AFM Home | The Staff Report | July 2004

The old adage in football is “whoever commits the least amount of turnovers will usually win the game.” Primarily true at all levels of the sport, the statistic used now more than ever before by coaches as well as the media is turnovers: the less you have as a team, the better your chances of a W. In turn, football teams from Pop Warner to the NFL regularly reward their players for both creating turnovers and recovering them.

Now, more than ever before, technological advances in equipment are designed specifically to help limit a team’s amount of turnovers. A perfect example is Rogers Athletics new ‘PowerBlast™.’ This concrete sled is a customized 2004 version of the ‘gauntlet sled’; that is, a machine solely intended to improve the performance of running backs and receivers by helping eliminate fumbles.

The ‘PowerBlast™’ is set up with ‘arms’ as attachments with different degrees of resistance to test a player’s ability to stay focused and run through the ‘arms’ without fumbling. The machine can be changed so that the runner is ‘hit’ by the resistance arms at various heights and force.

The most common drill for the machine is an actual quarterback snap and either a direct hand-off to the running back or pitch for a sweep where the runner then runs through the arms of the ‘PowerBlast™’ hits a tackling dummy, and spins away. The same drill can be used by wide receivers and tight ends in which they catch a pass over the middle of the field and then sprint through the machine.

Besides helping players limit turnovers, the ‘PowerBlast™’ also has a psychological touch: it makes every player focus more in practice on the importance of limiting fumbles. Then, hopefully, that will carry over to game situations.