Starting the Season Well with 7th/8th Grade Athletes

Here's what I used to do:

- Condition the hell out of the players. Run, and run, and run some more. Sprints, up-downs, suicides, etc. etc. A lot of it had no football application, but they were working hard.
- Talk a lot about hard work - have the kids break on "Hard Work!" - generally preach that no team was going to work harder than us and no team would ever beat us in the 4th quarter.
- Build "toughness" and "discipline" through conditioning and physically demanding practices.

The results were mediocre. We won a little more than we lost, but it was pretty close to .500. We realized that most of our opponents were preaching the same things that we were, and we won some games in the 4th quarter and lost some in the 4th quarter, but most games were over by halftime (in either direction), so conditioning rarely was a factor.

Here is what we do now:

- We don't do any conditioning for conditioning sake. Everything we do has a football application. We NEVER run laps (other than one half lap warmup at the beginning of practice). We plan the hell out of practice, down to 5-minute increments and try like hell to stay on schedule. We practice at a high pace and expect our coaches and players to keep up - by practicing at a high pace, our players naturally become conditioned just by completing practice (and they never even realized they were conditioning).

- We rarely talk about working hard (we let the players figure that out themselves and then then ones that do figure it out bring the others in line. Yeah, we do talk about it some, like it is a regular theme in our weekly story night, but we don't harp on it like we used to. If the coaches are constantly pushing the kids to "work harder" they either get burned out or numbed to the message, but if it comes from their peers, they are much more likely to raise their effort level to not let down their friends.

- We still build toughness and discipline from physically demanding practices, but now it's more in the form of high-paced competitive drills rather than simply running sprints or doing up-downs.

The results were a lot better.  Over the past 5 seasons, we have achieved:

2011 - Conference Semi-Finals (6-2 record)
2012 - Conference Finals (8-2 record, averaged over 33 points per game, 46 TDs in 10 games)
2013 - Conference Semi-Finals
2014 - Conference Champions (undefeated local record, National Semi-finalists)
2015 - Conference Champions (Regional Semi-finalists)

I hope you're getting the point here - I'm not talking about running soft practices or not conditioning the players - I'm talking about running very efficient practices at such a high pace that conditioning happens naturally and where the competitive nature of drills brings out top effort from the players without them even realizing they're working hard.

Do that and discipline, hard work, toughness, and conditioning will all happen automatically without any overt effort to make those things happen.

Couple things:

• Conditioning - Should be as football-specific as possible. Think maximum effort for 5-7 seconds followed by a 30-second rest. Get rid of crap like crossfields, gassers, or any other long-duration cardio-type conditioning. That kind of stuff is pretty much worthless for football players and will just piss off the bigger kids. Also, I like doing conditioning right at the start of practice. Gets it over with and the kids won't have it hanging over their heads.
• Don't stretch pre-practice. The kids will probably be warmed up enough from all the pre-practice grabass that you won't need a formal warmup period. Do some kind of dynamic warmup...nothing more than 10 minutes...just to get the heart rate up.
• No animal drills. Bear crawls, duck walks*, crab walks, monkey rolls...that has nothing to do with football. Get rid of that crap.
• Group punishment - use it sparingly and judiciously. Few things are worse than when you are running team defense and some d-lineman jumps offsides on a hard count and the DC makes the entire defensive unit do updowns or pushups. Dumb. Waste of time. If a kid can't watch the ball on defense or count past 1 on offense, get him out of there and put someone else in.
• I firmly believe (after a lot of trial and error) that a 90-minute practice is best for junior high-level kids (I coach 5th-6th grade). Once you go past that 90-minute mark, the kids start to drift and practice tends to get sloppy. My opinion is that if you can't get a junior high practice done in 90 minutes, you are either doing too much or aren't using your time wisely.
• No walking on the practice field and kids keep their helmets on unless a coach says they can take the helmets off. 
• Tackling drills every day. Don't have to be live. But you need to tackle every day for the first couple weeks of the season.
• Play as many kids as you can. You want motivated, excited kids? Get them on the field for quality reps when it matters, not just for the final couple minutes after the game has been decided. You want unmotivated, sulky kids? Then play your best 11 on offense and defense.

Make sure that all players know what the expectations are, and if somebody doesn't meet it, there will be repercussions. We preach "do it right or do it again". Over the summer during workouts, we also do combatives. Somebody wins, somebody loses every time. It teaches the kids to compete, and gets the juices going. If you lose, do something small like 5 push ups and go after it again.

Have a parent meeting EARLY on and let them know the expectations also, make them and the kids sign a contract that they will abide by the team rules. If you have kids that want to act up in class, they get extra conditioning after practice and lost playing time; not one, not the other, but both. The most important thing is you have to follow through with everything you say you will, if you don't you will lose all credibility. Once the precedent is set, they will either fall in line or get out of line and someone else will step up.

Sounds great Coach! Could you provide some examples of your 'Combatives'?