Pass Blocking - drills

Coach,

I suggest you try what we call the seven second drill. You have an offensive and defensive lineman on the line of scrimmage, and you place a football about five yards behind the offensive player. The O player has to keep the D player away from the ball for seven seconds. If he does, you may not critisize his technique, even if he made some big mistakes, because the focus of this drill is on maintaining the block, not blocking technique. (If a kid has some success but uses a bad blocking technique, I will put faster and faster kids across from him until he needs to change technique to win.)

The loser, O or D, does ten pushups, or some other minor penalty. This keeps them going hard, and adds some fun to the drill.

This drill is very efficient because you can run several linemen at once, decreasing the amount of practice time they spend standing around. You are only limited by the number of footballs you have on hand, and by the number of coaches. I find it difficult to watch more than two drills at once.

This is a very popular drill with the kids, and you will see great improvement in their effort on the very first day. I find it very effective for teaching timid kids to get physical, too.

Hope this helps,

Coach Stone