Week 1 - Conditioning and Evaluations

It all starts this week - conditioning and evaluations for the Sherwood youth football teams. Our league requires ten hours of conditioning for each player before they suit up in pads for contact, and four hours of practice with all players together is required before we select teams. Some leagues draft or divide their teams right after the minimum four hours, but we prefer to get in all of the conditioning plus at least a couple of days of full contact before running our draft.

Football evals

Our first four days of conditioning look like a mix of football combine timing, basic skill instruction, and conditioning. The Monday / Wednesday schedule looks like this:

  • Drill #1 (40 Yard Dash)

  • Drill #2 (Line Step Drill)

  • Drill #3 (Pass Rush Drill)

  • Drill #4 (Hit & Spin Drill)

  • Drill #5 (Shuttle Drill)

  • Drill #6 (The Gauntlet)

  • Drill #7 (Rose Red 12 Sweep) - play run-through

  • Drill #8 (Form Tackling Drill)

Tuesday and Thursday look like this:

  • Drill #1 (Hand Off Drill)

  • Drill #2 (Guard Pulling Dril and Timing)

  • Drill #3 (Rose Red 48 Trap)

  • Drill #4 (Footwork Drill)

  • Drill #5 (Burma Road)

  • Drill #6 (10 Yard Burst and Timing)

  • Drill #7 (90 Series Passing Drill)

  • Drill #8 (Form Tackling Drill)

Given that most of the kids we are working with are 7th graders with 3-4 years of experience in our program, we may alter things a bit starting on Thursday to do more position-specific drill and teaching work to get them a bit more prepared as we break out into teams. This is definitely the plan for Friday, and come Monday we'll have a variety of stations introducing full contact (angle tackling, form tackling, 3 slot challenge, and more). I'll talk more about that in my next post.

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