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This past week's practices were essentially a combine. I found out about that on Thursday, when I was running the kids solo for our group. When I asked how that worked, I got kind of a run around answer, and told we could do whatever we'd like to test the kids.
I came prepared.
I bought a stack of 3x5 index cards, a new stopwatch, and 2 more sets of cones to add to my collection. I left space to write in names later (honestly, I didn't know a large majority of the kids by name, anyhow), and then went down the line adding in the seven drills I was hoping to have them run through:
20
10
A4
S4
5/10/5
AL
SL
20 and 10 are yard dashes. A4 and S4 are 4 cone drills. A for agility (shuffle, backpedal), S for strength (bear crawl, crab). 5/10/5 is the 'pro agility', which is a 5 yard sprint to one cone, 10 to the other end, and 5 back to the middle. AL and SL are ladders, agility and strength.
Years ago when I was rehabbing my ankle I bought a long construction type tape measure. It served me well marking out long dashes and such, and it definitely helped in making sure we had the right distances for the combine.
The first day went well, generally speaking, but not as well as I'd hoped. We accomplished about 1/3 of the total drills, but we didn't have time to correct improper bear crawls and things of that nature. We also didn't split up the drills as coaches, we were all involved in the same drill.
I knew it was broken, so after a while, I came up with a better plan for Thursday. We would split up the group of kids as they came to us in groups of three. Each coach had a station, the 4-cone, the pro agility/ladder, and the dashes. I also eliminated the Sx drills, since we didn't have time to correct improper bear crawls.
It worked out great. We got times for every kid in every area this time around.
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