10 Mistakes You\'re Bound to Make at Pre-Season Practices

Glenn Caruso\'s top ten mistakes coaches commit when planning pre-season camp
by: Mike Kuchar
Senior Writer, American Football Monthly
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So the summer is winding down and you’ve put a stamp on your off-season conditioning; wrapped up the local seven on seven tournaments; and made all the necessary arrangements to have an intense and productive camp in preparation for another eventful season. But as the lazy days of July morph into the intensely crammed early days of August, there are some major concerns that need to be addressed before heading into summer camp. Sure, every good coach has a plan, but there are some major decisions to be made before putting that plan into action. Will you travel to a neutral location or have camp at your school? How many practices a day will you hold? How much conditioning should be organized? How will you delegate coaching assignments? When will you give the kids a day off? How will you deal with the summer heat?

These are the same questions that rattled around in the mind of Glenn Caruso, a young twenty-something offensive coordinator at North Dakota State when he first got into coaching in the college ranks. Now several years later at 33 and a head coach at Division III St. Thomas in Saint Paul, MN, he may not have completely orchestrated what he considers the quintessential training camp, but at least he’s learned what not to do, by trial and error – the best teacher of good coaches. So, consider yourself privy to the following information. There are some major gems and some hidden tidbits on the pages that follow but, and according to Caruso, all should be taken into consideration when gearing your team up for an eventful fall season.

1. Don’t practice in a sterile environment.
Pardon Caruso’s intellectual vocabulary, but he’s referring to practicing in a dull or barren situation. Football is not a laid back sport, so why practice in a laid back environment? “It may sound obvious, but many coaches still take their time out there on the practice field, explaining drills, doing a lot of instruction on the field,” said Caruso. “That is nothing like football. You have to practice with a purpose, with some urgency. Urgency is not the same as hustle. Urgency requires that you’re doing it with a desired response. You’re not just wandering around aimlessly all over the place. You have intent to your actions.”

One of the things that Caruso decided was to get rid of a static stretch period where players don’t move during a stretch. Instead, he implements a ten minute flex period in the beginning of practice where the stretching consists of full range of motion exercises like lunges, squats and various other forms of footwork drills to get the blood flowing. “Throw static stretch out the window. Kids get more out of it when their body temperature is raised because that’s where they get their best flexibility. Static stretching is not conducive to football. If your muscles are not warmed up properly, you will not get the full range of motion that you need to accurately stretch. It sets the tempo of practice.”

2. Don’t underestimate the importance of tempo by creating competition.
You don’t ease into Friday night games under the lights, so why ease into practice? St. Thomas will open practice with something competitive every day – Caruso calls this the competitive edge. “We do something every day to get them to compete,” says Caruso. “There is always a winner and a loser and it teaches ultimate accountability. Sometimes if you have a lull in practice, it picks people up and you get going right away.”

The competitive edge drills range from wide receiver vs. defensive backs in an Oklahoma Drill (where both positions compete in a man-to-man coverage in a six-yard box) to three-player monkey rolls where Caruso will throw a ball 20 yards down the field next to two cones. The three players compete to run and take the two cones, with the remaining player being left out. “The guy who doesn’t get the cone loses. It teaches you how to locate the football and run to it. If that’s not football, I don’t know what is,” said Caruso. He’ll even use a miniature tug-of-war with a small towel for individual position battles. “We sometimes stop the whole practice to watch them compete. These guys go after it like junkyard dogs; you got to pull them apart sometimes. Everyone cheers them on. It gets everyone going.”

3. Don’t schedule long amounts of time for individual, group and team periods.
According to Caruso, no period over ten minutes is effective. At St. Thomas, most of the practice periods are five minutes in length with the team periods lasting upwards of ten. Kids often lose focus during longer periods of time. Plus, when was the last time you saw a 20-minute drive in a football game? Don’t even think Joe Montana orchestrated one of those. “When I was a coordinator, I used to love 20 minute periods of team because I can script in a ton of plays. Why go a 20 minute team period if it becomes a lull and drag?” said Caruso. “We’ll just use a ten minute team period with a five minute corrections period following--that individual coaches will handle--with their players. What I love about that is it teaches your players to flip the switch on and off, and it allows your coaches to make corrections on what they just saw. It creates tremendous tempo. We can get off 14 plays in ten minutes.”

4. Don’t schedule mandatory water breaks.
Piggybacking off the topic of scheduling practice periods, make sure to keep water breaks off of the schedule. “Old school coaches may have a problem with this, but I’m not interested in denying a kid water,” said Caruso. “I let the kid get water whenever the heck he wants.” Obviously, dehydration is so ineffective for football and with so many occurring problems of guys dropping on the football field because of it---especially during the summer months---who would want that kind of responsibility? Caruso recommends cutting the five-minute water period out of practice and having student managers provide water at each individual station. “You would get a ton more reps during that period because your entire team isn’t getting water.”

5. Don’t condition if it’s not conducive to football.
When was the last time you saw your players run a gasser during a football game? Caruso’s point exactly. Sprinting the width of a football field continuously has never taken place in an actual game, yet we continue to condition our players at the end of practice by doing something that they will never do. Sure, it takes a lot to get rid of the stubbornness of prior tradition, but according to Caruso, there are certainly other things a coach can do to make sure his team is physically prepared for game day. In fact, Caruso often equates being ‘winded’ during the course of a game to more a mental than physical deficiency.

“We run to the ball, we run in everything we do so we don’t have to condition,” says Caruso. “If we have high tempo, it basically takes care of three things: it give us more reps; it forces us not to condition because we’re running back and forth every single time; and it gives them a mental edge to think in a high pressure environment. I would like my kids to think that they love playing on Saturday because I’m on them so much to hustle during the week. Saturday should be a vacation.”

6. Don’t use conditioning as a form of punishment.
Okay, so we may have lost you here, but just hear us out. This argument can trace all the way back to the negative reinforcement vs. positive reward theory, depending on what you believe. But it has been Caruso’s experience that there is no better enforcer to discipline problems than taking away playing time. “I never use conditioning anymore as a form of punishment. I used to all the time. But the bottom line is nothing affects a kid, scholarship or not, more than taking away his playing time. My goal is to make a kid be driven intrinsically, not extrinsically. I don’t want them thinking the only motivation they have for acting right is me watching them. You’re never going to get what you need that way and you’ll get worn out as a coach. If a kid doesn’t do what is expected, I’ll find somebody else. He’ll get it eventually. Let’s make a punishment that will force our players not to do something again. We don’t run them.”

7. Don’t incorporate three-a-days during summer sessions.
Have we committed football blasphemy yet, by declaring three-a-days being ineffective? Not according to Caruso, who feels that three practices a day for a teenager is useless. It will suck the physical and emotional energy right out of them- particularly at a time when you need it the most – during summer sessions in the heat. “I don’t think a kid could get up physically or emotionally doing that. Two practices a day are plenty, and I wouldn’t practice for more than two hours. If you’re out there for more than two hours, it’s wrong. Not only will you get diminishing returns, but you are practicing negative habits. As a coach, if you can’t get done what you need to in 120 minutes, you are not organized enough. Anything after two hours, the kids will start to drift and lose focus and before you know it, you’re getting worse.” Caruso may have a point. After all, a kid can’t sit in algebra class for 40 minutes, and we’re asking them to pay attention for three times that amount?

8. Don’t install your scheme slowly; use the overhaul method.
Caruso believes in stimulating his players with information to the point where they may feel overwhelmed. Why, you ask? It’s the conducive to football theory that was mentioned before. A kid will have to think quickly under intense circumstances during the course of a game, so why should he be able to take his time retaining information in the pre-season? “We push the envelope with that to see what they can handle. We install everything we have in our offense within a six day basis; that way they are truly never comfortable. If you go through it slowly, you’re gearing your coaching towards the low-end intellectual ability of your team; they start to feel complacent if they know it all in the beginning. This was a huge mistake I learned in the beginning of my career because as coaches we want everything to be installed perfectly. Getting it all in immediately and quickly teaches kids how to conceptualize; you can’t memorize anything when you’re overloaded.”

Caruso subscribes to the whole, part, whole teaching philosophy, where kids see the entire picture first, then witness how their position is affected by it. “Our teaching progression is always whiteboard, film, walk-through, individual and then team. That five-step progression will consistently work wonders for their learning ability.” Caruso, for the first time in his career, has even decided to discard playbooks. “It gives kids that don’t pay attention in meetings a crutch. They figure they can still do it as long as they read the playbooks. Can’t happen. If you can’t take the words out of my mouth and translate them into positive action on the field, you’ll never play for me. And you’re not learning anything.”

9. Don’t neglect the value of special teams.
It’s often the most under coached aspect of football, particularly at the high school level. On the average one fifth of every play is some form of kick, so why do we override the importance of special teams? Caruso doesn’t. In fact, he’ll often have all of his coaches involved in some element of special teams. The only position coaches that he’ll have off special teams duty are the offensive line coach and the defensive coordinator.

“Why would I waste my O-line coach on special teams if his guys are not on them? We’ll have the offensive line do blitz recognition or med balls or whatever it is. I also let the DC spend some time with the defensive line working on alignments, blitzes or pass rushes. It’s a nice time for him to connect and spend some quality time with them.”

10. Don’t underestimate the importance of a walk-through period.
Finally, Caruso expressed the significance of installing mandatory walk-through sessions with your team. Not only does it show them how ‘the pieces of the puzzle fit in’ but also it is a low-risk, high reward exercise, critical for those dog days of summer. Before any scheme that Caruso devises, he’ll implement a team wide walk-through period before going full speed. “If I was a coach in high school, I would sacrifice 20 minutes of practice time for walk-throughs every practice. It’s that important. It puts bodies out there and I can go over questions before we go full speed on the reps. I love the aspect of a walk-through.”

One of Caruso’s favorite low-tempo walk-throughs is aptly called ‘Walking the Field Drill’ which he does once a week before game days. He’ll walk the entire length of the field with his team, stressing what the goal is in each segment of the field. “In the early part of the field, coming out we stress getting the first down and keeping the chains moving. In the middle part of the field, between the twenties, we talk about opening up our playbook and taking deep shots when we can. Then when we get into the red zone area, we always stress our best plays and anticipate man coverage. Again, it gets them to perceive and conceptualize before things happen.”

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