Special Teams Circuit Training

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The full text of “Special Teams Circuit Training” by Matt Arshinkoff, from the Vol 2 — Fall 2018 issue.

33 the big 4 specialty units where the majority of the players will be standing and watching, hopefully paying attention and focusing in on the content being coached, circuits will allow a much larger group of players being active to demonstrate their skill levels. The second benefit to circuit training is that it will involve all coaches in the specialty phase. All too often the brunt of the special team’s burden falls more on the shoulders of the defensive coaches and their players.

That’s not to say offensive coaches and players are not vital to special teams, in fact to reach your full potential in the specialty phase, duties need to be evenly distributed throughout your staff and team. Having every single coach involved, even the offensive line coach, shows the overall importance to your team and how vital special teams is to winning games.

The more eyes you can have the players as they rotate through each circuit drill, the more thoughts and discussion you’ll have after practice to truly determine who the best 11 men need to be to comprise each unit. The third benefit involves the skill instruction, and how you can help to set up your players for success, instead of failure. Structuring your initial install schedule around circuits will help to guide your players from simple skills to more complex skills, as they progress through the circuit drills.

This will also allow you as the coach to control the tempo of the teaching from slow to fast, depending on the level of skill demonstrated by the players. In the world of education, this is what is known as “scaffolding.” It’s meant to help build the player up MS CIRCUIT NING e Coordinator Thiel College

34 one skill set at a time, instead of teaching the whole process at once. The fourth and final benefit to using circuit training with special teams is built around the idea of efficiency and high reps. As we discussed earlier, using circuits will allow your entire team to get plenty of reps for each drill. This will make your initial install much more efficient with guys flying around through the circuit instead of standing around watching someone else take all the reps.

POINTS OF EMPHASIS Before starting this article, I wanted to sit down with my head coach, Dan Blume, whom also comes from a special team’s background. The goal of the meeting was to figure out the best way to talk about the actual drill section of this article. At first, we talked about listing some of the drills that we do for each of the Big 4 and how we use them to get the most out of our players.

After further discussion, we came to the conclusion that not everyone reading this article would be able to simply take the drills we talked about and incorporate them into their own practices, for a variety of reasons. Instead, both he and I felt that best approach would be to talk about our Points of Emphasis in regards to each of the Big 4 and how we translate those into drills that fit our team. Hopefully you and your staff will be able to take what we do and apply them to your team by

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36 customizing the tools you need to fill your “box of coaching tools” to get the most out of your practice time. Before designing the drills for your circuits, remember to take into account of few of the points listed below: What is your main point of emphasis for each drill? What key area are you trying to get your players to improve on in each drill? How many coaches will you have available? How many players will participate in the circuit? What is the ideal number of groups or drills for your circuit?

KICKOFF 1. Stance/Get Off a. Proper starting stance. b. Crossover step and roll the hips into takeoff. c. Proper get off timing (hit the 40 at full speed, on sides, all together). 2. Avoid Opposite a. Reading the frontline blockers for return scheme. b. Avoid frontline blockers opposite their blocking scheme (butt side of the blocker). 3. Attacking Double Teams a. Split the double team without running out of the coverage lane. 4. Come to Balance a.

Going from full on dead sprint to under control (come to balance) with short choppy steps.

37 b. Gain ground towards the ball carrier during the come to balance stage-must close the gap between the tackler and ball carrier. KICKOFF RETURN 1. Drop and Settle (Drill 1) - Focus on the frontline taking their drops (on air) at full speed, reaching a set point, and settling while buzzing the feet. 2. Punch and Drive (Drill 2) - Focus on the frontline starting with the feet buzz and stepping up to punch their target (head on).

With contact made, make sure they work to keep the feet pumping and drive the target out of the lane. 3. Steer Drill (Drill 3) - Focus on the frontline starting with the feet buzz and stepping up to punch their target (work left or right). With contact made, work to steer the target in the direction he is headed and drive him out of the lane. 4. Drop, Settle and Finish (Drill 4) - Focus on combing the previous 3 drills. Work a full-speed drop and settle with a live kickoff cover guy sprinting down the lane.

Depending on the path of the cover guy, have the KOR guy either punch and drive him or steer him out of the lane. 5. Block destruction a. Engaging the blocker (thumbs up, elbows locked, work hands above eyes) b. Shock and shed blocker opposite the direction of ball carrier. c. Thud up the ball carrier for 2-3 hard steps. KICKOFF RETURN 1. Drop and Settle (Drill 1) – Focus on the frontline taking their drops (on air) at full speed, reaching a set point, and settling while buzzing the feet. 2.

Punch and Drive (Drill 2) – Focus on the frontline starting with the feet buzz and stepping up to punch their target (head on). With contact made, make sure they work to keep the feet pumping and drive the target out of the lane. 3. Steer Drill (Drill 3) – Focus on the frontline starting with the feet buzz and stepping up to punch their target (work left or right). With contact made, work to steer the target in the direction he is headed and drive him out of the lane. 4.

Drop, settle and Finish (Drill 4) – Focus on combining the 3 previous drills. Work a full-speed drop and settle with a live kickoff cover guy sprinting down the lane. Depending on the path of the cover guy, have the KOR player either punch and drive him or steer him out of the lane. PUNT RETURN 1. Get-Off - Focus on proper stance (similar to a track sprinter) and work to fire out low and fast off ball movement. If you have a chute, have the guys start under the chute to keep them low as the fire off the ball. 2.

Hoop and Block - Focus on the next segment after a good get-off regarding punt block. Once across the LOS, run the hoop (tight as possible to it) and bend with the inside shoulder-proper body lean. Have a second guy standing 10 yards away holding a volleyball out at arm’s length. The block guy needs to focus on reaching straight out with both hands crossed and knocking the volley out of the hands of the

38 simulated punter. The second man can work on the scoop and score technique once the ball is taken off the Punter’s foot. 3. Hold Up Technique - Focus on the next segment after a good get-off regarding punt return. Work to shot the hands and drive the frontline punt protector back off the ball and preventing him from getting into protection down the field. 4. Trail Technique: - Focus on the point after the punt protector gets into his coverage down the field.

Work to stay on the inside hip, in-between the returner and coverage guy, and trail him down the field. Once 5-7 yards away from the returner, gather the feet and work to get the coverage man’s shoulders turned to block him away from the returner. PUNT 1. Zone Steps – Focus on both a right and left step at a 45 degree angle to attack the potential rusher. Shoot both hands and aim the inside hand for the ‘v’ of the rusher’s neck and the outside arm to the near breastplate (pad) of the rusher. 2.

Bucket Steps – Focus on both a right and left bucket step, either flat down the LOS or slightly backwards, depending on how wide the rusher is aligned. Work to attack the near pad with both hands to force the rusher out of the block path. 3. Block to Release – Focus on starting in the fit position and have the punt unit member work to dip and rip through the outside shoulder of the punt return unit member to release into his coverage lane for 5 yards. 4.

Lane Coverage – Focus on multiple cover men sprinting down the field, attempting to keep 5 yards inbetween them, and work to close the distance on the returner as they box him in between each other. CONCLUSION As with many things in regards to the game of football, the old saying “there’s a thousand ways to skin a cat,” could not be more true.

There are a bunch of different ways to drill and prepare your team for the specialty phase of a game, but what you have to decide is which of those ways will be the best for your team. Our staff at Thiel College truly believes in the benefits we talked about earlier with circuit training for our big 4 specialty units.

If nothing else, I hope that anyone who reads this article will at least take a second look at the benefits of using circuit training for their team and ask themselves the question: “will this benefit our team?” For us, the obvious answer has been a no doubt about it “yes.” As an entire staff, every Sunday during the season we will get together for our weekly Special Teams meeting to talk about the areas we need to improve on and the specific drills we can do to help us improve.

An example of this from our 2016 season would be our kickoff team avoiding the frontline blockers to the wrong side, thus creating larger return lanes for our KOR opponents. We started small to focus on the minute details of how to determine which way is the proper way to avoid before we moved into the overall specific skills needed to improve the skill itself. Our entire staff believes in a small to large, individual to unit progression when it comes to drill work.

We started with a one on one kickoff cover man vs. a kickoff return man; having each individual focus on small tasks and keys to improve. Once we felt comfortable that they now completely understood how to improve, we combined the skills into an entire unit drill that re-enforced the skills needed at full speed. The bottom line is it doesn’t matter what we know as coaches, it matters what we can get our players to execute and understand on game day.