 2 hours on the weekend. We do very few hitting drills once the season is underway and the scout D does not tackle at all when going up against starting O. Our practice plan is very simple and is verbalized at the beginning of practice. Most of these things would have had us all up in arms earlier in my career. I now understand that to compete at the highest level, you have to have a damn good team, good coaches who can make week to week adjustments to get the most out of that talent, and a little bit of luck always helps!

To be clear, we are a Canadian school and we do not have that many teams to qualify for playoffs.

We also had some talent. We had a Pac-12 Offensive lineman, and a WR/DB who is one of the best in Canada (has a visit lined up to Ohio Bobcats). Some other really good players who had some character issues/inconsistent effort, etc. We also were average at best at certain positions, especially at QB. I understand you have to be good across the board, but we felt we had some good football players too.

I believe we've done some good things, but we feel we should be taking the next step. However we just can't seem to get past this hurdle, so we're looking for ways to improve