MAXIMUM USE OF VALUABLE PRACTICE TIME

MAXIMUM USE OF VALUABLE PRACTICE TIME

Which brings us to Practice Organization.  You have already done the most difficult part of drawing up practice schedules when you completed your lists of skills and drills.  So now it is a matter of which skills are taught in what order.  Most of those decisions are pretty much common sense.  However, you will no doubt be tweaking your order as you get into actually implementing those drills.

Several basics need attention.  Nothing bugs me more than to watch 1 or 2 players actively involved in a drill while the 20 remaining players stand around and watch.  That is absolutely a waste of valuable time, not to mention complete boredom for the 20 players forced to stand and watch.  It is absolutely imperative to involve as many players as possible at every minute of practice.

We had several assistant coaches in football, each assigned a position.  Sometimes group drills were necessary when teaching skills everyone should learn.  In our form tackling drills, for example, instead of 2 lines facing off where only 2 players went at a time, we instead spread everyone out into 2 parallel lines.  One side was the tacklers and the other side ball carriers.  On command, ball carriers moved forward to the left, or to the right, or straight ahead.  The tacklers had to “settle up” (shorter steps with widened base and weight on inside balls of feet and in “striking position”) and then move in and up with head in front of the ball carrier’s movement.  The coaches were spread out up and down the 2 rows to monitor the perfection in technique.  On each command, all 24 players were involved!  If a player needed extra instruction, the coach took the player aside while the remaining players continued their perfect form tackling drill.

When position work was needed, we broke up into position groups.  As always, coaches were expected to maximize the productivity by involving all players in drills at the same time.  As head coach, I floated and handled the players who needed the extra work or I concentrated on techniques that might require a little more expert attention.

               In baseball, we practiced the same way.  Even though you don’t have the same advantage of position group breakdown, we nonetheless organized what we referred to as a clinic practice.  What we mean by that is that we set up several stations specific to whatever skills we were working on that day.  The players were split up at each station and each player had a designated role to play when not the “featured” player.  We then rotated stations depending again on what skills were being drilled.

So, for example, on hitting days we might have a tee station, a short toss station, a bunting station, and a live hitting station.  Each station had particular goals that we expected the players to accomplish and coaches were there to monitor each station.  All players were busy and working every valuable minute we were at practice.  Compare that to a team with one player hitting and 18 players standing around bored to tears, wasting valuable practice time while learning nothing!

Our goal was to make maximum use of practice time.  It’s obvious that you accomplish much more crucial teaching but you must also tune into the attention span of your players.  You could be out there 3 hours but they will only tune you in 1/3 of that time.  Get there, tune them into to the technique work scheduled and let them know the expectations while they’re stretching, and get to work!