Coaching speed - braking, turning, etc.

Any improvement you can make in your players is an asset. I can't argue that. My boys do run at angles. However, I'm not sure if that isn't already covered in my touch the line drill. My boys do not shuffle sideways. They are always in attack mode and so it is just turn and go which is, again, covered by my "touch the line" drill. I imagine the "Kariokie" drill would help your team with this but I think the time invested for the small payoff works against you. There is a coach in my league that has his boys do kariokie, run ropes, and pays a lot of attention to footwork detail. Come game day, I beat him. He has great players and they're very well coached but I outspeed him and I out hit him. Coaching is all about time management and he invested his time in a low payoff skill. I also have to measure my payoff. The speed drills I use take up 20 minutes a night of my practice and, in eight weeks, I'll have the fastest team in the league. That's great but I'm at game four by then. What happened in the those first three games? Did I lose? Of so, that's questionable time management on my part to spend 20 minutes a night on something that won't pay off until game four. If you add even more running drills, now you're up to 30 minutes a night or even 40. At this point, if your opponents are getting a two hour a night practice, your boys are only getting and hour and a half or less of actual football. At the end of every week, you can be two hours behind every single one of your opponents in time spent on actuall football drills (i.e, non-speed drills) which is an entire practice day. If every team in your league has one more practice day per week than you do, how will you do? For me to put in 20 minutes of speed drills in per night, I have to subtract twenty minutes from time spent somewhere else. In my case, I eliminated calesthetics. The vast majority of warm up exercises don't apply to football and kids come pre-stretched anyway. I have studied and timed my opponent's practices and found that, if their practice was scheduled to start at 5:00 PM that they don't actually get started on football until 5:20 or even 5:30. Why? Because of calesthetics. Kids don't like calesthetics and will deliberately arrive late to practice in the hope of avoiding them. So a 5:00 o'clock practice doesn't really get started until 5:10 while the coaches wait for everyone to arrive. After 20 minutes of calesthetics, it's 5:30. My opponent has lost 30 minutes of practice. I've lost twenty. I'm actually ten minutes ahead of him. Not only only do I have an extra 10 minutes each day, but at mid-season my boys will be leaving his boys in the dust as I'll have the faster team. I can also invest that extra ten minutes a day in teaching my kids to do something his kids can't. I am outmanaging the other coach. Football coaching is all about time management. If the other teams are getting in 50 hits a night in their practice, you want to get in 100 - And in the same amount of time they used. And how do you do that? By not having kids stand in line, by putting your practice on a schedule, breaking up into groups, running stations, and putting it all on a clock. Every 20 minutes, we change our program. The programs are regimented. They don't change. Change requires explanation and demonstration and that wastes time. Pick your drills before the season and run them in the same order each night and never change them or add new ones. So make sure in the offseason when you plan out your practice schedule, that your drills cover all the skills you want to develop, do so in time for your first game, and do so in a controlled, gemelike situation. Make sure the drill fits what you teach. I don't teach lateral movement because my team doesn't use lateral movement. That drill would be wasted time for me. At one time I ran the "Oklahoma Drill" forty minutes a night. Great Drill! Worked great for my 5-2 defense and veer offense. Then I switched to the Wing T and the "46" defense. For three years I was still investing 40 minutes a night into Oklahoma and then one day the lightbulb came on and I realized that the "great Oklahoma" drill is pretty much useless for wing T offenses and DC-46 defenses. The players don't use what it teaches. Oh! We still do it a little bit because it is a great drill, but not like we used to. So when you, or any other youth coach, decides to add a drill, you have to consider the following 1) Does this drill fit with what my team does? 2) How long will it take for my teram to benefit from this drill? 3) How significant will that benefit be? and 4) What drills will I get rid of, or do less of, in order to add this drill, and what will the cost be of not doing the other drills? Then you weigh the advantages of the drill to added to the disadvantage to the time/drills lost. If the effect is positive, add the drill. If it's a negative, don't.