After hearing Coach Cerino from Limestone describe this lacrosse drill on our recent podcast (you can hear him describe this drill in his own words in the free sample), I fell in love with the concept. As you know, our criteria for great lacrosse drills are fast-paced, involving many players, and they must emulate lacrosse game situations. In this exercise, we meet all the criteria in all areas. But most of us in a midfield seem to violate the last of these key criteria for drills.
Often when we’re running our lacrosse drills and we’re working on offense, if they lose possession, we just put it back on offense to start playing again. Or if they don’t have a shot backed up, we still deliver the ball to the offense. Or possibly progressive coaches could even turn this into a punt and ride scenario, but regardless of whether most of us go back and deliver the ball on offense. In other words, there really is no offensive rotation penalty for offensive players, except for riding. Coach Cottle of Maryland also reinforces this unique responsibility of the offense to take good care of the ball in his drills.
This is a midfield drill, although it could be run simultaneously on both halves of the field during practice if you have the coaches for it, but then you will need three or four coaches. We put the players into rows or groups that they are likely to play with in the next game to help them get acquainted. So let’s play 6V6 with some unique wrinkles. The offense has a chance to keep the ball for two minutes, actually they must maintain possession for a full two minutes without stopping. But this is not an exercise to hold the ball or stand in any way. If the offense scores three times in two minutes, they get the ball back each time, if they miss the cage but have the shot back, they get the ball back. If they lose possession or throw or flip it, but go ahead and get the ball back before the defense passes through midfield, they keep the ball for a total of two minutes.
The defense plays much more aggressively than usual, pressing the ball and covering with a tight defense up to the restriction line and the ‘area’ throughout. This creates a unique pressure situation, good for offense and defense. And of course, after a fumble or a ground ball that they recover, they immediately find themselves in a punt situation. The key to the drill is the accountability factor. In case the offense loses possession at any time during the two minutes and the defense passes over the midfield line, they (six offensive players) must leave the field, or go to the other side and run sprints for two minutes while new offensive and defensive units take their place and immediately begin playing under the same set of rules for two minutes. After running their sprints, they now return to the field on offense, and so on.
Coach Cerino maintains that after sprinting for two minutes and then immediately returning to offense, they take more care to make sure they take care of the ball. Imagine … By running two groups of 6V6 or twelve players in each set, we keep 24 players active every two minutes. Defensive players rest between sets to encourage them to push even harder with aggressive defense. The key here is to limit each set to two minutes to keep kids busy, and exercise is quick and limited to 12-15 minutes.
Coach Mike
