After spending an hour or so this year with 8 of the 11 top-ranked NCAA DI (USILA) coaches, I’ve learned a lot of interesting philosophies about the changing nature of how successful college coaches structure their lacrosse practices. These new philosophies, according to these winning experts, are applicable at all levels of coaching, from youth to college players.
First let me suggest that if you’re not planning your practices in writing ahead of time, you’re not maximizing potential and probably not putting your players in the best position to succeed. This planning is not the key to a successful practice, it is much more, written planning should be standard operating practice for coaches. If you think this doesn’t apply to you as a lacrosse coach, and I used to think so, then there’s no use reading the rest of the article…
(1) Drills should be game-like situations
A key common denominator of all the successful coaches we’ve interviewed is their creativity in taking lacrosse drills and turning them into snapshots of game situations. This is not a slam in traditional 3 Man Ground ball Drills, nor is it a ‘dis’ in traditional Line Drills. But I wonder how many times in a game we roll a ball directly away from our teammates. And all the coaches talked about the efficiency of time in practice.
Just as a metaphor, coaches use line drills to loosen up kids. This can be done by emulating game scenarios with full field passing/running drills, or our circle drills, or in the case of many of the NCAA coaches we’ve interviewed; they use shooting exercises also as warm-up exercises. And many coaches, being a warm-up exercise, incorporate their goalposts and even goalkeepers into these exercises. The focus is on shooting, but also on multiple touches.
They set kids free and work on skills that are directly applicable to getting kids more ready for play.
(2) fun
Ok, I can feel you’re rolling your eyes at this one. Traditional coaches often don’t equate practice with fun, after all, when we played, practices were work. It’s amazing how often the top coaches we’ve interviewed have talked about evolving their practices to make them more fun and engaging for their players. Even the ‘old school’ bred NCAA coaches, Hopkins’ Pietramala (and listen to the candy jar podcast), Cortland State’s Beville, to name a few, and just about everyone else have made a conscious effort to involve the players in practice. . Not the other way around, the more traditional way.
This requires a bit of planning on our part, but the key elements are changing exercises from day to day, shorter exercises, and exercises that incorporate some level of competition. Most of the top coaches we have interviewed spend a higher percentage of their ‘scrimmage type’ time in practice in unresolved scenarios ie 3V4, 4V5 etc. and generally in progression. The children then play faster and the movement of the ball is paramount. And it’s more fun. I was surprised by our interview with Coach Tiffany de Brown, a great coach and a great interview, as she told our listeners that she ends practice every day not with sprints, but with each rotating player responsible for a joke or an antidote. You can imagine? Many of our high school coaches from 30 years ago would be rolling in their graves, but the facts are that kids are different and need to be managed differently to be effective.
(3) fast pace
You may think you’re doing fast-paced practice, but would your players agree? Can you honestly say that in a two hour practice you are performing at least ten or twelve different exercises? Do you analyze the structure of your practices? The opinions of the great trainers that we have interviewed on the web are that their exercises go from 7 to 12 minutes each, and then they pass. It’s a radical departure from my old style where, for example, if a drill didn’t work or the kids were struggling, we kept doing it until we got it working effectively.
I can remember running a two-middie fast break drill for an hour until we turned four in a row. That day was a long, frustrating, disappointing, and most importantly, ineffective wait. I was so wrong. Let the drill run and run it again later in the week. And of course, if we’re going to run more drills in a shorter period of time, we may have to look at more drills. We offer some new ideas in our e-book, Changing Philosophies in Coaching Lacrosse, our DVDs, as well as the reference links we have on our site, and you should check out the Berkman Shooting Drills on the Salisbury site.
(4) Focus on the keys
Of the expert coaches we have interviewed, very, very few speak/train on the field. Gone are the days of 15 kids watching you talk about the slides or the offense for 30 minutes and have a good trip. Today’s coaches understand that today’s children learn by doing. Most trainers suggest separating the two functions. If it’s ‘whiteboard’ type class instruction, do it in a classroom or before practice, then when you get to the field, keep it moving, all the time.
If you feel like you’re ready to go to the next level, when planning your practices in a spreadsheet or whatever style you prefer, create a column for estimated touches per player. We challenge ourselves to give each child at least 200 touches (left and right) in the first hour of practice, and stick skills improve exponentially.
Planning your practices, challenging yourself to be creative, and working to maximize these four keys will minimize your frustrations during practice, I promise. And the end product will be players more engaged in practice, faster upgrades, more fun for all, and ultimately better teams. After all that’s what we do, we put kids in a position to be successful. I await your comments, which I am sure will come…
