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3 tips for more efficient practices – teaching players to run plays

Coach Stinson | 0 comments

Coach Logan had a great question about tactics for teaching (and running) plays to your team. Q: Do you have any tips on coaching players who have difficulty remembering their assignments? We’re planning to run several sessions in practice next week where we call them to two huddles (offense and defense), take 45 seconds to explain a play and then make them go execute. I’m hoping that will help, but would be grateful for any other suggestions.

A: I think you’re off to a great start with the plan you have in place. At this time of the year many coaches – with games fast approaching and no body feeling like they’ve gotten enough practice time in – struggle as they work with their teams to “remember the plays”. It is obviously important to run the plays as the expected. But it is also important – especially at the beginning of the year – to concentrate on executing the fundamentals properly.

Here are a few ideas that I’ve used effectively when ‘remembering the plays” was a primary concern:

You’re looking for high repetitions in order to commit the movements to muscle memory as quickly as possible for each player. It is important to be sure you’ve explained and walked through everything thoroughly. It is also important to revisit those explanations – don’t assume that because you spent 10 minutes explaining something yesterday, players will execute it well today. Studies suggest that it takes 21 days to create a habit -so even if your players do remember what you did yesterday, the odds are good that they won’t do it well (especially if what you’re doing is new).

If you’ve done that, you also have to move forward with your (yearly, monthly,weekly, and daily) practice plan. Re-explaining rote skills 100 times each practice will kill the competitive atmosphere as well as players’ enthusiasm. You also have to ‘keep moving forward”.

You can run tight skeleton (5on0) possessions as part of your practice warm up routine. Each group of players executes 1 play or offensive sequence and quickly moves off the floor – the entire possession does not need to take more than 5 seconds. As one group steps off, the next group steps in. With a good rhythm you can get several hundred repetitions for your team in just a few minutes.
This works best when mistakes are instantly corrected and negatively reinforced. If a player makes the wrong cut or doesn’t know where to go, a coach should immediately point out the error and the player should immediately perform 10 push ups before re-joining the drill.

NOTE: This shouldn’t be considered punitive, or as as some kind of negative reinforcement that should be avoided – we aren’t punishing mistakes, we’re conditioning ourselves to play the right way. We’re also setting, and reaching, small goals. Even in a simple drill that is an important concept to keep in mind. By Setting and reaching goals we’re teaching ourselves how to be winners.

3. Staying with the idea of immediately correcting mistakes, one effective strategy is to identify the area of focus (i,e, tell the kids what you’re looking for) during scrimmages and to blow the whistle whenever an execution error occurs. The coach points out the error, the offending team (not player, team; peer pressure is a very powerful motivator) immediately runs the length of the floor and back (this should take no more than 10 seconds), and play immediately resumes. We aren’t “lining up on the baseline” – the idea is to identify the problem and respond without disrupting the rhythm of the larger practice. We’re scrimmaging, the whistle blows, we sprint down the floor and back, and immediately get back into the scrimmage.