Athletic Development Archives:

The youth football season is over for most of us, so now what? See what we do in my next newsletter. Many of us look to other sports to help players develop into better athletes, better football players and better teammates. With so many different sports to choose from these days, which make the most [...]

Helping Your Running Backs to Make Cuts When Coaching Youth Football There are a few simple drills you can add to your practice plans to help your running backs make more effective cuts. While some of your very athletic players with excellent body control already instinctively make effective cuts, you will need to teach the [...]

What to Say to the Local High School Coach, Pressuring You to Run His System? I love going to places where football is important. The Bay Area has good football and there are plenty of good youth football coaches I’ve met over the years from that area. My wife and I had the good fortune [...]

Boyd Epley, is often considered to be the “godfather” of modern strength and speed training for football. Boyd has published many articles on proper weight and speed training for young men age 10-14 as well as the college kids. I’ve spoken at the same clinics as Boyd, his presentations are always off the charts. My [...]

  As many of you know I’m a huge proponent of using unique movements and games to help me determine who should play what positions as well as help the athletic development and conditioning of my players. One of the best games for doing this is the Deer Hunter game. Last weekend at my Coaches [...]

    The Dummy Relay Race Game for Evaluating and Conditioning Youth Football Players. We use a variety of fun games to not only condition our kids but for team building and evaluation purposes as well. Youth Football is a game that values core strength, this is the strength a player has from just under his [...]

  Evaluating Youth Football Players Evaluating youth football players either for a draft or to determine positions is one of the most important but most poorly performed tasks done by many youth football coaches. Too often a player is assigned a position because he “looks” like the position without regards to the skills required of [...]

  What We Are Doing This Spring Speed Development For the second consecutive year my youth football program is doing an abbreviated “football speed” development program in the Spring. The program is designed to develop enthusiasm for playing in our program while working on form and “football speed” development. The program is called FASTT for [...]

This is our very abbreviated practice plan for week 1. We hope to have pictures posted in the next month. Spring Practice 1 6:00 Open-Intro Coaches Coaching Youth Football Philosphhy Goals Logistics 6:10 Cals-Warm Ups- High Knees-Butt Kicks Team Divides 6:20 Plyo Stations Cone Station 3 Cones�Outside IN- 10 seconds Inside Out-10 Seconds Side over [...]

We are in our first year of doing some off-season player development. The program is called FASST and it stands for Fun Acceleration, Speed and Skills Training In past Springs we played in a 9 on 9 full contact flag youth football league. We practiced just 1 day a week and played a very short [...]