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Post by bobgoodman on Aug 4, 2011 15:18:17 GMT -6
Since 6th graders won't be passing as much as HSers, your need for and benefit from twists decreases considerably.
As to skip vs. traditional pull, you've got to ask yourself what pulling assignments you'll have. Then determine whether the player's 1st step is going to make that much difference by the time the block is made. Depending on the assignment, you might try just saying, "You go here and block him," and see if that works without teaching any footwork at all; if it doesn't then you need steps, but if you try teaching steps first you might miss a player who's just a "natural" at it.
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Post by bobgoodman on Aug 2, 2011 21:05:58 GMT -6
I wish I had them when I demonstrated the shoeshine block on Field Turf last year. You land softly enough but the friction on the slide is considerable.
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Post by bobgoodman on Aug 2, 2011 8:55:26 GMT -6
Considering the "trip" it took, it must feel especially good.
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Post by bobgoodman on Aug 1, 2011 13:06:14 GMT -6
I'm still laughing as I type.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jul 26, 2011 11:04:26 GMT -6
As a high school coach and a youth coach I wish all youth programs would align with a school district. This would allow the kids to start playing with the kids that they will be playing with in high school. What are the odds they'll be playing in HS? Aligning along school district lines is unrealistic because there will be areas with more players and coaches, and areas with fewer. If a league wants to have a geographic division of teams, I'm sure they can come up with dividing lines more suitable for the number of teams they have than the school districts.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jul 26, 2011 10:51:47 GMT -6
Oh yeah coach, give it a couple days, I have been in your shoes many times, I have been down in the dumps after the first day of full gear, which is why we went to full gear from day one last year, which was a great move on our part. Why don't more programs go for that? Are they afraid the children will damage the equipment if they have it for too long? I've seen in clubs that don't start with full gear, the kids get confused: Is today full gear, partial gear, no gear...do we start unsuited and then suit up? And it's so time consuming to suit or unsuit during a practice session.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jul 24, 2011 18:57:14 GMT -6
.....So if you can get up an indie station with those OLs & LBs who have to do that, do so with an around-the-fence-and-thru-the-gate drill, over & over, separate from other players -- but you'll need some kind of bodies to make the "fence". This may hijack the discussion, but can you detail this? It sounds like what I am doing now, but I like the terminology. Todd I think this is the 17th entry, so I wouldn't worry about hijacking the thread at this point. With pulling OLs & LBs, footwork is one thing, but eye work needs to be done too. So what you do is set up a picket fence of vision-blocking people along the line of scrimmage. The opposing players have to move laterally on their respective sides of the fence before going thru the gate and meeting their target. Honestly it's a little hard to work on this one at exactly the same time for the offense and defense player, i.e. on the very same rep. You can do that for a while to get them used to it, each trying to hit the other, but after that, one is going to have to try to make contact, and the other to avoid it. So some of the time the pulling OL is going to have to simulate being a ballcarrier, to give the LB a challenge, until you add another player as the ballcarrier as below. Add a ballcarrier, and he has to follow his interference as it pulls and leads. Make a few spaces in the fence, and you can simulate run-thrus by the LB, and sealing leakage by the pulling OL. The ballcarrier's not allowed to run thru, but has to hit the hole. You can think of it as a nutcracker or Oklahoma with some extra bodies in the way. No need to take anybody to the ground if you're already getting your fill of contact that week.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jul 23, 2011 23:01:46 GMT -6
I just think that the return on investment for conditioning in children's football is so close to 0 that I would do practically anything instead of an activity that was chosen only for building stamina, unless the purpose was something beyond football. I can explain why if you're interested, but now I'm going to bed.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jul 22, 2011 21:10:34 GMT -6
We are limited to 2 hour practices. We schedule conditioning drills throughout the season, so its not that those are the only days we condition, its just that we know better than to try and get anything other than conditioning and evaluations done in the first two days and teaching proper form for contact the first two days in pads. So are those days what you meant by "conditioning days"? And there are no other "conditioning days"? I think you under-estimate what you can do in those early days without pads. How old are your players? Are you conditioning them just for your own football season, or is this part of some broader program?
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Post by bobgoodman on Jul 16, 2011 8:55:19 GMT -6
It really would help to do a Gantt chart on this. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart. The ingredients that go into it are: What resources do I need to do this step (whichever step it is) of the process? The resources are equipment, coaches, and players who are ready to practice that step. You've laid out when the equipment in the form of player-worn gear becomes available; presumably from the start you'll have whatever other gear you'll need. Then you have to take into account that players & coaches can't be in 2 places at once, so you can figure out what steps you can do in parallel and which ones you have to do in series. What things need to be done before other things? I gave the example above of how you'll need players skilled in handoffs before you can use them to walk a play on air. You'll find there are lots of things you can do in any order. For example, someone mentioned practice huddling and coming to the line; that and subbing could be practiced before or after they know how to run plays. In cases like that, the other considerations come into play, such as the fact that they'll need the pads to rep the plays as contact drills but could rep huddling and formations without them. An important factor is not knowing in advance how long it will take a particular player or group of players to learn something well enough, but having a general sense that certain things usually take longer than certain other things. You don't want situations where you get to a certain point and decide they're not getting this, let's cut it out of our plans, and wish you could have the time back you already spent on it...but it does happen from time to time. Compounding that problem is the fact that in some cases they can rep and rep and rep and seem to be making little progress, and then suddenly they seem to "get it" in a short period of time. Because of this uncertainty there's also the opposite problem, where you're too conservative and realize at some point you could've put in more, and then you wish you'd started on more things earlier and now there's not enough time to start from scratch with them. When it comes to installing plays, try to work on plays together that share the most moves in common, whether or not they're from the same named or numbered series. The most important thing they should have in common is whichever player's movement is most difficult to learn, so that player gets lots of reps at it while all of those plays are practiced. In wing T that's likeliest to be one of two things: QB footwork or in some cases blocking at the point of attack. Some coaches work on the separate components of a play -- backfield movement, line blocking, receiver movement -- separately as long as possible, and then put them together only very late in the process and without many reps with all 11 players. I'm sure that once you have experience, that method would come easily and be very time-efficient, but it could be scary for a less experienced coach. You still haven't said how many players you'll have, which is a consideration for instance in whether you can rep 11 on 11, or whether you'll need half-lines in opposed and semi-opposed drills.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jul 15, 2011 15:54:12 GMT -6
If you were to construct a Gantt chart -- a time line used in businesses to determine the minimum time needed for a project -- you'd find that when it came to play install'n, one step that comes early in the critical path is learning handoffs. You can take a while to get the C-QB exchange down pat, and fake it in the meantime by starting the QB picking the ball off the ground or getting it from a coach, but if you want to rep plays on air, none of the footwork & timing will be realistic unless they know how to give & get a handoff, so practice that first. Depending on the details of your wing T, you'll probably have to teach at least 2 types of handoff, and maybe more.
You can start coaching the line padless too, teaching stance, get-off, a chute or whatever low bridge you can rig, and pointing at who they would block (coaches, cones, whatever) vs. various fronts. However, another bottleneck is the center, whose duties are required with the line for blocking and the QB for the exchange. Everyone you might use at center you're therefore going to have to carve out some time for in both, and that first week would be a good one to exploit for that. But as I said above, rep the QB on handoffs in preference to the C-QB exhange, even if that means it takes you until the 3rd week to nail the latter.
You haven't mentioned how you're going to fit this in with defense or kick plays. Whether you platoon or not, the skill of an OL who has to pull & lead, and that of a LB who has to scrape & fill, is very similar, hard to learn (many reps), and best practiced together. So if you can get up an indie station with those OLs & LBs who have to do that, do so with an around-the-fence-and-thru-the-gate drill, over & over, separate from other players -- but you'll need some kind of bodies to make the "fence".
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Post by bobgoodman on Jul 14, 2011 23:19:35 GMT -6
We have 4 weeks. First week no pads. Second week helmet and shoulder pads. Last two weeks full pads. I meant how much time in hours. And is your "initial conditioning period" something that precedes that in the calendar, or an initial period every practice session?
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Post by bobgoodman on Jul 14, 2011 13:12:52 GMT -6
How much total time do you have?
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Post by bobgoodman on Jul 10, 2011 15:46:49 GMT -6
There are lots of organizations, not limited to sports, where there's somebody at the top or in some position of authority who seems to be like the description given of the guy above. Fortunately in most cases that person imagines he's in charge but really isn't, and those underneath him pretend to follow his instructions while they actually carry out the business of the organiz'n, getting things done despite him. And then he can take the credit without having learned a thing in the meantime. It's the stuff of situation comedies. Unfortunately your organiz'n was too small for that option to be available.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jul 10, 2011 12:18:23 GMT -6
The line players have to know the rule for their position for the play just as the backs have to know their assignment. If they have to play more than one position, it's just as much more to learn as backs playing more than one position would have, with one saving grace: on many of the plays, a few adjacent positions will have the same rule.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jul 10, 2011 12:07:24 GMT -6
I've coached in clubs that used one basic system in all the age and weight classes. Primarily it seemed to be to make it easier for coaches to move between teams. Some of the coaches were only loosely attached to particular teams, and the guy on top also wanted to be able to step in any time to "help".
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Post by bobgoodman on Jul 9, 2011 10:39:21 GMT -6
Looks like basically the HC is someone who thinks he can impart football to players by thought projection, and has not paid att'n to any evidence that that is not true. He went with you to the Dave Cisar clinic, but may have been paying att'n to the wrong things. It is possible that the material DC presented just reasonably assumed coaches did not assume they could convey stuff psychically, and that therefore the HC saw nothing that contradicted his pie-in-the-sky style of [non-]coaching. He may have seen samples of practice plans and just projected onto the headings of what would be practiced his own idea of coaching by force of will. (He also seems mercurial and/or scatterbrained from your description, but frustrating as that must be, it's not as fundamental as the problem of having no idea what it takes for players to "get it".)
Did he ever let you or any other assistant have some time aside with any players, where they might get an idea what real instruction is?
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Post by bobgoodman on Jul 5, 2011 20:12:06 GMT -6
My name is Coach dee from Milwaukee wi. My question is this. I currently coach 6-8 years old and we have one style of offense. Once that player turns 9 he moves up and learns another offense. and then once he turn 12 he moves up and learns another offense. my question is this....Do you think it would be a benifit to the player by having the same offense set in all 3 levels or is it better for him the way that we have it? No way to tell if it's better the way you have it, but I see no particular benefit to making the offense systems the same for 6-8 YO as for 9-11 YOs and for 12 YOs and older. A year is a long time for someone that age. Have you noticed how much of their subjects in school every year is review of material they've supposedly already learned? It's possible that a cut-down version of an offense that's good for older children would be good for the younger ones, but sometimes it's best to start from scratch to design age-appropriate systems. Change for its own sake is no virtue, but neither is sameness for its own sake.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jun 30, 2011 21:29:36 GMT -6
I've seen the ball stay alive on a wedge play for a ridiculous length of time. Doesn't matter that the runner's progress is stopped if he's not being held by an opponent at the time.
Running outside the hash marks has got to add a few secs. to readying the ball for play.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jun 26, 2011 21:26:17 GMT -6
With me the finances have introduced lots of uncertainty in my schedule or calendar. I don't know where my money is going to be coming from, so I don't know whether I'll be able to fit football into my schedule. Just a few days ago the medical director was asking how soon I could come to Panama to help set up a new testing program that to me seems highly speculative, and then we got word that a client who said they were sending the money to start their study (only the 3rd time they said they were sending it) now said they're not ready to start after all. I'm also angling for other jobs whose work schedule may not be compatible with football. I've had plenty of time on my hands, but it hasn't been time I could count on in advance. Plus it weighs heavily on my mind when I don't know how I'm going to pay my bills in a month!
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Post by bobgoodman on Jun 25, 2011 10:06:15 GMT -6
We do not do water breaks. A huge waste of time especially for the little guys. Hire a mom and her daughters, every team has this group, that is at every practice. Have them follow the team around with a water bottle rack and give the players water whenever they want it. The water bottle racks will allow the players water without having to take their helmets off. Huge ordeal. That's great, especially if you have the bottles, but what I'd like to know is how long it took you to organize that. My fear is that if we tried doing that, there'd be a few practices at first where the extra bodies and activity on the field would take more total time than a water break, before we'd get it organized enough that it'd go smoothly and save time.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jun 23, 2011 23:51:10 GMT -6
Just wondering what others out there think about platooning ( or modified platooning ) at the youth level (7th,8th graders). Three days per week of practice could look something like this. Offensive players get 2 day offense, 1 day of defense work. Defensive players get 2 day defense, 1 day of offensive work. It would really help with the minimum play rule and possibly be good for moral to have more starters. It would also give us more time to spend on position work. I do have the numbers and the coaches to do something like this. Could it be worth a shot ? Would it be unfair to the kids at the youth level to focus them primarily on one side of the ball ? Not saying I'm going to do this. Just a thought. Where I coached last year had that as a rule, and it's far from the only organiz'n to run that way. Administratively it's much simpler than counting plays. However, it's paradoxically more difficult to do the minimum participation rule that way if you have more than 22 players -- and would be impossible to do in a strict way as we did, where everyone had to play the entire 1st half on either offense or defense; but we were able to keep the number of players per team to a certain number, being house ball. Where a number-of-plays rule is used for minimum participation elsewhere, the MPPs usually get very little opp'ty to play both ways anyway, so I don't think you're giving up much there for them by platooning.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jun 15, 2011 0:33:19 GMT -6
Bob Does the parabolic effect change the wind resistance & velocity? Is the size relative to foot size therefore negligible? In South America does a punt spin different(like a toilet being flushed)? Heck since you are our resident scientist I figure you can answer these questions. Joe I can do better than that. See this starting at 4:25. I'm new to rocketry, so my sky rocket results that night weren't so good, but I'd been making aerial shells for years and had overcome a recent problem with fusing of film canister shells, so I expected this one to perform well. However, it lifted to a much lower height than I'd expected. The problem was the filling of the film canister: falling leaves fuse, very light, rather than much heavier stars that I usually use. The effect was like throwing a bag of feathers, and the effect wound up playing out mostly on the snow rather than in the sky. If you could somehow shave off half the weight of a football while keeping its size, do you think you could throw or kick it farther? Uh-uh. Objects need enough density to overcome friction with the air.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jun 14, 2011 13:37:27 GMT -6
I would think that the major difference is the weight of the ball - a heavier ball requires more force (i.e. leg strength) to go the same distance. That would be true if "heavier" meant an extra pound, but with objects this light and large to begin with, it's wind resistance that makes the difference. Try throwing an inflated balloon for an extreme example. Remember that a football is a hollow shell. A larger ball doesn't have that much more weight.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jun 13, 2011 19:15:07 GMT -6
Oh, OK. I was just starting to think you were making some metaphor about a "transvestite" offense, as if it were trying to look like one thing while really being another. Which actually is a good thing!
I'm used to discussions where coaches are bothered that because their offense isn't something fashionable, and hence not seen on TV, players, relatives, boosters, etc. complain.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jun 13, 2011 18:56:50 GMT -6
Why do people get upset at being asked to clarify? What good is group discussion if someone is left out for lack of understanding? I thought "TV" meant "television" but if it's another abbr., couldn't you let me in on it? If it's something embarrassing, you could e-mail me.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jun 13, 2011 18:42:35 GMT -6
I know the instant I see a TV offense that you can't recognize Isn't that a self-contradiction? Does "TV offense" mean something seen on TV?
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Post by bobgoodman on Jun 13, 2011 18:38:42 GMT -6
In another thread I referred to these, so I thought I'd give examples and am sure you can think of others:
Failure of coaches to communicate in advance so that when they come to practice they'll know who's in charge of what.
Players and coaches arriving late because they don't trust you to start on time.
Not knowing ahead of time where and when you'll lay out equipment such as cones & bags. Not arranging the order of drills to minimize the time needed to rearrange the equipment.
Spending time on exercises that are neither good preparation nor fun.
Taking time on the practice field to talk about things that could've been taken care of by a phone call or handout.
Failure to have a contingency plan at the ready for if someone doesn't show up or is called away.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jun 13, 2011 18:18:40 GMT -6
But how many times has anyone in football in the last, oh...90 years...invented anything new? They've given things new names, reinvented a few things they didn't know had been done before, and combined things that may not have been (but probably have) combined before. There's been more emphasis on some things, more popularity of some, but nothing actually new.
So the whole bit about "recognizing" something just means it has a name and is fashionable -- which says nothing about how good it is. Frequently on this proboard a coach describes something like a formation or offensive system and asks, "What's this called?" Mostly they're just looking to get more info on it either to install it or prepare against it, which is the stock answer to give others who respond, "Who cares what you call it?"
When coaches run things you don't recognize, it's not poor coaching (although it isn't necessarily good coaching either), it's just that either you haven't seen enough to have seen it before, or you've seen so much that you've come to focus on minuscule differences between things that are essentially the same.
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Post by bobgoodman on Jun 13, 2011 18:01:36 GMT -6
All true except a smaller ball's being easier to kick. I'm not sure how a smaller ball isn't easier to kick, unless maybe you're teaching a toe punch. Does anybody really teach that anymore? I suppose a smaller ball will have a smaller "sweet spot", but it is also going to travel further in the air, so at most it's a wash. I can tell you this - I can easily make a 40-yd FG with a Jr or even a Youth size ball, but I'm lucky if I can make it from 35 yards with an NFL ball. Sure, the smaller ball having less wind resistance, it will carry farther. But that doesn't make it easier to kick, except in the sense that if you hit it just right, you'll get more distance. I think most of us are more concerned with reducing the percentage of shanks than with squeezing a few more yards out of our punts & place kicks. Kickers generally prefer bigger balls. They're easier to hit. The only exception would be if you're punting in a lot of wind, the wind blows the bigger ball off the line of your drop more than it would a smaller one.
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