In order to truly be effective with your system, you have to take the knowledge in your own head and somehow stuff it into the heads of your players. If it were easy, everyone would coach football.

There is never enough time for everything. Nobody I know of has ever done a complete count, but there are literally hundreds of separate skills and responsibilities that must be mastered by your players. Fitting all these items into three practice days of two hours each week is a difficult task.

Nobody I know of has ever complained about having too much practice time, either.

Even a simple offense and defense takes time to install. If you can minimize that time as much as possible then you can then put more effort into perfecting the skills you need. There has to be a sort of balance in your practice schedule between learning the plays you need to run and developing the skills you need to run them.

Every player on your team must have a secure knowledge of their position. Poor coaches work only with the starters. Good coaches work with all their players, and great coaches make their third string players into starters.

So, if you have five offensive plays, two backups and a starter for each position (three strings), you must teach 5 plays X 11 players X 3 strings = 165 responsibilities. That's a lot of stuff to cover in three days a week. (And part of the reason those coaches with 35 plays usually finish as the league doormat. 35 X 11 X 3 = 1,155 responsibilities!)

The good news is that your opposite numbers are in the same boat. Wanna get a jump on them? Here's what I do:

Get your hands on some traffic cones. I don't want to spark anyone's life of crime, so don't hang out at construction sites, but you need a bare minimum of eight, and twenty-two is better. Ideally, you want eleven for each string.

Traffic cones can be ordered from a number of sources listed at the end of this article. What you really need are the tallest ones you can afford, but even low ones will work. They should be wide enough to keep them from tipping if bumped or rolling an ankle if stepped on. Try to get the softest plastic possible to reduce the risk of having a kid impale himself on one of the darn things.

Take twenty-two of them and arrange them on the practice field. Eleven of them should be arranged in a 5-3, and the second set in a 6-2. Take your first string offense and line them up against the cones representing the 5-3, and line your second stringers up against the 6-2.

Run your plays. Use extra players or coaches to represent defensive players that need to move, such as linebackers chasing flow, or defensive linemen to be trapped. If possible, give these mobile folks a blocking shield to protect themselves.

Give each string five minutes against each defense and then swap them. Additionally, intermingle your second and third stringers and give them some practice working together with each other and with the first string. Game day is not the best time to discover that your only available left guard, who happens to be third string, has never thrown a double team block with the starting left tackle he's now sharing the field with.

In five minutes you should be able to get 25 correct reps of each play against each defense. Five reps per minute sounds impossible, but the biggest stumbling block to your success is not the players, it's your coaching staff, who will not believe that they can coach at that speed.

There's a trick to it. For offensive practice periods, one coach, generally the offensive coordinator, is the man in charge. He is the only person allowed to speak in a normal voice. Everyone else is to converse in a whisper. Note that this rule is only for the coaching staff. Players and helpers, such as water boys, are to keep their mouths shut during this period.

Here's the way to run the plays. There is no huddle. I recommend using a no-huddle play calling system anyway, but if you use the traditional messenger player it will add a few seconds to your play calling time. If you use a messenger, though, you need to practice that.

Figure 1.1 shows the arrangement of the practice field for this drill.

Figure 1.1: Practice field organization for speed teaching drills.

Call the play. The players should assemble on their cones and get into formation. Don't waste time on a choreographed "Ready...break!" Just get the darn play in.

Let's say you called the I-right 32 Dive from my I-formation playbook. You are working with the first string offense against a 5-3 defense.

According to the blocking rules, the left guard should move downfield at the snap and look to pick off the outside linebacker on that side. Instead, he forgets his assignment and tries to double team the nosetackle with the center. The position coach should spot this (if you have one). If not, then the head coach or offensive coordinator needs to be very watchful and learn to follow the line and backs rather than the ball.

There are two ways to deal with the player's error. The first way is as soon as the play is whistled dead the line coach calls the player over to him for a briefing. Now, the offensive coordinator can't run another play until the player comes back, so his sub should go in as he comes out.

Brief the player, correct his techniques, and send him back in.

The problem with this method is that it requires a backup player. On mid size teams the backups will probably all be working with the second string on another set of cones behind you, so you may be forced to use method number two.

In this method, the position coach is given five to ten seconds to speak in a whisper to the player as he returns to the line of scrimmage. You've got to coach on the run, and yes you can do this.

In 1999 I was the head coach of the Lion's Club Lions of the Kodiak Football League. It was mid season when we discovered this teaching technique and began to use it in practice.

It was unfortunate for us that my assistant coaches weren't quite sure what I was looking for offensively, so I was forced to coach the offense on my own, using them on defense as "mobile cones" for the kids to block. Coaching the offense by myself I was able to keep an average three play per minute pace. At times we even operated at a four play per minute pace. Yes, you can coach this on the run and do it right.

Every day, change the defenses. Day two, for example, line up the cones as a 4-4 stack and a seven diamond. Obviously you should spend the greatest amount of time practicing against the defenses that you are most likely to see in your league, but spend a few moments on unlikely defensive fronts just in case one of your opponents decides to spring it on you.

Let's discuss what this does for you. In 2000 I was stationed in St. Paul, Alaska, a tiny island with a population too small to support a football program. I kept myself busy by studying the game and teaching PE to the tiny school's 5th/6th grade class.

The Coast Guard allowed me to come home on leave during football season, though, so I naturally went looking for high schools and youth teams to observe. I was fortunate to find a local high school with a coach kind enough to allow this youth coach from nowhere to observe his practices.

I am saddened to say that despite his generosity, I was hard pressed to find many positive aspects of his practice system. During his offensive period he generally ran his plays against air, and not a defense. After each snap he would speak for one to two minutes about the upcoming defense. Then his offensive coordinator would speak for another one to two minutes, and finally the line coach would speak. After all that, the offense would line up again and run another play, and the process would repeat.

In a twenty minute practice period, they managed to run between six and eight plays, tops.

Because they practiced against air much of the time, and they ran the complex Multiple Offense, many of their players had to ask the coach what their alignment and responsibility was after a play had been called. This was mid-season!

The second string quarterback never took a snap in practice. He spent all of his time watching, or occasionally playing defense.

I do not want it to appear as if I am bad mouthing that coach in any way, but during my dismal playing years, my coaches committed similar mistakes, and they led to a combined five season record of 1-37, after which I sacrificed my senior year of football to join the drama club. This coach in question went 2-18 over two seasons, and was fired at the end of the 2001 season.

I mention this because many youth coaches do the same things at their practices, only usually on a much worse scale. Imagine the differences between a team that averages three to six repetitions of each play per minute, and a team averaging three to six repetitions per offensive period. This is what my speed teaching technique will accomplish for you:

1) Faster blocking retention.

2) Easier learning because it strikes all three physical learning styles; kinesthetic, verbal, and visual.

3) Improved conditioning.

4) Improved discipline.

5) Greater number of reps for backups. (A chronic sore point with me is youth coaches that only work with the starters. The younger/smaller/slower players deserve your coaching time too!)

6) Immediate feedback to the player to correct mistakes before they can be ingrained.

What will the speed teaching system not do for you? Speed teaching is no substitution for scrimmaging. I advocate scrimmaging infrequently, but there is a big difference between blocking a cone and blocking another player. You must give your players a chance to practice against a live defense. I recommend a full scrimmage once a week, and at least five to ten minutes per offensive period of live defense work.

Can this technique help you defensively as well? Most definitely. One of the things you must teach your defense is how to instinctively recognize and line up against common, and even uncommon, offensive formations. Simply place coaches in the offensive skill positions, like halfbacks and flankers, use the cones to represent any non-moving players like offensive linemen and quarterbacks, and have the players turn their backs. Shift the coaches around into the common formations, and at a signal, the players face the formation and must react correctly within a given time frame. (I use two seconds.)

This works well for demonstrating plays as well. Rather than trying to teach the scout offense to run a Single Wing well enough to give your defense a look at the seam buck on day two (the day I traditionally install my defense), simply use coaches to walk through the play. As your players learn more about football, phase in a scout offense, and run the plays live.

There are as many ways to use this trick on the field as there are coaches. It will not surprise me when some coach, somewhere, sends me an email and tells me how he used this trick on special teams and reaped great rewards from it.

The following is a list of sources for purchasing traffic cones for coaching purposes. If you have additional sources, please email me and I will add them to the list.

Cannon Sports 1-800-223-0064 Email: cannonsprt@aol.com

All Sports America 1-800-597-6017 www.allsportsamerica.com

Good luck!

~D.