Football Maniacs

Football may be the most popular team sport in America, but you don’t need a team to become good at it! Though passing needs to be done with a partner, almost all of the speed, endurance, and strength training can be done alone, at home or in a gym. The one drill that makes you training for football and not just any sport is catching the ball, so we’ll start with that.

Solo Catching Practice: Spiral the ball into the air. Pump your arms vigorously to simulate running without the ball. Look up as the ball begins to descend. Create a window out of your thumbs with arms extended above your head. When the ball is close, attack it. Receivers do not wait for the ball; they go get it! This way there is less of a chance for interception. The second your hands make contact rip the ball down and cradle it to your body. From here you can sprint to your “end zone” or just start over. [...]

Athletic Development In Youth Football

Athletic development is the process of developing players speed, agility and quickness. It is worthy goal for your players when coaching youth football, unfortunately many youth coaches either take it too far or they do it in a very inefficient manner.

What the Poor Performing Youth Football Teams Do
When observing traditional poor performing youth football programs, what is a common theme is lots and lots of conditioning and or attempts at athletic development and lots of full contact scrimmaging. There is rarely little attention paid to technique development and perfecting offensive and defensive team execution. The traditionally successful programs on the other hand typically devote most of their precious practice time to developing technique and doing the ordinary things extraordinarily well. Athletic development, conditioning and full contact scrimmaging are usually held to an absolute minimum with these teams. [...]