Football Practice Planning Pro Tips: How to Use Team Nation Every Week
Developing football practice plans and delivering them straight to your collegiate, high school, youth, or flag football players on their phone is a highly effective way to ensure your players are prepared and can be proactive—making practice really count. Beyond practice plans, there are several ways to utilize your Team Nation subscription to prep players for games and upcoming opponents, and for disseminating crucial inform and knowing whether your players accessed that information. Here are 6 ways you can use Team Nation (including practice plans):
#1 Deliver Opponent Scouting Reports
Make your scouting reports interactive with Team Nation’s mobile lessons including your Hudl or DV Sport clips, play drawings, voice over, and more. When you share scouting reports through lessons, you’ll get clear data into who studied.
Pro Tips
- Focus on opponents personnel (height/weight, stats, film, etc)
- Introduce opponents Offensive/Defensive basic philosophies
- Highlight key team strengths and weaknesses
- Identify opponents tells and tendencies
- Defense: Introduce base fronts/coverages/blitzes
- Offense: Introduce base formations/concepts
#2 Share Your Game Plan
Put your lessons and the football plays you want them to really nail next game all in one place where players can access them.
Offense
- Keys to success
- Key plays (play groups)
- Offensive Coordinator Message
Defense
- Keys to success
- Key fronts / coverages / blitzes
- Defensive Coordinator Message
#3 Distribute Football Practice Plans
Whether your coaching staff plans by the week or by the day, dropping your practice plans into lessons can prep players for what to expect, how to help keep practices on schedule, and instructs on elements like proper form so players can get straight to running drills correctly. Flag football team practice plans might vary from full contact teams, but the concept of sharing your practice plans remains the same. Football pros have pre-loaded weekly planning templates in the Team Nation content library.
- Practice layout / periods
- Drills with video demonstrations, voice over and/or written instructions
- Daily/weekly focus & goals
- Game day logistics (what time bus leaves, which jerseys to bring, etc)
#4 Game Plan Your Film Study
Use the lessons feature lessons feature to outline how you want players to study.
- How to access their film account
- Instructional notes on how to properly break down film/what they should be watching for
- Highlight key clips in your Team Nation lesson, or share how to locate key clip playlists in your team’s film account
- Advise players which plays to watch/study to go above and beyond
#5 Add Trivia to Keep Learning Fun
Recruit your team captain (assistant coaches, or active parent supporters) to build short flashcard-style trivia games in the quiz feature. The Denver Broncos add Star Wars trivia to their quizzes!
- Add general football trivia questions to your weekly lessons
- Include trivia for your region (player with record tackles, sacks, completions, touchdowns or team standings)
- Add player trivia (who eats pizza for every meal, how did Twinkle Toes earn his nickname, which player was born the furthest away from your location, which team member can do the most pull ups, which coach was an extra in a movie)
#6 Incentivize Learning
Keep young players and non-contributors excited about the game and mental prep with bonus prizing. Call this your game plan to help players stay engaged.
- Award players for climbing the leaderboard
- Award players for completing lessons beyond their position group
- Consider non-traditional prizes such as the non-starter with the highest preparation scores can choose and lead an exercise to kickoff practice, or that athlete can claim an exemption from having to perform a specific exercise (it’s almost always burpees)
Contributing Author
Preston Curtis | former Utah State University wide receiver, Team Nation content library manager, rockstar support staff for Team Nation coaches, and avid trout guy
Team Nation
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