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How often should I practice my plays?
This question is one of the most asked by rookie coaches. Most rookie coaches spend far too much time just running plays, and usually they are running them wrong. These young coaches ignore the fundamentals of teaching the proper stance, blocking technique and tackling form. There is no excuse for skipping the fundamentals, especially just to run plays.
I do believe you need to have many repetitions of the playbook prior to the first game. I have read some crazy books that recommend something like 1200 repetitions in prior to the first game. Coaches, this is not the NFL, these are little kids. Please do not believe this garbage.
Let us put this ridiculous claim in perspective by using a little math. If you could run a play in one minute (trust me you cannot) that would equate to 1200 minutes or 20 hours. This means 20 hours of repetition per play would be needed. In July after the tryouts and you are the “master of your domain”, you might be lucky to get two or three weeks of practice before your first game. Let us be generous and say there is three weeks of practice time available. You decide to practice six days a week (most teams go five days) for two hours per practice. This leaves your team a total of 12 hours of practice per week. Now we will take the 12 hours of practice per week and multiply this by our three weeks of practice before game one giving us a grand 36 total hours of practice before the first game.
With 36 total hours, if you are supposed to practice 20 hours per play, you can see how preposterous this claim is. I did not even take off time for
- Water breaks
- Team exercises
- Stations
- FUNDAMENTALS
As you can see this is just a ridiculous claim to try to have this many repetitions on each play.
I think as a coach you need to make sure when you run the plays that they are run prefect. Once you get a play down it is Ok to add another play. I just make sure that the primary plays are put in early so they can get the most repetitions.ody
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