Film: In-Season

1. Do you watch film as a position group, small group (OL&RB), or whole team? If so, which one(s) and how much/often?
We watch as whole team on Monday, after a brief scouting report and before we go out to field.
2. How long are your film sessions?
No longer than 20 minutes. About 12 plays of opponent's offense and 12 of their defense.
3. What are you specifically watching? Game, situations, cutups, etc.
We will make cut-up's of what we want to show-could be their top 5 offensive formations or their defensive alignment to certain formations.

Sometimes on Wednesdays we will watch film after practice (no more than 20 minutes).

1. Everywhere I've been, we've watched film as a whole team.

2. This depends. When I was HC and one time as an AC, 20-30 minutes at the most. Another place I was an AC, film lasted about an hour and a half every time.

3. This also depends. When we watched film for 20-30 minutes, it was cutups or situations. When it was an hour and a half, we watched every single clip.

We do a film session before our offensive and defensive practice. Tuesday is D day so D film, Wednesday is O Day so O film.

I do our offensive film. I put together a presentation on Google Slides and upload it to Hudl. It includes details on their overall scheme, personnel, and how they have lined up to our formations. Then for film I add about 15-20 clips of good and bad of them vs stuff similar to what we do.

Takes 10 minutes. Then we hit the field and are rolling.

I leave it uploaded to Hudl for the kids to go and look on their own. It doesn’t take much work as it’s just copy and pasting from my own personal scout/gameplan usually. If it helps one kid it’s worth it. It helps me stay organized anyways.

Have done it several ways. Last few years I coached, game film on Monday. Got to where we just watched specific plays I had noted from grading, not the whole game. We did it by position group. OL would be separate from skill. Defense would be all together.

Then we filmed practice and tried to watch that film several times per week. One thing that was great was filming inside and team from behind the OL. Then we could project it up on the white board and draw on them to what should be happening. Also a great way to teach the young guys. Draw it up and then erase and hit play and they can see it happen in real life.

Monday-Thursday morning 6am, we (coaches)would watch practice and any new games we had acquired. Break down would be done that morning. For the most part.
Sat. Morning 6am. Coaches would watch our game, grade it, talk about it. Kids would come in at 8, be gone at 10. We would do special team in the morning.
Offense defense Sunday morning. We would watch the swap of special teams sat as a group, break up, do the scouting report. Smart coaches had it done long before.
Same with offense. Then the kids would come in before practice, do a lift, if they did not have a class, we would do group install, which included a film session

Then there were times where we would watch practice after practice. Or if we practiced in the morning, after practice.

I've been part of staffs who did it differently.

My preference was to show a little to the whole team on Monday (after no activities on the weekend), both to correct mistakes and also to preview the upcoming opponent before practice.

From there, if a position coach or coordinator needed to go over some stuff later, they would do that after practice on Tues-Thursday or maybe even before the game on Friday.

Sessions need to be kept fairly short.  Ideally, it's 30 minutes or less *total* per session because there are other things to do and HS kids typically start getting distracted after about 10 minutes.  In order to make this work, you focus on a combination of cutup and situational stuff.  If you could keep it under 20 minutes (10 for our film, 10 for opponent film), that would be ideal to me.  This means you need to be organized and know what exactly you're going to show and what'll be skipped before you ever turn on the film.

In the past, I worked on staffs who wanted to show our entire previous game to the players for an hour or more, but that usually just turns into a goof-off period where players just look for "highlights" even on plays that bust and miss the point of what we're doing.

I've also worked on staffs who required players to watch film on their own time in HUDL, but that usually turned into an uphill battle to get like 85% of kids to watch it, and even then it's unclear if they're getting anything from it.  You'll have a few kids who take it seriously--the ones you could see becoming coaches themselves one day--but I question the value for the majority who may not actively be watching or analyzing what they see.

IMO, it's the coaches' job to show the stuff they need to see on film and then reinforce that in practice by showing it on grass--by this I mean formations, plays, fronts, coverages, telling kids which jersey numbers to watch out for on the other side of the ball, etc.

We have 90 minute classes.